POLL - Should Blizzard reveal how hidden MMR is calculated?

Should they do so, and why? Is there ANY good reason to keep this hidden? What would be the downsides for detailing how it is calculated? Do YOU think they’re refusing to release this info because they already know it’s unbalanced? your thoughts guys…

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They probably refuse to reveal it because some people might abuse it somehow. Personally, i’d be fine with it being revealed, but i don’t mind if it stays hidden either

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Personally I think they should, if only to make people quit moaning about whether it’s balanced or not. Does make you wonder however. If it is fair and balanced, why refuse for 3 years to break down exactly how its calculated.

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Yeah, the whining is pretty annoying lmao

because it would lead to players looking to farm whatever was seen to give an advantage. We already saw it before with Rez.

and we know how the system works.
It’s based off wins and nothing else really seem to mater. You have to win around 55%+ of all the games you play to keep moving up in SR. If a player stumbles into the 50%-53% range they tend to just jump around a couple hundred SR up and down.
Anything at say 51% or lower odd are will drop a player and of course sub 50% you fall rather quickly with zero chance to climb.

that’s it… that’s the system.
The win rate on one’s main, the stats, the ranking, PBSR and so on don’t really impact players that much being in the end it’s just win rate of all games played.
Play 100 games, win 55+ of them, then repeat.

the problem is the system feels lame looking at it from game to game, being it’s tough to see it from a distance of being based around 100s of games.

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it is fine that it is hidden. However they use this and a few other metrics to make matches. They need to use one and only one.

YES THIS. And the messed up thing is that it’s a really dumb fear for Blizzard to have.

If it was revealed, two things would happen. One, is everyone would be on the same level, no ridiculous mystery involved in figuring out what is OP in the way it is calculated and what is broke. Two, Blizzard would actually have a fire under it’s rear to fix the problem. Meanwhile, as they fixed it, at least people wouldn’t be wondering about how it is calculated.

You canNOT exploit what everyone knows. That’s why in zero major sports without judges, there is no ludicrous mystery in how you score.

Don’t tell the fans this though, because to them, Blizzard is flawless.

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Personally I am very curious about how it works, though I wouldn’t know the implications of revealing it.

Recently I had an 80% win rate over about 30 games, and to my surprise I began gaining 40-50 SR for wins. So my MMR had climbed high enough above my SR to gain double SR.

As soon as I hit that point though, I got some interesting matchups. I was only able to benefit from 2 wins at this rate, and the 2nd win was a very lucky one in that our team was getting rolled when an opponent left. The next 3 games were absolute stomps favoring the other team. All 3 had players in different ranks and the players on my team were absolutely clueless. The first 2 games I only lost half SR, and on the 3rd I lost normal SR, indicating that my MMR had fallen back out of that range. Then I started getting normal matchups again.

I don’t know if this means anything, it could be total coincidence. But it feels distinctly like once my MMR got too high, I started getting matched with literal monkeys. As if the matchmaking system is saying, “oh yeah? See if you can win NOW.”

I dunno, it’s just really frustrating because it’s not clear what the system is doing but there is consistency to it. Go on win streak, hit a wall and get knocked back down to size.

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What other game OFFICIALLY releases how its mmr system works & the formulas?
None that i can find.
All are by guide writers & YouTubers just guessing.

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Oh, and if you are good at this game, you should beg for Blizzard to make it public. Because it would be one less excuse bad players could use to hide behind their bad play.

And yes, that’s right, from me who played up to high gold I’m saying that. Because I’m not running around being an idiot thinking I’m secret OWL material :smiley:

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A published MMR formula becomes one more “broken” thing for players to complain about on the forums. I’ve read the forums for two years now, and I do not see a reason for the OW team to give us anything else.

We are the whiniest group of negative individuals I’ve ever come across (I’m not excluding myself here).

  1. _________ is too strong. ________ is changed by the devs. Community complains.

  2. Community: We want an LFG.
    Devs create and LFG
    Community: LFG is garbage.
    No one uses it.

Why take precious resources for OW and put it towards smurf accounts, alt accounts, the reporting system, and guilds when the community will simply complain about it 2 weeks later.

99% of the community problems, and I mean 99% of the problems, are due to a personal SR or competitive rank. Players want a system that will magically pull them out their rank.

So, no, the devs should not publish the MMR calculator.

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Jeff said that he doesn’t like how obscure and hidden MMR is and the dev team is looking to change it. So at least they are aware of the desire of community for more transparency.

I might have to disagree there. Although, I do also think a hidden MMR system is pretty dishonest .

