tell me then. what does it represent, why is it useful and why do you care how many hours someone of the same rank has put into the game?
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even this is not entirely true. people could have created custom games to learn the maps before playing. you dont know, and thats the issue with tying anything other than time to someone’s level.
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the two of us being the “we”, and the implication being that we are in control of that choice?
you’re gonna have to retry 
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oh i know
just shooting the 
for fun while i wait on stuff 
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This just isn’t true. I started playing at the start of 2018 and saw people from silver all the way up to diamond in my games when I first started. Sure, it’s more frequent now with a smaller playerbase, but it absolutely used to happen too.
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Out of curiosity - what would you propose using in place of MMR, were it to be canned?
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You’re correct enough. I mean it in a general sense but you are entirely correct. They could have gotten every level in arcade, for all anyone knows.
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why does my game client launch with the option flag --prometheus?
interesting these patches keep asking for admin access for weird updates and my mouse keeps not working mid game.
Anyway, you don’t replace MMR with anything (for comp). For casual modes I don’t really care about SBMM. But for competitive esports ladder? You don’t replace mmr with anything except SR and pbsr with very shorterm state like 2-3 matches. Players are randomly sampled into a lobby from similar SR range (natural competition), instead of tampering with match outcomes (rigging). If there are 36 players between 2900 and 3100 they should all be fair game to be sampled for/against without looking at any analytics behind the scenes. MMR rigging tampers with who plays who based on all kinds of hidden crap that is unethical, invasive, and anti-competitive.
Stateless SR really should be enough. It’s the end-all-be-all metric that scores, ranks, paysout, and is meant to represent player skill. So it should represent one’s ability to go 50% winrate against an average backdrop (randomly sampled) of said rank.
exactly. they could be global in cs or predator in apex. it could even be a pre levelled account. judging people from level is was and always will be dumb as hell
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Prometheus is the name of the engine the game is built in. If I had to take a wild guess, it perhaps has something to do with that.
You mean, sort of like some form of rating system for a matchmaker?
Where does the rating of players by SR come from? As it exists, SR is merely an icon, it can’t “rate” people into matches.
So where does the backbone which does so come from? Do we just randomly assign players ratings on a daily basis? How do we know that there are 36 players between 2900 and 3100?
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It matchmakes around the rating? you sample people of similar SR into the same match around the stated rating.
why have SR if it’s fake?
you put people into pools based on sr brackets, say 300sr ranges (relaxing by queue/availability). And you randomly ship matches from those pools. You’ll get an avgA of say 2145 for team A and avgB of 2234, say. Meaning if team A wins they get slightly more pbsr for the win, as well as pbsr for those who put up good stats (have to revise what constitutes good stats). Then the players are released back into the pool, and another random match is sampled. People can move out to an adjacent pool if their SR moves enough. No data is tracked or used against since it’s a team game afterall and winning with/against others who win (of the same degree) is the end-all-be-all.
This way it’s not rigged, you’re still getting “fair” matches by sampling players naively (fairly) from said rank. Fewer queue times since fewer mmr constraints, and actual unrigged competition.
SR exists purely to give people a pretty icon that they can use to quickly tell others “I’m Gold”, or “I’m GM”, so you can convey your skill level easily.
It does not determine a players actual skill level. MMR does that entirely, SR is just a drastically simplified easy-to-read numerical representation of MMR. Just like LP in League of Legends, or the rank icons in CSGO.
The first part has nothing to do with PBSR, so I’m really not sure why you’re mentioning it here?
But… you literally just mentioned PBSR?
So, you aren’t using PBSR, because stats aren’t being tracked?
Or you are, in your proposed system?
You should be more clear, because you seem to be co-opting terms and using them to mean things they do not currently mean.
Please explain to me what you think “rigging” actually is?
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Then it’s a total misrepresentation. It says 3132 so you can tell people the game has declared you as 3132, not diamond, not 3300, not 2928. You’re 3132, which is supposed to be meaningful in terms of a normal pdf that represents % players (not alts) by skill rating (sr).
K so ladder is fake got it. The labels are false.
because mmr-free system can use not only sr but also pbsr to move people efficiently and reward/payout more precisely. it would simply matchmake using sr brackets alone.
This is alternative to mmr system, which tampers with natural match lobbies using behind the scences mmr analytics to rig the match outcome/odds.
pbsr is used to scale post-match payouts and move a players sr slightly more/less if it was deserved based on the last 1-2 matches (i.e. highest performer that match, not deep history performance stats calibrated to rank averages).
you sample around narrow sr bracket, the team that was randomly made with slightly lower sr gets slightly more sr for the win and loses slightly less sr for the loss, proportional to the d(abs(avgA-avgB)) where avg is harmonic.
I think what the dictionary says.
i.e. every match is rigged. they claim it’s for “fairness”, but it’s still rigging/tampering with natural competitive outcomes.
for more info on why that’s unethical and unlawful:
Please consult the above thread to bring yourself up to speed on the discussion.
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For me it’s the actual technical issues. Check this.
