In other words, winning isn’t enough below Diamond. He is pretty much admitting that you have to stat hunt to climb.
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Nope. It means it’s easier to climb below Diamond if you’re a good player.
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Hmmmm, in Diamond all you need is a winrat greater than 50%, below that you need more than that, thus it is not ‘easier’.
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Wrong.
- A Diamond player already has better stats than lower ranked players
- It’s both easier and faster to climb because you are rewarded with an SR modifier i.e.–more SR.
- MMR is still a factor–which is performance based
That means it’s more difficult to climb once you hit Diamond. You must rely on your teammates more than in lower ranks. So everyone complaining about “bad teammates” holding you back is in for a treat.
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Not wrong, your points are irrelevant. Your opponents have the same skill as you do so the tier can be ignored. You are assuming that PBSR always makes it easier to climb but the OP shows it isn’t always true. Winning more than 50% of your games against equally skilled opponents should result in climbing.
Whatever this player is doing, he is helping to win games, but some hidden stat isn’t high enough for the MatchMaker’s liking, so he has to do MORE than win 50% of his games. PBSR is supposed to help move people to their proper rank, assuming they win, and he IS winning. He has found an edge case where the PBSR is working against Blizzards stated goal for the system.
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My points are only irrelevant if you discard logic.
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Because Diamond+ necessarily perform better than lower elos, they necessarily have better stats. Meaning any PBSR or MMR metrics are going to be better.
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Because PBSR awards more SR for high performance and winning, it is necessarily both easier and faster to climb. If you cannot both perform and win, you don’t deserve to climb.
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Even if PBSR were completely absent, you still have MMR which determines your skill and therefore your SR gain/loss
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When PBSR is absent, your teammates more heavily impact your SR gains/losses because you cannot compensate for those losses on the basis of individual performance.
The “tier” of your opponents cannot be ignored. The amount of SR gained or loss is primarily determined by the “tier” of your opponent. PBSR is a minor factor in one’s gains/losses.
And losing games against worse opponents does not result in climbing. Neither does winning games against worse opponents. Performing badly or average also doesn’t allow you to climb.
There is nothing rigged or unfair about this system. Players want to defer responsibility for their rank–that’s it. PBSR helps good players climb and it helps bad players stay where they are so they don’t ruin other peoples’ games.
YES. Just like a professional MMA fighter can go dominate local tournaments against amateurs, that fighter must also do more by winning against people of equal or greater skill.
This is not hard to digest.
OP is literally climbing right now. They are +247 SR from their end of last season. If they maintain that performance, they will continue to climb. If they have not improved, their rank will stay stagnant. This is straight forward and easy to understand.
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Other than the system being the one forming the teams. Your point might have merit if the player were choosing to go up against lesser opponents, but the player has no control over their teammates nor opponents.
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Can you think up a match making system that doesn’t match players?
The player may form groups and therefore choose their teammates. You don’t get to pick your opponents in any competitive game. If those are you expectations, they are wildly misaligned with the spirit of competition.
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The system only forms the teams, if you don’t 6 stack, if you don’t 6 stack, you aren’t playing the game as intended to start with.
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Yes but the question you never answer is, do I play worse than my teammates? And am I the primary factor that’s causing these losses or categorized as one of the worse players on my team? It’s no surprise I make mistakes everyone makes mistakes at every rank, I’m not denying the fact that I make mistakes. When I go through my replays I look at everybody’s gameplay because I have assumed wrongly before that another person on my team is doing bad only to look at his replay and see he was doing good. If you honestly looked at the replays and seen the plays of the other players on my team and gave a fair assessment I think it’d be almost impossible for you to say that I am the primary factor for the losses on
So essentially you believe I can go on high win streaks rated at high PBSR beating high MMR opponents for no particular reason and then ranked back down to 1.7k because… (cont)
(cont)… you believe normally I lose my low MMR matches. So for both of these points to be true this one in the previous, It’s essentially means that I lose the low MMR games I play but apparently that doesn’t cause me to rank down because I also win every high MMR game I play? Or what exactly is the logic between these two things.
It’s a strange belief to think that after seven seasons I would not get better or worse, according to you I essentially stagnated after the first competitive game I ever played and since then never gotten better.
Maybe from your point of view that makes sense, but since I’ve known the games I’ve played the plat games I’ve played, the play games I’ve won compared to the plat games I’ve lost, and knowing that I have gotten tons better since I’ve started playing support, none of it makes sense.
The only reason you can argue is, thanks to lack of information lack on both seeing what your own gameplay would be playing solo queing on this rank with brig, lack of Knowing how exactly matchmaker works.
My statistics haven’t been completely useless though, I’m no longer picking any other healer other than brig possibly why I’m on such a winning streak right now. Who knows maybe i’ll be able to climb strictly one tricking instead. Figures now that I start documenting my SR gains and losses everything is smooth so far. I’m not sure how much further I’d need to go to surpass your support role rank so I can speak as if I’m the master of the universe. So I don’t think it’d be so far away considering you have an endorsement level of two which even by strictly playing competitive at the level you’re at is kind of weird but competitive is a bit thankless so maybe, wouldn’t want to hard assume I know something.
It depends on the MMR of your teammates, right? You are the only factor that you control in the game. If someone in higher elo played on your account, they would climb. That means the individual player is the primary factor for success. Not every game is winnable, but most games are.
Of course everyone makes in-game mistakes. As you go up the ladder, players make fewer mistakes and they punish enemy mistakes more often.
In terms of replays, I generally don’t look at other players unless I need to figure out how they killed me or how I could have saved a teammate etc.
The logic is this: Your real SR is around 1700 (as is your MMR) and you lose some games (let’s say 1500 SR) that you should win–causing you bounce around 1600-1800 range. You then climb to 1900-2000 on a win streak (as does your MMR). This forces you to encounter better players. At 1900, you’re expected to win against 1700 players and perform like an average 1900-2000 player. However, you haven’t actually improved and so you lose games to lower MMR opponents (which is technically your real MMR at 1700) while simultaneously underperforming when you do win.
You then drop back to 1700 where your performance is average and you beat opponents closer to this rank.
Is it a strange belief? If you ran 1 mile every day at the same pace, would you expect your run time to improve after 850 miles? Probably not, right? To improve your run time, you would need to run at a faster pace and that requires conscious effort.
What have you done to improve besides playing hundreds of games on autopilot?
Right now, it sounds like you’ve made improvements by staying away from heroes that you’re not as familiar with.
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As the only factor that controls my games and being the only factor Behind me ranking up, getting a positive win ratio should cause me to rank up, but oh wait it doesn’t, because I’m not the only factor.
PBSR is the other factor which is determined based on how some AI thinks I played. An AI that is neither guaranteed in its accuracy, unlikely is not accurate, but has “Good Enough” accuracy. Specifically why Blizzard didn’t want to tell us how PBSR was calculated. It wouldn’t matter IF PBSR was a perfect calculator of skill because then you could not get around it. It mattered for them not to tell us because PBSR can obviously be abused if you know how to do it. If you knew what variables PBSR looks for you could just play to those variables. However what these variables are is a mystery and it’s not guaranteed that all variables are accounted for and all variables are considered equally or correctly valued and there’s many variables to consider when considering what has value and which is not.
Which leaves the following possibility, another player can take control of my account and they can actually be as good or even slightly worse based on these statistics than me but simply play in a way that PBSR calculations.l favor. Because on win ratio alone if I was the only factor I would have ranked up. PBSR introduces an unknown AI detection that can likely be abused.
I specifically stayed on Brig because my logic was that I can get better at one character faster than I can get better at multiple characters, and because I had heard professional players saying you could one trick anyone into GM.
Seeing as most of my games with brig have never been a hinderance. There have been many things I’ve done to impprove since then. There was a whole time when I watched all these replay reviews and learned all these tips on youtube. I’ve played with my controller settings a bunch I even bought a gaming controller (although these last two are minor things there have been times where I noticed they have helped) even while playing on autopilot experience alone pretty much makes it so any player gets better. I played many games on autopilot, and strictly starting on autopilot in the beginning I’m a big noob, and then I get good until a point and that’s as far as autopilot takes me. Even autopilot experience will guarantee you some improvement, you’ll simply memorize the maps more you’ll come to know player’s abilities more. Certain strategy more, but you’re suggesting that I haven’t improved one tiny bit and you actually believe that. That’s some really low expectations to have of somebody. But you believe that after all this time 7 seasons I’ve stayed pretty much at the exact same rank as I started. From my position that just sounds absurd.
