I’m not trying to speak for anyone but myself. I don’t see my position as a “reversal” of the OP or the scholarly article he’s referencing.
- Did you not, in this very thread, claim Blizzard uses balances matches to “put players in a hamster wheel”, i.e. to increase engagement at the expense of the player?
- Does the article not clearly state that balanced matches, which are “fair”, do not necessarily create the most engaging experience? So that companies might want to create unbalance matches to increase engagement?
- Did you not reference the article as support of your ideas in this thread?
I’m not sure where the confusion is. The article says one thing, you claim the opposite, but also reference the article as support of what you are claiming. If I’m wrong about this, which of the three bullet points above am I incorrect about?
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I still think the only reason we have MMR and SR is so that Blizzard can tinker around with the system out of view of the players. I don’t mean that in some sort of fixed or deliberate win/lose sort of way. I’m saying stuff like these certain actions get a 3% boost to a players MMR or maybe X number of kills etc etc.
by having two numbers they can fiddle around without drawing any ire from the player base over all, being we can’t see the MMR move up and down anyways. If we could then some uber nerds would notice “Hey wait, why after the last update am I…” etc… Same for being able to “crack” the code as to what stats to focus on in the first place for better gains.
and the harsh truths about people really trying to dig in the match maker is a better player will walk right over all the math. Like I don’t care how a person break down their PHD level reasons for why they can or can’t get out of gold etc. If a better player just took over their account, they would smash out almost instant.
Overwatch is just a very deceptive game as far as what you think you’re doing in game vs what one is really doing at the time. I hope we get the World Cup viewer for personal games so at last people can finally see all the stuff they are doing wrong.
I respect a lot of the data gathering you do. What your data shows in having avg gains and losses at 3k+ is that the matchmaker there does have to find another way to force the bell curve to continue and not flatten out unil 42k.
How do you keep more people at 3k, then you do at 4k? I mean, it is pretty consistant in that regard, yet other factors in the game show that people can move along the ladder very quickly.
Nope, pretty much everyone is showing up around 2300 at the start, then move very quickly, until they even out. Even new people hitting 3k+ still move very quickly. If they didn’t you’d have a big problem with GMs being in diamond for at least 42 games on new accounts… and thats if they won all 42 games in a row to raise their SR 1000pts. I severely doubt that is what is occurring.
If MMR adjusted at an even rate, you would have diamonds and master players dropping VERY fast whenever they hit a smurf to make up for the big swings in SR given to the new accounts.
As I just stated, having balanced MMR changes in each match would make every new account VERY disruptive to explain the wild swings in MMR for new accts and those returning from a long break.
How exactly would this work? You would have to basically reset people at the start of the season… then readjust them drastically from where they finished during placements.
However, probably 99% of the community starts off right where they left off.
No, the way the prevent inflation is to make sure everyone stays in their section of the bell curve. They use the legacy accounts that have a high confidence rating to be the markers in the bell curve to place new accounts and to help anchor down the confidence rating of those that have show marked improvement.
In the main part of the bell curve, they leave pbsr in effect so that the UI/SR number can fluctuate greatly… and call it performance base which no one can lock down.
In the higher end, they use decay and unevenly balanced teams to given a slight disadvantage to those that the matchmaker has determined don’t belong where they go. But make no mistake, it is still trying to bring SR as close to MMR as possible, even at 3k+.
The other thing that you look at is the overall win rates in each tier. As you climb, you HAVE to maintain a winning record at 3k+ in order to keep your SR even. In theory, if you had an even 24 avg of both wins and losses… and it was equal… you would be able to stay at a 50% rate and stay even. Even with the games flucuating between favored and unfavored… they would equal itself out.
However as you go up in teirs, the avg win percentage goes up and up. You can’t explain that without saying there is some artificial adjustment being made for people whose SR exceeds their MMR. That is a signal that something is artificially keeping you down where you have to win more then you lose to keep your rank.
While it is hard to agree with the consipiracy theorists when it comes go their SR experience… we can’t completely discount the anecdotal evidence that is given to us. It can’t just be dismissed as if it is not happening. But when trying to figure out what this secret system is doing, you have to include ALL data points.
For example. The people that get a string of bad lucky matches and fall. How do they not just shoot back up when it isn’t their bad play that put them down 200sr, but an uneven number of leavers and people actually throwing matches. Then, they get stuck where they dropped.
You can’t say ALL those people on these forums complaining were boosted, had a bad day, are lying, etc. There are some legitiment players that have dropped and can’t get back up to where they were. They grinded against the system to have high win rates, but stay even.
