The flawed opinion on handicapping

[Vurg-1970]

@McCringe-1673

Handicapping and rigging is when the matchmaker uses hidden MMR in order to balance a match. If it used average SR instead, then SR would be a more accurate measurement of skill than it is current

So your only complaint is that it’s Hidden?

I mean, the SR of all 11 other people in the game is allowed to be hidden from you based on their own settings. The only thing you are likely to see is SR Tier (Gold, Plat, etc).

@McCringe-1673

Both of these are incorrect.

My statements are based upon the statement of developers for WHY they hide MMR. Please read the guide for all the provided evidence of those statements. Summarized here:

@Kaawumba-1133

The real purpose of MMR is to provide Blizzard’s absolute best estimate of each player’s ability, while SR is to give a friendly indication of rank to players, as well as penalizing for DCs (without affecting matchmaking), and to prevent high ranked players from getting rewards while only playing five games a season.

@McCringe-1673

On a new account you can either gain or lose 100 SR on your first game after placements.

I’ve seen Samito on game 6 go from 3140 to 3249, so this is true. His average SR gained in 5 placements was 158. This is information I have reviewed since my previous post.

Unranked to GM DPS FLANKER ONLY IN ONE SITTING PLACEMENTS PART 1

This does suggest that my argument about brand new accounts is incorrect, as there are already mechanisms that allow SR to move rapidly.

This means that we’re just left with Leaver Penalties, SR Decay, and concern about performance based adjustments being abused for reasons that MMR is separate and hidden from SR.

@Vurg-1970

It would take much much longer for people to get into the games where they belong when they are on a new account.

@Kaawumba-1133

Currently, streak bonuses exist, but in a more limited form, and are quite difficult to trigger. The current design is much less likely to throw people out of their rank incorrectly, while still allowing accelerated motion for people that really don’t belong there.

@McCringe-1673

It is fairly accurate, but the system could still be improved greatly.

A system being able to be improved does not mean that replacing MMR with SR would be one of those improvements. If there was exactly the same Matchmaker, but that Matchmaker used SR instead of MMR, only in the edge cases would match quality be impacted at all.

@McCringe-1673

It is that it causes insane win/loss streaks and therefore expands your possible range of SR. I would assume this is deliberate to make players feel as if they are not stuck in a rank but it is artificial manipulation.

The matchmaker can do exactly what the developers say it does and there can still be streaks. Random chance is a sufficient explanation of that oscillation, and changing from MMR to SR would not impact that.

You genuinely feel that random chance is an insufficient explanation for fluctuations in SR?

@Kaawumba-1133

The game uses MMR to determine whether a match is fair, and attempts to match teams such that the game is fair (each team has a 50% chance of winning).

@Kaawumba-1133

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. This problem can be analyzed in depth, mathematically17,36.

@McCringe-1673

Most games are already stomps anyway. At least my solution will create less stomps over time due to SR becoming more accurate than it is currently.

Do you have a spreadsheet to share where you’ve recorded information showing that most of your games are stomps? If you don’t even have that, then why would we argue about it?

What exactly is your solution? You seem to be banking quite a bit on the problem that MMR is hidden.

@McCringe-1673

Your skill should only be tested more as your SR goes up.

Basically, the “hardness” of the match is mostly determined by the randomness of the fact that 6 people are on a team that may or may not actually synergize with each other. It will also fluctuate an increasing amount based on how inaccurate your SR / MMR compared to your real skill. SR and MMR are just estimates of your skill, and when expressed accurately they would be expressed as a range to demonstrate a margin of error. If your SR / MMR is lower than your real skill, then matches should be on average a little easier. If your SR / MMR is higher than your real skill, then on average the matches will be harder.

It’s important to realize that the Matchmaker doesn’t need to succeed in every single match to be statistically accurate. Statistical accuracy comes from hundreds, even thousands of games of data averaged out over time.

You can’t look at individual games and complain about the matchmaker, you have to take a step back and evaluate the matchmaker across all your games over the course of a season. You also have to evaluate your own progress over a longer period of time as well.

@McCringe-1673

I think removal of MMR would make SR less volatile and that is the point. Instead of having a SR range of 1000 it should be 250 or 500. You wouldn’t get as many win/loss streaks and your SR wouldn’t move as much. You wouldn’t be able to peak as high as you do with MMR but you also wouldn’t be able to drop as low.

But why do you think that? I’m genuinely trying to understand. Why would the outcome be different if we used the other number in a pair of numbers that are intended to reflect the same knowledge except for the situations of Leaver Penalty and Decay?

I do not have an SR range of 1000. I do have an SR range of around 250. A range of 250 is basically a net difference of 10 games or so from high to low in the season. Are you trying to say you go for a streak of net 40 more losses than wins from your peak down to your season low, and then another streak where you have 40 more wins than losses to get back to that peak? (40 * 25 = 1000 SR where 25 is the average gain or loss per game rounded up from 24)

@McCringe-1673

Assuming of course that by the use of the word “fixing” you mean rigging. And by the word maximize you mean minimize.

Argument

Please try to help us understand what needs fixing, the method you suggest using to fix it, and why that would help.