I don’t think this is true. There are plenty of people who climb even with a really low winrate (40-50%) yet PBSR grants them a huge bonus simply because of their stats, yet no one outside of Bliz knows the details. Did they have high Elims? Low Elims to Deaths? High healing? Damage per 10 minutes? It’s all shrouded in mystery, and here you come along and say (paraphrasing) “It’s simple, play better!” You are entitled to your opinion and I’m sure your perspective is, ‘If I could climb, so can you’, the issue here is pointing out the flaws in the system that DO catch some players.
If you don’t know the MMR of your opponents, how do you know ‘this is the game I need to win to get boatloads of SR’? How do you know that your win that nets 16SR was because your stats were low or because your opponent was subpar? You don’t (which I’m sure your response is, it doesn’t matter) but when you are on the edge the mystery becomes a mixed signal. Did I perform good but was penalized because I lost to a better team or did I perform poorly and was penalized because I won against a bad team? This is why I say for these people, going on just winrate (like in Diamond+) would benefit these players, they obviously are doing enough to win, which is supposedly all that matters, except for the lower-skill yet borderline players for which you want to raise the bar.
I’ve read the post that you pasted in, thank you for that, it is good material, but there is another reason they don’t discuss why they implemented PBSR. Obviously lower-skill players will not win as much and have a winrate below 50%, and that would be a negative reinforcement which would likely drive away those players, and for Blizzard, more players == more $$$ so they have an incentive to keep all players in the game, even the bad ones.
Now for a thought experiment. The system knows your skill and could put you on teams with teammates of equal skill but a team of 6 low-skill players doesn’t change their odds they just get averaged out over those 6 players. How could you give that low-skill player better odds? By giving them high-skill teammates of course! If you offset the low-skill player with a higher-skill player, you could create a team that has a 50% probability of winning. This is handicapping, just like in bowling, except in bowling the practice is public and well known not to mention applied on an individual basis and not on a team basis. Now, that low-skill player might win but now because of their own skill and they get a deduction in the SR awarded for the win, BUT they get the endorphin rush of “A Win!”. This goes back to the psychology of intermittent rewards which changes behavior to keep repeating the behavior, read ‘increase player engagement’.
Bliz is playing psychological games here using high-level statistics and pretty graphics, enough so that you might even compare the experience to pulling the lever of a slot machine.
The “Nope” indicates its incorrect but you dont disagree just say something different.
These sounded out more than the others.
Basically Diamond+ folks dont have to worry about stats, its ONLY about the win… so the opposite of that… Diamond- folks have to worry about the stats, its not only about the win.
Diamond against diamond their stats are actually the same? The stat difference is only when someone is in the wrong rank (or have good people to play with). So no - Diamonds dont have “better stats” because they are in diamond… they’re opponents are also in diamond so kills shouldnt come “as easy”, healing tanking… are not “As easy”. Stats are only relative to the people around you.
In conclusion, yes, you have to worry about your stats - which is “ok” but 300 points? yesh…
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You are the only factor that you control. You can’t control your teammates, the enemies, or the map.
Machine learning isn’t a black box. Data from many players is compared against your data. If you’re above average, you get more SR. If you’re below, you get less SR. It’s similar to an exam average in a class and seeing what your score was in comparison to everyone else.
The variables aren’t that mysterious. We know it roughly correlates to the amount of time spent on fire during the match. That means if you play well, you get rewarded for it, right?
You are climbing this season, right? Your winrate is higher than your career average and you are climbing. Do you think you’re playing better? Maybe taking some of the feedback and trying to incorporate into your games?
I think that’s a good idea. You seem more comfortable on Brig than other heroes and I think that helps you win games–at least it does for my mains.
I’m not trying to say that. Clearly, anyone who has several hundred games of experience under their belt will know more about maps, abilities, compositions, etc. I have no doubt you’ve improved on that front.
I’m not trying to foist low expectations on you, I’m speaking from my own experience with the game and other competitive games. Autopilot is fine if your goal is to have some casual games/play with friends etc. However, if you want to achieve a personal goal and climb to some rank, you have to break habbits and play differently.
