The "Git Gud" Mentality

Competitive Discussion
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So, I have seen it said a lot. And it makes sense.
Let me explain…
You say that the match maker groups you with “people of your own skill level”
yet that is demonstrably false in most cases, but that is not the topic.
Let us say that they group you with people of your own skill level.
That means you should have a perfect 50/50 chance of winning. You don’t, but go with the idea.
So you win. What does that mean? It is supposed to mean that you are better than your opponent. You gain some SR, your MMR changes a bit, and you climb.
So that means you are “gitin’ gudder”
But that would mean that when you lose, you suddenly got “badder” than you were the last match, or that the enemy team “got gudderer” than you did.

So let us say that you started out in Sub 500 SR. And you slog your way through that, then trudge you way through Bronze, and Silver and Gold, and Plat…But you just can’t get into Diamond. According to the current logic, and the way people think the system works is that you are either going to be hard-stuck in Plat, or you will climb. Because that logic from earlier means that you are in Plat because you deserve to be there. You worked for it, so now Plat is your reward. Your home.
So why do you derank then? Did you suddenly become a worse player? No.
Did you suddenly forget how your left-click works? No.
Nothing you are doing is any better or worse than what you did to climb up to Plat. Your performance is just as stellar as before. So why can you not get into Diamond. The general logic is that you need to “git gud” but you already did. Afterall, how else would you have gotten to Plat?
But what if you fall down. You go to mid Plat, to Gold, to low Gold, Silver, low Silver…Using the same logic as before, you already “got gud” and climbed to plat, so you should stay there until you get better, right? If you were able to get there in the first place, you should never be able to get de-ranked because Gold would be a cakewalk for you, and you would just climb back into Plat. So how did you end up back in Silver? Again, using the same logic, if you fell back in Silver, you belong there. But you climbed up to Plat, so you deserve to be there as well.
How do you belong in Silver and need to “git gud” but you climb into Plat and you are called a crappy player?

How can you deserve to be in Silver and Plat? How can you be hardstuck in Plat, but then turn around and be hardstuck in Silver?

The answer is that you can’t. You belong in Plat, because you climbed your way up there. You worked your butt off, you watched all those videos, you learned everything you can, you worked on your positioning and call-outs. You work with your team and communicate. You took all the advice of the pros and top-end players, and you ran with it. You got to Plat…But Blizzard loves you having a 50% win-rate, so guess what happens? Oh, but wait, that does not exist.
The system is flawless and perfect and you belong in whatever rank you go to, despite your work in much higher ranks.
Nevermind that pro players, and YouTubers (?), and people in Diamond to GM all say that there are some pretty messed up issues with the rank system…

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The simple fact is that the matchmaker does a horrible job at estimating your skill because the people who programmed the matchmaker are not good at gaming, so how would they know how to estimate skill?

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There’s a reason why guess my SR is a thing. It’s because SR is fairly accurate and you can generally tell what ballpark someone is in with a mere 9 second highlight.

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Why do you make so many topics? Dont you feel like it crosses over into spamming/trolling?

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I’ve been flagging his tilt posts, hopefully someone does something about it lol.

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You made some good points and I would love to talk about this more. I don’t get some things though, If you dropped to silver from plat then something is wrong with your gameplay, no? I have experienced it where I climbed to plat then dropped back to 2100 (happened to me recently) in a day from 2600. And it has happened a lot. I KNEW for a fact that my performance was worse comparing the things I was able to do on my way UP to plat and DOWN to gold (or other ranks because the crazy drop happened more than once) and I worked to improve it.
Remember when I dropped to 2100? I didn’t just try to get back to what I was doing (having good aim and diving on lucio) because at the time I didn’t care about the rank, but I mostly cared about improving myself so I could be like funnyastro, with healing so people would never get on vc to complain, with ults so fast enemy lucios would be perplexed as to how I got it so quick, and with aim that would finish supports easily for the teamfight. I did multiple things in and outside of the game to do it but I did it and got to 2900 in 2 days (the weekend) from 2100. I then (this week) started playing and got to 2980 but mostly off of luck from those games because my skill had gone down and was less consistant, because I had wrapped my head so hard around “a few more games and I’ll be diamond”. It didn’t work and I dropped to 2800 then eventually in the 2700s, slowly but surely. I noticed I was playing a bad, and even went to an FFA on lucio and noticed my aim was lacking. So what I did was I went BACK to no crosshair as I had done during the climb from 2100 and tried to focus more on my role in the game so my game sense would not be trash and I got to diamond while doing that, without thinking about getting into diamond that day specifically (today). In fact, with every rank I’ve climbed to I didn’t even notice It was my last game until that rank, until after the game (and as a result skipped over all the promotions).
Maybe I don’t have this cursed “hardstuck” account that people preach about with FORCED loss streaks, (although back when I played paladins a bit more casually but still IN IT TO WIN IT I did have these lose and win streaks almost just switching back and forth and I thought it was systematic, but I kinda understand that it was more of the role I had on that character I played was not fully understood by me, and even though I had good mechanics on them, I was not doing enough to carry). I understand that when wins/loses seem out of control to me, it is because I am doing something wrong, well, not nessecarily wrong because people in most ranks are doing something wrong, more mostly I am not doing ENOUGH to give my team an edge. Because that is what ranks are about. If you are SO good that you make the game unfair for the enemy team, you are better than your rank and you go higher so you can be in games where it isn’t too easy, and they can be in games without players who are too good for them.