That is not to say the system is purposfully making someone lose. It puts people at a disadvantage when they climb higher to prove they belong there. Testing games mind you. If you win, your MMR will go up… if you lose… it did so to make that correction. But even then, the SR doesn’t make a huge jump until the system starts losing confidence in it’s ability to project a winner.
Since we can’t tell based on SR which games someone would have an advantage or disadvantage… it provides an ability to adjust without causing an alarm to the player… until they get too high and crash back down.
With decay, you can artifically lower the SR of a player down to their MMR without affecting win rate as they climb back up playing at the same MMR as if they are not decayed, but the SR displays never quite catches all the way back up without a bunch of wins… that would increase their MMR up to where their SR should be.
Under this hypothesis, you can fit in all the outliers. While there are still too many unanswered questions with your data.
Question, do you solo q, or group with friends? One of the things that can stunt your SR against the natural trends of the bell curve is grouping.
If you play in games that are lower then the MMR from where you are… and you LOSE those games… your MMR will drop drastically. Similarly, if you win games below your MMR, your MMR will not increase.
This drop is SR will then make solo q very easy… because you aren’t ranked properly, and you’ll win a disproportional amount of games in solo q.
Last season I did a mix of LFG and solo q. I won like 70% of my solo q games… but only ended up with an overall winrate around 51%. I lost 40-50sr while having won I think 2-3 games more then I lost since placements.
Grouping severely impacts your MMR because you’ll start confusing the system and it loses confidence as to where to place you on the bell curve. The larger the gap of your MMR from the rest of the group, the greater impact it will have both negatively and positively. Most people don’t see too many effects in the positive factor, because boosting someone above plat by grouping starts getting increasingly more difficult as the system starts to fight against you the farther from 2500 you climb.
stopped reading at this point.
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I only solo Q. All my friends that play this game are plat and above, i am the lowly denominator.
You’re equating maximum engagement with the best possible user experience. They’re not the same thing. The former is in Blizzard’s interest. The latter is in player’s interest.
Match Making Rating exists to handicap matches, giving teams a manufactured 50% win every time they play, regardless of who is participating and at what SR level. This comes at the expense of the system’s fairness and objectivity. It converts the time and effort of experienced players into an illusion of fairness. Blizzard maintains that illusion to maximize engagement.
I have advocated for fair and objective (i.e., non-handicapped) Competitive Play, with no MMR. This would produce fewer of the close games and ‘near wins’ that players become so easily addicted to.
If the scholarly article claims “that balanced matches, which are “fair”, do not necessarily create the most engaging experience” and “that companies might want to create unbalance matches to increase engagement,” then I find that very interesting. But the more I learn about the nature of addiction (like from that Adam Alter book I mentioned), the more I doubt it is the case. And I suspect that Blizzard has done a great deal of their own research into this, and already chosen the design that promotes the most addiction to their products, regardless of the intrinsic harm to their customers.
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See, then your data point shows that Your MMR, which is determined by your stats, is dragging behind your SR. You win quite often is my guess, with very little gains… and when you lose, you lose much larger… 18-27 split is my guess, correct?
The game thinks you belong at a lower rank… and when it gives you games to see if you deserve the higher rank and you lose when your suppose to win… it just confirms your inflated… and refuses to raise your MMR up to your SR… it continues to stunt your growth.
Only until you fell back down to 1100 where it probably thinks you belong, did you start seeing SR gains higher then your losses.
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Your basic premise is wrong. SR is not a zero-sum resource that must be split evenly between all players in a match, or all players in the game. Instead, SR is determined independently for each player trending towards their MMR, which means that it can enter or leave the system every single match.
MMR may or may not be a finite resource - we don’t know exactly how it works. But we do know it’s not affected by decay or the full leaver penalty, which means it does not necessarily trend towards 0.
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It seems that people might be overestimating the role of SR and MMR when the matchmaker is trying to form groups, there are a bunch of other variables, an example is:
“The unfortunate truth is that there is not always a “perfect” match for you, especially at very high (and very low!) skill ratings where there’s fewer players of similar skill. Then you throw in the desire to match groups vs. groups, with everybody having low latency, and doing ALL of this as fast as possible even though it’s the 3AM offpeak… it can get tough. We’ve tried different tunings with regards to wait times”
That was from this post, which explains some more of the variables:
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20749737390#post-3
MMR is used, it seems, to introduce a factor that includes a measure of confidence in it’s assessment of your skill.
An good example of a much better documented ranking system that seems to have the same goal as whatever blizzard do is TrueSkill.
The FAQ linked below, particularly the matchmaking section, here has some excellent descriptions of how and why Trueskill does what it does
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/trueskill-ranking-system/
Hope that helps some 
Sure, the average SR at the end of the season will likely be lower than the average SR at the when people place, largely because of decay. However, you describe it as a fatal flaw, but it doesn’t really seem to be a fatal problem to me since SR resets each season.