All day - account 1 I play 10-20 games. I step away for dinner and when I come back since I know it’s a different time of day I switch accounts. 3 game freezes in a row. Now… I don’t know what to make of that so I updated my drivers and didn’t even return for nightly gaming.
Next day, back to my daytime account. 10-20 games.
Evening account, THIS TIME 2 server crashes. And I mean midway through a game “server crash you will be refunded your tickets”.
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I’m getting the crashes and issues as well. Only started recently. Almost like the client/server just wants to fail people out and discourage gameplay entirely. They can just come right out and say it if they really want to force people to quit. They can also just come right out and say the game isn’t rigged and 0 patents apply etc, officially on record for all to see to silence the debate (or get themselves purgered).
Until then it’s a livelihood for people. We know this because streamers are making content and are backed by bnet launcher events and an ecosystem represented as fairplay path2pro esports.
This is… just wrong, though.
Your skill rating is not a specific number. That isn’t how OW works, it isn’t how any game works, and it isn’t how real life and humans work.
You are not a “point” of skill, you represent a variance in skill. Some days you perform better at certain tasks, some days you don’t. You might be better in specific, but uncommon, scenarios - you may generally just not be particularly consistent.
Your assumption that “You’re 3132” specifically is false, and at no point has the development team ever implied otherwise - it’s well known, and has been discussed on multiple occasions, that you’re expected to vary easily +/- 200 SR for most people. Some are slightly more consistent, but no one is a precise number.
What an incredible way to not understand a statement. The ranks are arbitrary. Real human beings are not diamond. They have a skill level, the devs have chosen to call that approximate rating “diamond”.
It does that in the system you’ve created in your head?
Because it certainly doesn’t do that right now.
This sounds like an incredible system…
For Chess.
Overwatch is not a 1v1 matchup. It’s a 6v6 matchup with different roles and different heroes that each person is restricted to.
Can you elaborate on what “d” means in this instance? Determinant? Delta? Derivative?
Why is this “use a harmonic mean” talking point so overused in discussions about skill ratings by people that don’t understand what a harmonic mean is?
Harmonic means are typically used to average something which is changing. The average ratings here are not changing - they are snapshots of the prior to the beginning of the match.
According to you, they shouldn’t change at all, they should simply be points - so I’m exceptionally confused why someone that doesn’t understand skill variance would then want to use a harmonic mean when rating players.
Can you please explain to me how you came to such a conclusion?
For it to be rigged, they would have to actively sway the direction of the match’s outcome.
That isn’t what MMR does.
MMR predicts the outcome at the beginning of the match - and if an unexpected outcome occurs, then it will make a slightly more drastic shift in it’s estimation of player’s skill ratings.
I have no faith in anything Cuthbert says.
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I didn’t assume there was no variance attached. Where did I say there was no variation in skill? That skill is multi-factorial and scoring is multi-moment is so obvious I thought it went without saying. The index is being read out by users so it needs to be representative.
The instantaneous skill index (or level) is supposed to be at or very near (+/- errors) the declared SR. If your skill variations cause you to drop or rise, so be it. The SR is supposed to register and match where you left off.
If SR has nothing to do with player skill, then the entire ladder, matches, esports ecosystem is a sham. It’s fake payouts fake rewards fake classifications.
If SR does correlate with skill, then matchmake using SR alone, no need to rig lobbies with MMR.
That’s the fairplay rankings system ™ It’s obvious, well-known, and not novel enough to patent, because it’s not rigged.
Plus, you asked:
Which is why you randomly sample people along SR axis and let them play it out. After a while, SR will be harmonized, representative of combined/overall/variance-smoothed player skill. That’s what the metric should represent.
No need for mmr, except to artificially tamper the lobby with chery-picked players for rigged outcomes.
Because in a team composition the mixture of efforts is parallel operation which is why you use harmonic mean. Players are like pumps the don’t work in a series they work in tandem = harmonic or rate.
Please state your level of education so I can adjust the explanation. Because this is a waste of time explaining obvious trivial matters. Just accept that mmr is bad and sr only is completely fair.
Which is exactly rigging. You don’t predict the odds and move players around to fix the outcomes. That’s entirely unethical and anti-competitive. You can get fair competition by randomly pulling from within a narrow SR.
Please state your level of education because right now I have no faith in someone who can’t lookup the dictionary defition of rigging, assumes I’m not accounting for multi-factor multi-moment skill index, or understand why harmonic mean should be used. If you were able to bring yourself up to speed we wouldn’t be having this discussion. MMR exists only to rig, you can’t have real competition through rigging, and SR is all you ever need to ship fair matches.
I already said in my first comment now it means nothing bc of alt accounts .
If there was no alt acc in the game , then by just looking at the borders u can have an idea that a certain player most likely an experienced OW player or a new one .
This would be the equivalent of posting WebMD and decreeing it as advice directly from Harvard Med.
They’ll be getting rid of the border system for overwatch 2. How will people determine experience/inexperience players then?
not represented in this game tho
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I know this , my comment is about current OW.