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I love the ops thought process. I swear no sarcasm here. Great post

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Except they sometimes get it wrong even in the order of 500-1000 SR so what’s your point then?

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Dude… if I was in Silver and played Tracer, Zen, or Zarya regardless of team composition I would be Platinum within a week, likely less. If you can’t get one of your accounts out of Silver it’s on you and the heroes you pick.

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Most solo-play ranking systems (such as Elo and MS TrueSkill) are based on win ratio. You’re either finding the correct win conditions and winning, and to what degree. They don’t try and read too far into the game mechanics involved in edging out a win.

While I think this matchmaking system is trash, you could be forgiven by not being a serious gamer but a really good e.g. statistician or reverse game theorist - and design very relevant protocols.

Of course Overwatch isn’t solo-play. That said, I think we have too much bloat in the analytics - all the performance-based crap that un-favourably scores clutch plays and overly discounts utility/second (e.g. area denial or coverage, mei or hybrid players that don’t get medals but somehow their presence converts into decent win % conditions, etc).

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I tend to agree here. There are a lot of conditions that carry and ladder better. Stack up, play carry heroes, don’t tilt, settle for small daily gains, dodge awfuls, etc.

But that isn’t how it -ought- to be. A well-designed ranking system doesn’t strongly bias towards a narrow range of roles or hero pools. There should be near equal opportunities. But I digress.

Also, the ‘ladder mobility’ you describe is different for different account histories. A new burner account can zoom up and down with ease - that is where most of the “bronze to GM” streams come from. But if you took an account with hundreds of hours of bronze and tried to solo queue boost it up, it would take much longer for the matchmaker to detect and reward the sudden regime change.

There are long-run assymptotics at play and I personally think there is too much ‘lock-in’.

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This isn’t the case.

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Do we know this for sure? Blizz is rather silent on how the matchmaker actually works. Everything else is pretty much anecdotal.

Edit: Look how sensitive a (new) account’s placement is based on initial conditions, and how locked-in it becomes subsequently between seasons. Its awful. If we can deduce anything its that placements hardly matter - and that is the canary in the coal mine for bad ranking design.

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These are the heroes I’m best with. I’d probably be stuck in Silver if I played Mercy, I’m that bad with her. The point is to get good and play what you’re good with, not that specific heroes result in automagic climbing. There are people who can one-trick Mercy to Top 500 - that’s not me.

I 100% guarantee that I could take any “hard stuck” Silver account and get it to Platinum within a week. (no, that’s not an offer to boost.)

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But could you take the same account and, upon a fresh season, do 10 placements and get it to e.g. plat? Likely not. Thats lock-in.

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They’re silent because they’ve already explained how it works and don’t bother to re-explain every time someone questions it. It uses SR to match, and tries to match equally sized teams. Nothing else.

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If an account was Silver one season and Platinum the next, that would likely indicate a sold or boosted account. You clearly don’t trust the system, but that doesn’t mean it’s untrustworthy - it just means that you don’t trust it for reasons.

It’s not lock-in, it’s the player’s inability to improve, likely due to blaming external factors and not working on self-improvement.

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Thats not what my research turned up. It uses pbsr viz. mmr to match. The sr is supposed to be the measure of where you currently stand on the ladder - but they leave it to 3rd party tracking sites to attempt to extrapolate what sr means in terms of % playerbase (which ends up being noisy af because of all the closed profiles and smurfs).

They don’t publish their algorithm and they don’t publish even just the top 2 or 3 moment parameters of their distribution. Knowing the kind of mean, variance, and skew would be a huge step towards understanding what kind of skill deltas we’re really dealing with.

A strong % of matches away from the mean (of the entire ladder) have loose sigmas to keep queue times short. For instance, you’ll have a match being played at live 800sr between 12 players, where the lowest skilled player averages 1400 mmr, and the highest trends around 3400 mmr. Its a huge variation (+/- 2000) at a huge offset (+600) from what you’re labeling (800).

It needs to go.

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The forums are full of anecdotal evidence that “proves” your evidence-free point. You believe what you’re going to. ^^

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You’re not understanding. matchmaking != sr. I wrote about pbsr, mmr, sr. Thats what the forums are full of. Thats what the devs have talked about. Its not just about sr and equally sized teams…lol. And my other points are based on statistical rigour. Anecdotal evidence is not needed.

And I’m not talking about ‘trust’ in the matchmaking system. I’m talking about ‘fairness’ in terms of getting a reliably fair match, a non ‘git gud’ gameplay experience that is nonetheless competitive, ranked, and offers legitimate ease of progression to your correct rank.

It doesn’t give us that, objectively. And they have not published what we need to critique it properly, objectively.

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