I agree and have been studying it in my own capacities as well as a programmer.
As I’ve mentioned before, there are two significant events that cemented that Overwatch is rigged.
1 - Scott Mercer mentions in this article that the matchmaker won’t form a match until a minimum winrate of 40% for a team is “fixed”. This concludes EVERY match has a 40%-60% chance of winning, minimum NO MATTER WHERE YOUR SR STANDS IN RELATION TO YOUR MMR. Masked under the guise of “fairness”. https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/groups-and-matchmaking-in-overwatch/134776
This means SR is completely irrelevant. Hypothetically, if you’re a GM and fall to gold. You will NOT be against golds, you’ll be against smurfs and other GM’s that fell to gold or you will be handicapped with even worse players on your team to make the match reach the 40%-60% predicted winrate and you will have only a MAXIMUM of 60% chance (predicted) of winning games down there.
You shouldn’t have to verse people you’d be versing at you PEAK just to CLIMB.
Anyways, y’all, keep poppin’ those blue pills.
Edit: I should also mention the inverse of this can be true, too. If you manage, somehow, to climb your SR ABOVE where your MMR rests, your presence will negatively affect the predicted winrate so you’ll likely be propped up with the better players. This partially explains both sides of the Overwatch is/isn’t rigged arguement. “Well my games are fine! Therefore OW isn’t rigged” - Boosted Mercy main whom’s SR is higher than their MMR.
Real talk, there was an article or book that I read in high school that one of my math teachers based an in-class exercise on where we had to make an educated guess on what set of numbers were faked from coinflip tests and cast a vote.
The real ones were never voted upon. The fake ones always were. (I read the article/book long before we did the exercise and everyone thought I was crazy, then the teacher said I was right).
Real experiments do not resemble heads-tails-heads-tails-in-that-order, ad-infinitum. In fact, the real ones NEVER look like that. It’s entirely reasonable to get 5-10 heads/losses in a row. That’s how math peeps know if numbers were faked.
Besides, claiming the system is rigged because its matchmaking tries to create fair games is a bit weird.
Hypothetically, if you’re a GM and fall to gold. You will NOT be against golds
You don’t seem to understand how it works. If a GM falls to Gold his MMR will not stay at GM levels. It will adjust to Gold as well and he will be matched accordingly.
Where can you prove that? This is based on the assumption that MMR moves at the same rate as SR. It likely does not.
Other’s have mentioned in the past that MMR is only calculated on wins although I have lost the source for that. I’m skeptical of that claim however.
More flips means that it’s more likely to converge to 50-50, but it’s more unlikely to be exactly 50-50 - if that makes sense.
Numerical examples:
10 coin flips yields 4 heads and 6 tails. Certainly possible and it yields 40% to 60%.
10000 coin flips yields 5027 heads and 4973 tails, which is 50.27% to 49.73%. This is closer to 50-50 but it’s still off by more flips (27 compared to 1). So while we’re converging to 50-50, it’s incredibly unlikely for us to exactly hit it exactly because, like you said, each flip is an independent 50-50 chance.
Okay, but afaik Kaawumba is not a developer for the Overwatch team and had no involvement in coding the algorithm for the MMR. So his ‘theory’ on how it functions is as baseless and moot as someone making a claim to the contrary. For example:
Here we see Cuthbert making a claim in the same year as Kaawumba’s article that Competitive Overwatch games are handicapped by the MMR or ‘rigged’ as many have suggested. I cannot say Kaawumba nor Cuthbert are correct in regards to the issue being discussed or the claims made in their topics, because neither party fully understands or is privy to how the matchmaker functions because only the developers have access to this knowledge. This knowledge has not been made public, and probably never will.
The only thing people have to rely on is anecdotal experiences in game. That is, until Blizzard fully discloses their MMR algorithm. Which they won’t, because it is their proprietary property. And they have every right not to, just as players have every right to question things that affect them in game and to exercise caution in choosing to remain playing that game in the very near future.
So, back to the topic of invisible dragons in the backline, seriously, who tf am I to say you don’t? It’s mighty rude to dismiss someone’s claim without having all the facts, don’t you think?