The biggest issue is fairly fundamental, that SR can enter and leave the system at Blizzard’s will, so it is not clear that Blizzard would ever let SR get to zero, even if the seasons were of infinite length. Also, SR doesn’t really act like a currency where the equation balances one person’s loss is equal to another person’s gain. This is most obvious in decay, but it could happen in a more subtle way with performance SR, for example.
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This is conspiracy theory talk. The game does not rig matches to favor one team to push players where they belong.
Blizzard doesn’t force the bell curve. It appears naturally because of the ranking system (wins make you go up, losses make you go down) and because people often distribute into bell curves (this depends on how the measurement is made).
Compare:
from The Chicago Marathon, 2017. An Analysis of Participation &… | by barrysmyth | Running with Data | Medium. This gives the running times from the 2017 Chicago marathon. Blue is men, red is women.
Let’s say that during the course of the season, the average SR rose 20 SR because of poor players quiting the game. Everyone could have their SR bumped down 20 SR at the start of the new season. It doesn’t have to be drastic if the drift isn’t drastic.
Win percentage only goes up at really high tiers (like 4200+ or so) and it happens because the game cannot find fair matches for players that are good enough. No manipulation or rigging is required.
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Well, we don’t quite know how SR is calculated so we can only make assumptions. However, I think the assumption to treat SR as an economy is flawed for basically one reason:
The amount of total SR is not finite. *
From what we can tell from the scarce data Blizzard has given out, SR is supposed to find your place on a Bell’s curve based on the population of the active players. A good example was Lucio Ball. You could be in silver for the normal competitive but Diamond for competitive Lucio Ball simply because fewer people were playing. The same thing happens with competitive deathmatch or CTF, or any other “minor” season. I am certain we all had our rank being a lot higher or a lot lower in those “minor” seasons. I understand that those are different game modes and therefore someone might actually be a lot better, but the size of the active player base was definitely a factor.
As a thought experiment consider if everyone who is above 1500 SR (silver) stopped playing, and I mean to remove them completely from the season. Then the SR system would distribute the bronze tier across all ranks. The top 500 would still be at 4200+ SR because compared to the new active population they would be better.
From that, it is safe to extrapolate that every time Blizzard has an overwatch sales deal, if a sufficiently large number of high tier players enter the system (smurfs), they will inflate the skill metrics (whichever those metrics are) causing the Bell’s curve to redistribute SR. This will cause platinum players to go back to gold or not climbing despite getting better.
However, as I said we don’t know exactly how the SR is calculated so we can only speculate. That said, it makes more sense to me to design a system that will be invariant of the population size and simply attempt to place everyone on a Bell’s curve, rather than build a system that has to keep track of the total SR and adjust for inflation or recession.
*EDIT: It does not need to enter or exit the system
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Any developer wants to pitch in? I feel we are talking conspiracy theories about a system we don’t understand
Take a look at How Competitive Skill Rating Works (Season 13) and the references (most of which are developer statements). From this, you can reject most of what is being said in this thread.
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I just want to make the obligatory comment about how (pure) mathematicians ignore application. The mathematics was fine, it just had little relevance to the problem at hand.
Applied mathematics is what we need here. I’m a physicist, so sort of very applied mathematics. We’re kind of the opposite to pure mathematicians. We ignore the mathematics which doesn’t fit our situation where as pure mathematicians ignore the situations which don’t fit their mathematics. 
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Ok… 1, your example is a bell curve in a non-head to head scenerio… and actually highlights a bell curve that is opposite of the bell curve we see in OW. In OW there is more people on the top tail, then the bottom. After many years, inflation should be pushing everyone closer to the top, not still below the 2500 middle.
2.Bell curves go away when you have a flat win/loss in a head-head scenerio where the extremes of both ends only play each other and are unable to play the bottom
of the tier while also being in a 50% win scenerio.
At that point, the win/loss mechanic is used to spread people apart and differentiate who is better. Think of it like a tournament.
You have 8 people. A-A beats b. c, d
A, c, e, g win
b, d, f, h lose
Then round 2
A, E 2-0
b, c, g, f 1-1
d, h 0-2
round 3
a 3-0
b,e,g 2-1
c,d,f 1-2
h 0-3
Round 4 (rematches are 50%)
a,b,e 3-1
d,g, 2-2
c,f,h 1-3
As you can see… having a 50% win change handicaps and equally spreads people apart, not form a bell curve when you then turn around and have the ends of the bell curve face each other in a 50% chance to win.
The only way to form a bell curve is NOT to have 50% chance to win matchups… but then you run into the problem of Person “A” running undefeated to infinity because they are the best. It is the same thing you see in sports leagues… where when someone clearly is better… they rise to the top… while an equally sized tail appears on the other side.