That is what the data suggest, right? The first season (23) you started playing you ended at 1795. Last season (28), you ended at 1705. To me, that’s the same rank over 7 seasons. Do you disagree?
Yes, they did. Any stat that is recorded (you can look in career profile) is a likely candidate for these calculations. If your stats are better, you get more SR. The best correlate we’re aware of is the “amount of time on fire” per match.
Can you explain why the system is fair for everyone except a select number of players?
Why do you need to know? I don’t think I’ve ever gone into a competitive game and thought, “I don’t need to win this game.”
I would definitely like to know what my MMR is and what everyone else’s MMR is too. For the overwhelming majority of players, MMR = SR. So, you can do some quick mental calculus looking at the team SR difference and the differences in rank between teams. That’s not always possible if people haven’t done placements.
I don’t quite understand how it’s a mystery or a mixed signal. There are a limited number of options for getting a lower amount of SR:
- You won against a lower MMR team
- You won against an equal MMR team but have been under performing
I understand Blizzard doesn’t provide statistics per rank and that is frustrating. But, you can look at your in-game stats and compare them to your career average. If you’re below, then you under performed. The same goes for average and above average.
It literally would not. You would have more people complaining about being hard stuck because they would get less SR for individual performance and need to rely exclusively on their team to perform.
Do you want to rely solely on your Bronze teammates or would you rather keep the mechanisms that allow you, as an individual, to climb independently of what they are doing?
Or, you move them down in rank to an appropriate skill level where they have a better chance of winning. That is what the system does.
Yes and I’ve made comments about this on the forum. The match maker is designed to provide a greater number of games at the player’s skill level–which results in fewer hard stomps from better opponents. That encourages people to keep playing.
That’s the issue I have: ethical transparency. Users should know how they are being manipulated to increase screen time and in-game purchases. This is an issue with other tech giants like Facebook, Google, and many free-to-play games.
No, stats still matter as MMR is affected. Removing PBSR at this level just removes the SR modifier and disincentivizes manipulation of that system.
Yes, they literally have better performance stats than people in lower elos–by definition. The user’s argument distills down to, “Well, it’s not fair that I’m getting judged on my stats and they aren’t.” News flash: Diamond+ stats are already better than those at lower elos.
It wouldn’t be fair if you had Diamond+ stats and were stuck in Silver. That’s why PBSR exists.
Stats are relative to the entire player distribution–that’s how we even have a rank distribution to begin with. You are awarded PBSR by performing above average for your rank.
“300 points” is being measured from a 1-time career peak with a true seasonal average around ~1700. It’s not like OP was 2050 SR for 9 seasons then dropped to 1700 and can’t get out. They have always been ~1700 and had a fluke climb to 2k.
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Your all over the place… so did they have a winning record as a player? If yes… but still maintain a deficit in SR then pbsr is holding them back. (Can’t be mmr cause they actually winning games while mmr is to keep a 50%?) but pbsr is to help good players climb, so your saying this dude is not a good player? But he wins more games than he loses…? It’s a flaw in logic somewhere.
Is the system perfect? Start there. If said system is not perfect - can there be edge cases where someone can be “trapped”? If you said no? Then go back to the question if is the system perfect. The answer should be no.
Once you admit the system is not perfect… (because if it is then the person who made it is perfect right?), then try to realize how an edge case can happen. Then come back to this thread and see how close is this person to that edge case.
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I’m not all over the place. I am clearly and logically explaining how the system works. If you choose to deny culpability for one’s rank, that’s your prerogative.
Or, you are losing games to lower MMR teams or you are winning higher MMR games but performing below average.
Engage with the argument.
Objectively, the player is below average. That’s what I’m saying.
Answer. The. Question.
A semi-pro soccer team beats a high school team 100 out of 100 games. With a 100% winrate from beating lower-rated opponents, should the semi-pro team move up the ranking to “professional” status?
Yes or no?
No system is “perfect.” And no, you cannot be trapped in rank that you don’t belong in. You will absolutely never see a GM player “trapped” in Bronze. Never. People get “hard stuck” because that is their rank and they are not improving. It’s not a magical conspiracy to keep players down.
It’s like taking a multiple choice exam, answering the easy questions correctly, scoring a 52%, and then complaining that your class ranking should be higher. Give me a break–that’s not how it works.
