Correct. Grizzgolf was asking about the low ranks.
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It is the reason why there is so much skill difference in most tiers?
Why the matchmaker fails so much (hope it will be less of a problem with role SR)
He talks himself about playing against a very bad tjorb and the next game a good one.
Ranking most players between -3 and 3. Then i hope certainly not that every one in bronze is -3, in silver -2 etc… I hope it is more like someones MMR = -2.39484 or something. And if you play well then this number will increase (probably compares you with others of your rank)
I would love to see this number after every game. And more info about how it calculated. Jeff calls it an unexcited number… I would like to see this number more then SR. SR is more based on your team performance(win/loss) MMR is all about your individual skill.
Awesome! Thanks Kaawumba!
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I’m fairly certain it does. It doesn’t quite make sense for a matchmaking system to only have only 7 set values (especially when there are 5000 SR points).
I doubt we’ll ever find out. SR at your true rank is close to your MMR so there’s no need to. They also won’t reveal what MMR entails in order to avoid people trying to abuse and stat pad in order to raise it.
How’s this work, exactly?
For instance, is the matchmaker looking to make a match where each team is 0.
And to do that you’d, say, take 6 players that are something like…
3
2
1
-1
-2
-3
Balancing each other out to Zero? Then have both sides come to about the same number.
Yes, it is a floating point, not an integer.
I agree.
No. This is persistent, but false myth. Both MMR and SR depend more on win/loss than performance (and above diamond, neither depend on performance). See How Competitive Skill Rating Works - Season 17 - #17 by Kaawumba-1133 → Summary.
Please wait for other posters before replying.
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No, all players in a (100% solo-queue) match have a fairly tight cluster of MMRs, perhaps +/- 0.08, so it’s more like, 0.06, 0.05, 0.01, -0.03, -0.06, -0.07 for one team, and similar for the other team.
I agree.
My understanding is that MMR 0 is basically the middle of Gold, and 1 is above that somewhere, maybe something like Plat/Diamond, with 2 being somewhere around master/GM, and 3 being top 500 or so (not that it matters exactly which maps to which, and this is wild speculation) A better grasp of standard deviation would probably say that I’ve got the gaps all wrong, but which number equates to which rank isn’t the important part.
This means that a particular match is probably something like a 0.85, 0.84994, 0.8501, 0.8489, 0.852, etc. But the main point is that they’re very close to each other, and only the whole population is centered around 0, not the participants in a certain match.
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Might as well ask, do you want to do season 18 for the skill rating guide thread? I know you handed it off with things being dead quiet in the last few seasons, but obviously with changes now…
…it would also help me out as I have something important going on (which I can’t discuss at this time).
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Sure. Maybe I just needed a few months off. I came back for the replays, and stuck around for the role queue. Also, it needs a full rewrite with the changes, and you’d probably be uncomfortable with all the deletions that need to be made.
Can you say if it is Blizzard/Overwatch related or personal?
@Kaawumba
Hi, Noxifer here. I know you usually compile info like this in an attempt to combat criticism towards the system. That’s all good and well, but I really gotta ask you:
Can you not see how something like this can be particularly problematic and it would explain the one-sided streaks many players are complaining about?
In WoW they used a 4 digit number, same as SR. That MMR served the purpose of giving you an estimation of where you belong, and they used it for finding enemies only (because there you created teams, so you always played as a full premade).
Here you have a 1 digit number between -3 and +3, it’s not given to you to see, and it’s also used for finding allies (essentially making it into a self fulfilling prophecy). And, especially if it can shift quickly from +3 to -3 after a single match, no wonder why they don’t display it and no wonder why the system is so volatile.
Exactly what is happening in Heroes of the storm
You win SR raise then you got match with potatoes (MMR dosent move as fast as SR)
I did quit HOTS for this reason and im quitting OW for this even if 222 was a really good move BYE
He adressed this before. So instead of 1 it is probably more like 1.001203 and the jumps are far smaller.
Let me share a story from HotS.
A friend of mine, who is really good at the game reached rank 4 (that was either preseason or season 1, when Rank1 was the highest).
On rank 4, instead the games becoming more skilled, he would literally play with people who mess around and throw the games, so he would swing between rank 5 and 2, unable to reach rank 1. I think he dropped to like rank 6 and got pissed off.
Meanwhile, I was ~rank 30 and was steadily climbing. My friend asked me if I could help him out, so that he knows he’ll have at least one person who can help him.
On the 2nd time we tried, we did manage to pull off a win streak (I don’t know, however many games it was to get him from like rank 5 to rank 1) and he did reach rank 1 and got his mount. Surprisingly, I did pull my weight as rank 30 or lower, with the lowest rank on the enemy team being 11.
We never bothered with that trash of a Comp system again… or not in that game anyways.
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This does not reflect the initial state of the game, where SR swings of ~800 were a common occurrence. It used to be a meme, that one day someone is in Silver, the next day he’s in Plat, so how can SR represent skill in any way.
And while SR swings are not as crazy nowadays, streaks remain very much a thing.
As to why they are happening, I was about to suggest, that the personal performance factor is at fault, but then again streaks also happen for people in Master and Grand master, where supposedly the personal performance factor doesn’t work anymore, and the system is pure Elo (which I don’t know if it’s true, but it can be tested easily if two Diamonds or higher queue together and see if they win or lose the exact same amount of points at the end of a match).
Also, numbers can be translated. They could be showing you what is a numerical representation of what SR you are estimated to be able to reach, just like they did in WoW.
They are not hiding it, because “people will abuse the system”. They are hiding it, because people will point out irregularities, especially for Plat and below with personal performance affecting your MMR and SR gains/losses.