However, OW doesn’t have equal tails. The bottom 1500 comprises of 8% of the population… whereas the top 1500 comprises 4% You have an additional 10% in the top 2000 Sr… where you get up to 30% in the bottom 2000. Then 60% in the middle 1000, which over half of those are in the lower 500.
Considering this bell curve is also the same over multiple seasons a good year apart makes it look very contrived and planned out. Especially when you consider that if it was natural, more of the population would trend toward the higher end of the competitive bell curve like you showed in the Marathon. Instead it is the opposite.
Also, notice that the bottom half of the bell curve has INCREASED. This leads credence to the alt accounts being added in and pushing the avg player lower as the new players are added in… The slots in diamond and above are finite by design as a percentage of the player base.
I did not say the matches themselves were rigged. It is also stated by the devs that not all the matches are equal, and that varience in SR gained even in diamond and above are due to variences in the the matchmaker viewing if someone is favored or not. They also said you will get put against tougher and tougher matches.
Now, the conspiracy theorists say that Bliz intentionally sets you up to lose a match. They say that games are unwinnable. That is just not true.
However, what I am saying is that when you win… and the game doesn’t think you belong there, the SR will bring you back down by giving you an adjustment. Favor status can also not be determined by SR… even in gold where pbsr can theoretically put your SR exactly where your MMR… that having a team with a higher SR then the enemy does not put you in the “favored” position all the time.
So there is no way to tell if the devs when they say “harder” opponents intend to say… oh, you climb so obviously they are better. Or, is it that they will test you if you can carry a group of similar people that are inflated against a team with a higher MMR but same SR.
Because everything you posted can be true, and everything that I said can be true, and match everything the devs have said.
Somewhere along the line in both cases, SR has to play a role in the matchmaking, otherwise the number fails to have meaning.
They have to artificially fix the SR number so it is relevant. If the computer thinks you are bad, it WILL make the SR find a way to get to the MMR. It is harder now for the system to do that in 3k, which is what decay is mainly their for… and why once you hit diamond it is more about how much you play until you hit GM.
Even in your 3k analysis, you mentioned a variable that your couldn’t attribute to anything other than the MMR which you separated from Hidden SR.
I think what they did with the non-pbsr 3k+ was to tie MMR closer to the SR… like MMR moved faster with wins over performance like it is at the lower ranks.
But when they did that, they showed how much favored and non-favored status has such little effect on SR in lower ranks. IF that is really what the variable is… We won’t know until they actually show us if we are favored to win or not.
What I DO know… is that based on my data I collected from s12, that SR gains and losses are NOT tied to the displayed team SRs in low gold. There is no correlation at all. This leads me to assume that favored and not favored status also is not accurate at 3k and above.
Want to know the best thing about this thread?
Nobody is being toxic and saying “git gud” because you’ve actually mathematically proved that the SR system is inherently de-ranking everybody, and that those who climb are statistical anomalies.
Nobody can argue with sound mathematics… it is the universal language. I too was a mathematics PhD student (graduated).
The fact that you have outlined a valid proof that Activision’s/Blizzard competitive design has de-ranking in its design makes me warm and fuzzy inside. I think the design choice for this system was purposeful… de-rank everyone (or make it nearly impossible to rank up) until they get fed up and just buy a new account.
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What definition are you using for bell curve? If you contrive a strict 50% win percentage for each game (or flip of the coin) you get the binomial distribution:
https://support.minitab.com/en-us/minitab-express/1/binomialdistribution_def.png
from 404 - Minitab
This is pretty bell like.
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These details, the ones you spoke of, are absolutely possible. Since we can’t see MMR, we cannot know for sure either way-- its important to note this.
However, let’s assume you’re right. What then? Well… If SR is to follow MMR, then consider how matches are formed: the team with the higher total MMR should be favored to win, probabilisticly, right? Yet, if the two teams SR is relatively equal, then you’re saying that they will receive MORE SR for the win than for a loss? This is ezclap if I’ve ever heard it. The team favored to win will get more for winning, think about this for a second.
This is why I reject this theory. It contradicts what Scott Mercer has said in many Q&As where he said the match maker factors in the probability of a win and uses this to decide what was, or wasn’t, an “upset” victory for the purposes of giving, or taking, SR. It rewards unlikely victories, punishes unlikely defeats. I then assume MMR is used in establishing this probability which seems like a reasonable assumption.
Maybe Blizzard is just saying what, in context, sounds fair, even when they contradict one another. Maybe your ‘SR follows MMR’ theory is right, after all. Or maybe Blizzard is doing neither of these things and simply saying what they think we want to hear. We’ll never fully know.