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Yes and for the most part I can deal with this because well I don’t control the maps and my teammates and my enemies they are at random meaning I won’t get always bad teammates are always good teammates. That’s fine because it averages out. This is not the case for pbsr though.
I’m aware of this I do video game programming myself. But you yourself know that metals don’t guarantee good gameplay right? If it’s comparing me to what it thinks is good just like the medal system, is that an accurate measure of value? Being compared to most people in my Sr range doesn’t make this better. For example what if most brigs on my team concentrate heavily on healing whereas i also heal but like to assist in other ways such a cc helping people get kills with the stun etc. Basically players are compared to the average Brig player what if they do not play in the style of the average Brig player? I compared my stats to global average not so long ago. What I did notice is that well everything was more or less mediocre I had an unusually high block damage with Brig I literally was in the top 10 percentile. Which made sense to me, the manner I play I do heavily use my shield. Its perhaps different but so far it is not failed me I have still one more games than lost. But it’s not the average brig stats expected of me and so I possibly could get punished for this…
I already touched on this in the last point but again that would be terrible because it would be like the medal system determining your pbsr it would promote playing to farm stats.
It doesn’t matter it’s happened every season when season you climb when season you don’t essentially being hard stuck. I’ve climbed to Gold before and now I’m back down here and that was early on in my competitive career. Sure I’ll climb but I’m then I’ll rank down and yes I’m aware of your little theory that that’s why I’m stuck in it because I’ll rank up and rank down but point is and the reason this topic was created was to show that I’m ranking down although I’m getting more wins. That is my beef with the system. I do not want a machine telling me how I’m supposed to play if I’m still winning I wanted to reflect on my rank, and not be stuck here despite winning more than I lose. You have to understand the no other competition does this, except in the world of esports, but this method doesn’t guarantee anything if anything is introduces the possibility for errors and abuse. Natural selection though win ratios in the long run is the superior method, and also simple and transparent there’s nothing to guess no reason to argue because it’s plain and clear.
Yes that’s correct. That’s my mistake I shouldn’t have said rank. What I meant to say was more along the lines of rank skill, if you honestly believe that I have been at the same rank skill for seven seasons.
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Judgement in my useless opinion:
1705 is an accurate SR. In order to climb, stop playing the heroes that you lose games on. Focus on 1-2 heroes.
I suppose I’m not completely useless, I climbed from 700 SR (pre role queue) to all 4 (Tank, DPS, Support, Open) being between 1800-2100. I currently focus on playing my lowest SR to improve my overall game sense and awareness.
Having a very slightly positive win rate and falling SR is an indication that the PBSR is determining your statistical contribution to games to be less than people in an equal rank on the same hero. I recommend that you use a spreadsheet like “Overwatch Game Tracker 1.9” (it’s posted in reddit / OverwatchUniversity) to really see what is happening in your games and to see trends and patterns that may not be evident by looking at the stats available in game. In particular, use the replay feature to look at games where you Lost and had a large negative SR loss, (more than -26), also games where you won and had a small gain (less than 22). Figure out what you’re doing differently in those games than the ones where you have average (+/- 24) gains and losses, or even the ones you have large gains or small losses. The large SR gains on wins and small negative amounts on losses are the ones you want to try to make all your games into.
I apologize for not reading the whole thread, and probably saying things that have already been said.
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So at this point, I think we know “WHY” - the question is - is it right?
So far the the examples of “is it right” uses some extreme polar opposites.
Semi - pro, and GM in bronze… since we know the system is not perfect…
and thus exist edge cases :
Can we say the system sucks at detecting incremental changes in skill? (And we know there are some glaring holes like perhaps if people were all solo queue the overall stats would be worse. - so to pbsr compare a solo que’er stats to a team’er stats is a little unfair.)
If we can say incremental changes in skill are hard to detect, perhaps we can circle back to “is it right”, and say no its not right. A gold player can be stuck (even for a little while) in silver - maybe even trapped?
Because at what point can this imperfect system breaks down? It cant be perfect everywhere? And perhaps the original poster has a point you agree to:
Maybe it wasnt a fluke? but the imperfect system has trapped them down there?
- This just goes back to my “classification” vs progression. And if it does classify then by all means new players should not be in gold (but thats another topic - or perhaps another flaw in the system).
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