Having a basic understanding of how ALL the systems of matchmaking implemented across all games, is generally considered is better evidence than saying “you aren’t the developer, you can’t know that”.
Even if I don’t know the exact method they made, if I know other methods can’t be implemented cleanly (and have read the white papers regarding matchmakers shared at stuff at GDC/online/GitHub readmes, etc), then it’s simply Occam’s Razor.
The most straightforward, most adopted version of a matchmaker is MORE than likely to be correct. It’ll be tweaked, so specifics might be off, but the methodology and underlying technology is correct. Therefore, my speculation would be sound.
There’s an entire logical fallacy based on this – the ignorance fallacy.
The thing is, why would they do that when the natural outcome of an elo system is that you get a 50/50 winrate?
Like, why would they give that friend of yours a loss streak in gold instead of just letting him climb to diamond? When he gets to diamond, all that’s going to happen is a completely natural loss streak because he’ll eventually up facing people better than he is.
I think there’s all kinds of issues with the matchmaker including odd streaks but I think it’s bad design/bugs, not intentional. Because I just don’t see a point to it.
It IS how ELO systems work but it would be foolish to assume that it moves at the same rate.
SR ONLY serves to limit the pool of which players to pick to rig the minimum predicted winrate to 40%. Even then, I’ve seen silvers in the same games as diamonds so perhaps it doesn’t even limit that anymore.
I mean when it comes to business, it could be as simple as someone who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about insisting that a system be implimented even if it hurts the end product / users, because ~ trust me, management always thinks it knows exactly what’s right, no matter how many experts will tell them they’re wrong.
So it doesn’t necessarily need to make logical sense, is what I’m trying to say.
That’s a fairly weak write-off. Despite what I think of private profiles, it being default on would deal with that for the most part. Regardless, it already is for a lot of people.
MMR is hidden because knowing the exact amounts that you and everyone else around you have (and your own match history), if you’re a math nerd or have access to a crowd-made calculator on GitHub, you could determine the exact numbers for the SR gains/losses.
If you know the exact amount of SR you would lose, and that number is HIGHER than the leaver SR penalty, you’d just leave the match and take the -50 SR.
I mean, he did provide sources which were (when they were up at least) developer’s posts regarding these exact issues. And the articles I mentioned did test their hypotheses (which is the exact reason I called them “substantiated”). But hey, look who has foreseen the future:
But here we run into the issues with Subjectivist reasoning. How do we know they didn’t change it since the time the articles were posted? How do we know they didn’t change it yesterday? How do we know the authors are not lying? Alas, we know nothing.
You keep claiming not knowing anything due to not looking at the evidence I provided. But the fix for that is simply looking at it. Or at least accepting that it is there instead of blindly refusing that it exists as you did.
Truth doesn’t care about rudeness. And since your focus obviously does not lie on acquiring truth, I’m out. I’m not willing to disprove every single arbitrary claim in existence you can come up with.
The earth is flat
Edit: Oh yeah I replied to myself lol
My bad, but it doesn’t really matter now, does it?
How many losses have you had that were equal or greater to 50 SR?
Additionally, private profiles would likely still hide it if you were that paranoid about it.
We’ve also already been told that the SR gains and losses are based on where you sit in the 40%-60% winrate in that article I linked (likely augmented/diminished by performance if the player is in the SR range that is affected by it). I have my own reasons to why I think they’ve hidden it, IP being one of them however.
When I first played ranked on my second account, I played matches immediately after placements where I lost 70 SR.
This was like… Season 4-8, so they may have tweaked gains and losses since then, but the fact that it happened at all means that it probably still could happen if you’re targeted metrics are way below average…
In the article I linked, they mention that a match isn’t even created if a predicted winrate doesn’t reach a minimum percentage or goes over a maximum percentage. I know it’s easy to look at that and say, “oh that’s fair”. It’s literal fixing. If someone has a god on their team, they should just win and reach their actual rank faster than drawing it out and putting a similar god on the other team to “make it fair”. It stagnates people in their ranks which is exactly what Blizzard wants so you keep playing.
If a grandmaster chess player somehow smurfs in tourny matches, do they get put up against similarly smurfing grandmaster chess players and have a similar winrate to what they would have at their peak or do they completely dominate and rise quickly?