I’d be in favor of removing solo queue games, forcing grouping only with a mandatory 2/2/2 system,champion reworks and a proficiency validation system (that tells others where your proficiency is on each role/champion) along with 2 factor cellular phone authentication for competitive (would solve the free alt account woes on plebstation/Xboned) along with a minimum of $5.00 Debit/Credit card sub (for competitive), and a mandatory microphone check for competitive. Not being in voice to hear/communicate strats/enemy locations should be penalized.

Doing these things you would DRASTICALLY increase the quality of the playerbase and make people think twice before being throwing/leaving/smurfing in competitive brackets

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I keep reading this yet nobody is able to explain how confidence in your rank affacts the matchmaking.
How can a match be deemed “fair” with groups in it when MMR doesn’t account for the heroes you play and those heroes are of equal value in different match ups (e.g high ranked widow vs mercy in a lower ranked game due to groups).

The issue in question isn’t the concept climbing due to winning, but the premise that matches are inherently “fair” and that there is nothing that can be done in order to improve this.

Is there any reason why you need to see that? They said its not just simple number. Its more complex, you would not be able to interpret it anyway. It would be useless for you.

And it would not make better player from you too.

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Does confidence in rank even matter in a system based on wins?
Even if the match maker doesn’t really think a player should be SR _______ the player can and will reach any given goal by just winning games. It’s why boosting and throwing works to hit a goal SR in either direction.

group wise the match maker only sees the allowable range and doesn’t really care if you win in a group or win solo. The player STILL has to win those games.

The ranks have a very clear hierarchy to them and nobody accidentally ends up a 1000 SR out of their player skill set in either direction. Now it’s not perfect, but with in a system based off either 500SR or 1000SR range for a group a few hundred SR one way or another for a player isn’t seen as a big deal.

The problem comes with the player base looking at SR on a point by point level. It’s just not set up for that level of precision. It’s why at the highest SR ranges where every 100SR might as well be 500+ in skill jump vs low SR the system runs into a ton of problems.

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They won’t reveal their method, because it would show that they rig the matches by handicapping. It’s NOT random, that’s for sure. But to show that they literally punish the winning players by sticking the worst teammates they can find on your team would be quite a blow to the game.

Since the matchmaker takes it into account it might influence the outcome, point is, we don’t know.

And its an issue when a single player above everybody else can impact the outcome of a game more than anybody else on the match.
In that case the person would climb out of that elo yet with groups you allow him to play in those matches as well as carry other players into SR regions they shouldn be in thus messing up further matches in the future.

I’d accept this once we studied all possibilities and got showcased the possible tradeoffs.

Yes, when you are “competing” and being graded typically you are given the information regarding how the grading works.

If you refuse to release the information because you feel people might abuse it. If the system is abuseable some people are already doing it.

It’s only broken if they’ve constructed a broken system.

Pretty much all forums works this way. It doesn’t help that so many people carry themselves like they’ve the maturity of a 5 year old.

people did not ask for LFG, they asked for RoleQueue with a system to properly rank roles and they got a half baked system with no proper role based SR and no tools to keep trolls out of their groups. Private profiles made the problem much worse now you’re asking people to open profiles and having conversations about why you need to see what they play then getting salty and joining your group over and over when you ask them to leave / kick them.

I simply want a system which will generate more genuinely fun, balanced games. Actually read this instead of going on about people and “climbing” which I’m so tired of hearing about. People lament their rank because they are constantly in games which are low quality and they hope it’ll be fixed when they move up. If the game quality was not trash, there would not be so much of this on the forums. I have had losses which were more fun than wins simply because people were working together. It’s a video game…it’s not like if I lose I don’t get paid this week.

We don’t all care about our rank, but some of us care about the amount of time competitive wastes when we go into it. The games are often trash because the matchmaker is trash.

Strictly speaking on the MMR front, everything Blizzard ever said about Competitive and its matchmaking has been compiled into this topic:

It’s a very extensive References section on the bottom of the post.

As for general match quality, the entire balance of the game, first and foremost, is made around fully-organized teams taking on other fully-organized teams. This was never exactly meant for random matching randoms with other randoms to take on other randoms. You could argue that this kind of game was too idealistic in nature to be feasible, but I’m pretty sure that in primary schooling all over the world, people at some point had no choice but to work with other people even if they didn’t want to.

That being said, the actual rank very much factors in for so many players (just look a couple posts above you to see someone complaining about the matchmaker intentionally giving him bad teammates).