Streaks can be easily explained. If for whatever reason the system decides you underperformed (even if you did what was necessary), and you end up on a downward spiral, because the system assumes you can maintain consistent performance under any circumstances, which in a team game is not really the case. What others do or don’t do can and will affect your performance.
I bet you, that if we could see numbers, there will be these cases where a player does everything right, but the system decides he underperformed. Maybe he underperformed when it comes to pure numbers, devoid of the context of the match, but with a replay you can show, that he couldn’t possibly do any better under the circumstances.
Other issues could be related to smurfs artificially raising the bar of what the standard performance should be on certain rating.
I’m telling you, there’s something very fishy with this system. It simply does not behave like what one would expect based on his experience with other games where Elo, True Skill or whatever variation we have here.
The worst part is, Blizzard do not have the financial incentive to improve the system, because there are all these morons willing to buy multiple copies of the game to try and play in a higher league.
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This is my take on a particular quote from Mercer in the Role Queue Update thread. It’s indicative of what I think about the current state of the matchmaking system.
This is a common misconception. My goal is primary to give information about how the system works. If I have no problem with criticism if it is criticizing the system as it is actually implemented. I criticize the system as well. I get frustrated when people hallucinate how the system works and criticize that hallucination.
MMR is not an integer, and will move a small amount (approximately 0.03 for established players) with each game.
Regarding streaks: Win probability changes slowly with rank because there are so many random factors in each individual match. Unfortunately, it follows from this that frequent and long streaks will occur, and a player’s rank will oscillate widely. Essentially, a player will tend to bounce between the range of where he is nearly guaranteed to win and where he is nearly guaranteed to lose. Historically, the range varied from player to player, but +/- 250 SR was common and +/- 500 was possible. This problem can be analyzed in depth, mathematically (Overwatch Forums). With role queue, and several months of data, streaks should be reduced in frequency and duration, and total SR swing should be less. How much less will have to be seen.
It behaves exactly like expected from TrueSkill: Why Match Quality is Frequently Poor.
SR is not used in matchmaking. Only MMR is. There is no “you’re doing well, time to carry a sack of potatoes” in Overwatch. I don’t comment on HoTS because I’ve barely played it.
MMR is measured in standard deviations, got it. Still not really useful information, because we don’t know if it’s standard deviations as a modifier of your SR or range, or standard deviations as a modifier to the average player overall.
Measuring it in regards to the average player makes sense in the context of fair matchmaking, by using it to push people toward their SR and setting the goalposts of 0 and 5000 at the highest attained values(or slightly above), you get a system that properly models the bell curve, which SR appears to do. You also get the effect we see where it becomes increasingly hard to gain SR approaching 5000, and to lose it approaching 0, because maintaining performance above or below 3 stdevs from the norm is extremely difficult.
However, in the context of the fixed system suggested, it still makes sense. If you have a measure of a player’s stdev from their rank, it’s easy to pair them with opposite players, match their performance with similar players on the other team, etc, to ensure a more fair and balanced game.
While the devs have said matchmaking is done based on MMR, not SR, that is a single line and not some code we’ve actually been able to examine. It would be perfectly reasonable for them to drop you into a pool(likely containing dozens or hundreds of queued players) based on the SR range the game will be, then match players out of the pool based on MMR. You would still be matching based on MMR, it’s just within the SR range.
‘Performance’ is not a metric easily measured in standard devations. A DPS playing with amazing tanks is going to be doing much more damage, getting many more eliminations, and suffering far fewer deaths than the same exact DPS playing with a potato roadhog and dps sigma. In this way, it’s quite possible that hitting a few one-sided wins would result in your stats appearing to have vastly improved compared to the average player, who is getting one-sided wins, one-sided losses, and a few fair games. Your stats in a one-sided win can easily be 5x or more your stats in a one-sided loss.
If MMR is easy enough to shift in that context, then it would make perfect sense that winning a few stomps results in you being paired with poor players. The resulting stomps will confuse your MMR, and perhaps you end up back in a winning streak.
Again, while I don’t buy into anecdotal evidence, there is a ton of it to be had. Smurfs largely agree that they will always end up paired with enemy smurfs if overperforming. Hundreds if not thousands of players feel they’re being forced into win and loss streaks.
Games in a coordinated stack feel utterly insane compared to normal games at the same SR. While stack matchmaking is weighted to be matched against other stacks, it’s clearly also got a skill factor. When you could still see stacks, my 4 stack would always be put against enemy 4-6 stacks. That’s fair, but they were always coordinated as well, resulting in long and fair games. I would expect that if there were no bias in the internal balancing, we would see the stacks that result from idiots using ‘stay as team’ as well, and it didn’t appear so.
The average ability of an opponent when queueing as a 2050~ sr 4 stack is equal or higher than the average ability of an opponent when queueing at 2700~ sr solo. This is something I do have enough games to be confident is past the observational bias mark. Whether it’s because stacks that don’t work well together break, or because there’s an internal bias, I can’t say.
In the context of what blizzard employees have posted, you can make a convincing case for either way. That said, my disclaimer on this topic still applies. While I personally am inclined to believe this system does exist, there is no proof one way or the other.
Further, if you’re using the potential existance of this system to claim you can’t climb, you are just plain wrong. If you are good enough for the matchmaker to try to balance downwards around you or put enemy smurfs against you, you are raking in performance based SR like crazy. If you can’t win half your games, or your performance based SR gains don’t outweigh your losses, any potential argument about being sandbagged falls apart because you’re obviously not doing great in the eyes of the system.
tldr; Maybe the games are handicapped, but if you can’t climb that certainly isn’t why.
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