There is no reason for MMR

Maybe I misinterpreted it but I was under the impression that your MMR always goes up after a win and down after a loss but the amount was a complex calculation.

A quote from Jeff Kaplan regarding MMR:

In Overwatch, whether your MMR goes up or down is contingent on winning or losing.

Link:

EDIT:

It’s a long post so I’ll copy that whole paragraph so people don’t have to search for it.

In Overwatch, whether your MMR goes up or down is contingent on winning or losing. But there are a number of factors that determine how much that rating goes up or down. For example, what map you’re playing on and whether you were attacking or defending is factored in. We know the win rates on attack/defend on all of the maps and we normalize accordingly. Not all wins and losses are equal. We also look at your individual performance on each of the heroes you played during the match. Everyone has better and worse heroes and we have tons of data showing us what performance levels should be like on those heroes. We also look at your opponents and whether or not their matchmaking rating is higher or lower than yours. These are just a few of the things that are considered when determining how your skill should go up or down. At no point in MMR calculations do we look at your win/loss ratio and win/loss ratio is never used to determine who to match you with or against. We are not trying to drive your win/loss percentage toward a certain number (although the fact that so many people are at 50% win rates makes us extremely happy). All the system does when it comes to matching on skill is attempt to match you with people of a similar number.

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BTW guys OP is just a troll who just keeps making this thread daily, look at his post history lmao

Please dont make assumptions when you dont understand how mmr and sr works.

Isn’t it way simpler to assume that SR is a mapping of MMR to a simple integer format rather than some nefarious system meant to keep the noobs down?

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I would say that MMR is just mechanical skill without outside interefence. It doesnt care about leavers, trolls, throwers and just all kind of social aspects in matches. Its just pure skill. SR is on other hand number affected by many things.

You can for example be highly skilled player having high mmr but if you act like moron and you are very toxic in games, your sr will be much lower.

Well, Kaawumba literally has to post this every season, this post containing everything Blizzard has officially ever said about comp and matchmaking. This includes posts that flat out state that SR isn’t used at all in matchmaking (only your MMR), and Jeff’s statement about MMR working the same way SR does and that unless you’re decayed, your SR is more or less your MMR.

And then people don’t want to believe it, and would rather believe posts about handicapping or forced wins/losses in which those posts have nothing but BS content.

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If sr is not used in matchmaking why have both teams ±same SR on initial screen?

SR is definitely used in matchmaking.

Perhaps you should take your own advice?

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What do you mean, i am pretty sure i know how it works.

Nobody knows how MMR works because Blizzard won’t tell us. And you’re wrong about SR being used in matchmaking, look at decay for example. MMR stands for matchmaker rating so why would they need to use SR?

I have played over 8800 competitive games and played on several alt accounts in different ranks so i have pretty good picture how it works. Sure, i dont know everything but I know a lot. I know Kaawumba work. While i agree with most of stuff in his great topic about competitive i definitely dont agree with some things. Why? Because my experience showed me something different and i did many experiments myself.

As I said, matchmaking definitely works with SR by my experience playing on alts in lower ranks than my elo. Matchmaking works with player levels too, mostly with balancing lower level accounts on both teams. It works with MMR too definitely, but mostly for unranked/unplaced and decayed accounts.

My elo is platinum and practicaly every game both teams have same SR. Why would matchmaker try to balance teams by SR if he works with mmr as some people think, it doesnt make any sense. I had games where it was clearly one sided. Teams had ± same sr but players were much better than my team including me overal. How is that possible if matchmaker is working with mmr? On other hand i had wininng streaks in lower ranks dominated every single game with different roles and heroes while i didnt see anyone on enemy teams to be better than his elo to compensate for my mmr. There is just too many things which support my version and not the version of matchmaker using just mmr to balance games.

It could be that SR actually isn’t used in matchmaking, but MMR so closely relates to SR (with the exception of decay) that it appears as though SR is used.

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You’re looking at it the wrong way. The MMR is accurate and SR is more of an approximately value which could be inaccurate but more then often is rather close to the MMR value.

The matches are based off the MMR, not the SR.

Good point actualy, but i still think think it works with sr too. I just had too many games with people playing on low ranked accounts while playing as much higher ranked and not being matched with enemy team having some kind of opposition to that. When you will play on new account you can often see one team having two 2x level newbies while enemy team have 2 low lvl smurfs on new accounts. I had plenty of games like that. I remember one where i had 4 low lvl account with silver/gold stats on their accounts and enemy had 4 smurfs with diamond+ stats on their profiles.

Decayed accounts proves SR is irrelevent.

Really? I dont have much experience from Diamond but when i was doing my placement with alt where i mained mei my MMR/SR was low/mid diamond and i was consistently placed in games with decayed accounts from Master even grandmaster. If matchmaker is working with mmr only, this should not happen, right? I mean i can occasionaly see higher individuals in plat games but not consistently a lot of them in majority of my games like i had in dia elo.

If you’re low diamond getting matched with ex-M/GM, they didn’t (just) decay, they dropped rank to low diamond the normal way.

A 4500 player decaying to 3000 will still be matched with ~4500 players. They will never be matched with true 3000 players unless it’s some freak low-population-time accident.

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You can easily keep that one part of it to account for decay and ditch everything else about it.

This is more of a bullet point as to why decay anywhere under the top 500 is stupid to begin with. If someone does not have the skill to get more SR than someone that hasn’t played in a week, does that person really deserve top 500? All decay does is STOP players with less interest in the game from playing comp at all, because as soon as our placements are done, decay will start, so we just hold our placements until the end of the season so we don’t decay a ludicrous amount.

As everyone else mentioned after you posted this, decay proves that SR isn’t used at all. Jeff Kaplan specifically stated that with the exception of decay, your SR and MMR are “closely linked”. His wording sucks, but I interpreted it to mean that your SR is translated from your MMR because MMR isn’t a human-readable number. The case where you see it happen is a GM game where everyone in the game is above 4300 except for one player at 3000 (who decayed from 4500) because that person still has the MMR-equivalent of SR 4500.

The following Stylosa video isn’t proof of anything, but Stylosa mentioned internal conversations with Blizzard employees about the matchmaker, and how MMR is a horrifically long number: