Well as I said, the streaks are harder to explain. What I proposed is pretty much a conspiracy theory.
The lopsided games though are a natural consequence of EOMM, especially if the churn risk is defined as simply as by the W/L/D table in the study.
I definitely don’t know the devs by name or what they have said. If they have said that OW’s MM is not an EOMM, then I would believe that. Thanks for informing me on that. Do you have a link where I can read up on it?
Honestly, it’s any time they mention the matchmaker. They always describe it as a pretty standard SBMM. There was a dev update with an FAQ a while back. I don’t really remember precisely when it was from though. The FAQ addressed various things players say such as “does the matchmaker force losses,” etc.
I follow this stuff because it relates to my day job. I don’t really expect anyone else to listen every time they discuss the matchmaker.
ETA: All right, I did a quick look through the dev updates and found several instances of Aaron talking about the matchmaker. The one with the FAQ was from January 30. I’ll quote some of the relevant bits below:
Q: Do you deliberately place players into winner queues and loser queues?
A: There are no winner or loser queues in Overwatch. Your current MMR is the only thing the matchmaker takes into consideration when forming your matches. The matchmaker doesn’t force a 50% win rate on anyone, nor do we favor certain players over others.
At its core, our matchmaker is a mathematical formula used to place similarly ranked players together in a match with the goal of creating as fair of games as possible.
Q: Why do I sometimes have a large win or loss streak?
A: Sometimes, if a player goes on a very long win/loss streak, it’s indicative that their internal rating is not well-calibrated. The best way to calibrate your rank is to continue playing competitively. The more data we have, the closer you’ll get to a rank that best represents your skill. However, there are times when players are going to get lucky with their win streaks or the opposite with loss streaks.
We’re investigating this and will be testing some changes to see if we can reduce this kind of streaking in the future.
It does, until marketing data gets involved…
The whole idea is to get them in and spend a few bucks early on, then utilizing the sunk cost fallacy to retain them…
Basically “i gotta keep playing to get my $20 of value from this skin”
Which is now that i think about it, is Likely why prices are absurdly high to begin with…
Thanks for looking that up.
Him saying that MMR is the only thing that is taken into consideration surprises me greatly. That means that the MM is actually a fairly simple system. An EOMM for example couldn’t possibly only look at MMR.
The second answer has one key part that worries me “the more data we have, the closer you’ll get to a rank that best represents your skill.”.
This would explain the streaks, your hidden MMR and actual rank can differ greatly. If you’ve played 1000 games, it might’ve pretty much locked you in on a certain level of MMR, but your rank keeps moving as usual. So when you’ve strayed too far from your MMR’s equivalent in rank, you’re set for a streak to go to back to whatever rank matches your hidden MMR.
But in that case, if MM is only based on MMR, then you would still be playing against many of the same players after your rank has moved, since you’re still in virtually the same MMR. But that’s not the case, you can clearly notice all the players changing when you move through the rankings, while when you’re stuck, you keep playing with many of the same players. So I struggle to make sense of it.
As for the lopsided games, I guess it’s just because the range of MMR of the players on both teams is so big then. But sometimes the ranking discrepancy between the teams is massive. I guess it’s because the teams’ hidden MMR is still fairly equal, but if the MMR can be that far disconnected from the actual ranking, then I think something is wrong.
EOMM prevent solo players from climbing the ladder as fast as possible in the best conditions, so who would not care to cilmb and have a challenge right up lower bracket having to 1V5 in game, when climbing up the ranks is alraedy a challenge. probably people who are totally fed up with the game and literally are triggered after a single request for healing for exemple. they will not heal you just because you butthurted them asking for more focused healed wich is strategizing.
so yeah i have a hard time defining the players who actually come back to teh game because there is eomm probablyh close to 0 people just have the memory of a good game and just cant beleive it could be rigged and still trying to climb.
This theory is as stupid as it can, sometimes there is a smurf in opossit team its enough of a challenge for me or a nice experience, but having this range of level is just literally a 1V5 training wich could be a mode why not after all lol but dont make it the standard solo queue, also stomping the other team isnt satysfying at all. you just roll over new players and i have the strong feeling that my damages are shadyly buffed my movements are quicker and my cds seem to turn faster.
Thanks for this garbage thing. I mean it got to be a direct attack by Tencent , it has to be.L