What I don't get about "forced losses"

I’m not sure what you are complaining about. Of course groups of platinum+silver players will have an “average MMR” in or near the gold range, and will usually be put into games around gold. What else would you expect or want?

I guarantee this is just a misunderstanding of probability and statistics. Let’s say I flip a coin repeatedly, and look at the count of heads or tails for the last 10 throws. You’ll see it cycle between having more heads, or more tails.

You have a binary outcome, whether your team or the enemy team is higher. And it’s random. So of course you’ll alternate (or cycle) between the two possible outcomes. I’m not trying to be condescending, but people mistakenly find patterns in completely random events all the time. It’s a well known phenomenon. Actually write down all the SRs for 20 games if you want, and with proper analysis you’ll immediately see there is no non-random “cycle” of harder/easier opponents.

You’ve discovered:

  1. You play better on your mains, and thus tend to win more.
  2. The basic existence of tilting and hot streaks that exist in every video game, and even real sports.

Do you know anything about sports? Do you know how players all refuse to speak to a pitcher who is currently throwing a no-hitter? Do you think that happens because they are given easier batting opponents? Of course not. Humans are complex psychological creatures. Success feeds our confidence and success further.

The same is true in reverse. Professional atheletes have bad games and slumps. In the video game world it’s usually called “tilting”. Nothing makes you tilt more than struggling and losing (like you are likely to do if you flex to heroes you are bad at). This is why EVERY game ever has had people go on huge 20+ game losing streaks, and why the common advice to “take a break” after a few loses is spread around.

A final, more humurous, point against what you are saying. If you read this forum with any regularity I’m sure you’ve seen Cuthbert’s “Handicapped MMR” threads. He, and the people who agree with him, claim the exact OPPOSITE of what you say. You say playing well means the game gives you easy matches to get you up where you should be. He says playing well makes the game “balance you out” by giving you harder opponents. Who is right? Neither. It just shows how neither of these conspiracy theories are formed from any actual testing, and y’all both experience confirmation bias on your own ideas while playing.

The vast majority of the time a stomped match has nothing to do with any match maker problems. Remember old KotH when it was best of 5? You know how many games I played where one side got STOMPED for two rounds, than reverse swept? Currently you’d just end the match as a loss as say “what an imbalanced match” but they weren’t imbalanced at all.

Small things, sometimes random, can add up to make big differences in outcomes during a game. People don’t realize how close most games are. One of my last games the other team finishes Hanamura with 4 minutes left, pretty good attack right? Except they barely got point A in overtime, after never touching it. If one fight went slightly worse for them, they end without even 1 tick. Instead, my team is tilted over our defense is crumbling, and people started fighting, leading towards terrible play and a loss. The game was easily within our ability to win, but small things caused this disparate outcome.


Phew I’ve rambled a lot. Point still remains. No such things as “forced losses”.

He actually did this. Used the moving average with graph smoothing and then called it “cycling”. If you removed the average and the smoothing it’s just a bunch of random jumps to and fro. How Competitive Skill Rating Works (Season 11) - #24 by Oldphardt-2154

No man…it’s the ALIENS!

I’m a bit surprised and saddened that I was able to describe all of those conspiracy theories as quickly as I did.

I should play more.

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You know, why I don’t believe in random nature of team SR difference change? Because there are no long streaks. There are no long streaks in my data, there are no streaks in Kaawumba’s data regarding 3000+ players. It’s obviously controlled in some manner. If it would be totally random, we would see long streaks in one direction. But there are none.
Streaks are present in SR movement (as it should be in case of random events).

If you, or FriendlyFire are proficient in statistics and math, maybe you could help with interpreting the results of spectral analysis I did on my season 11 team SR difference data. I would also appreciate Kaawumba’s opinion.
Here is the spectral analysis result:

https://imgur.com/a/SXq2kgt

Do you have more data than the 68 games? He gave his opinion, which was that there wasn’t enough good data to determine anything one way or the other.

I’m simply pointing out that the claim make is just, like, your opinion man. It may look like a cycle to you, but it doesn’t look like one to me, and there’s not enough data to say objectively one way or another.

  1. 25 games completed this season. I am 13 to 12. Of the 12 losses, 3 were due to Leavers and 2 due to throwers. So far no enemy Leavers and no enemy throwers I am aware of. So in theory I’ve been robbed of circa 125 SR already this season.

I’ve won games at 2500 before. I’ve regularly held 2350 for 4 seasons. But I crutches on my team’s dps being solid.

When I lose games fairly, is mainly due to being massively out dpsed. Enemy Pharah that no one can hit, etc. Team Sombra that doesn’t get kills and EMPS when we’re all dead at spawn, etc.

As a support I can’t output enough raw damage to carry poor dps. When I climbed from 1700 to 2350 with 65% win rate in season 4, was one tricking Torb.

If I want to dps my way up, need to learn a new carry hero.

  1. My natural Sr is presumably 1800 as that’s where I’m at. I could get a free alt account and likely place 500 SR higher no problem.
    My performance depends on what team mates I get. I can stay alive and support adequately vs. 2.8k to 3k enemies when in qp with my 3.9k dps friend. Conversely I imagine I can lose games at 1.5k Sr if my dps are rotten.
    I played 5 games of 2.4k Sr last season. Won 3 and drew 2.

What is my real Sr? Who knows?

It’s 184 games now in season 11

I took a quick look…there’s some pretty long streaks in there, red and green. 11 (or 9, you skipped one), 7, 8…seems normal for 189 instances but I’m just looking on my phone real quick.

Was I looking in the wrong place?

Look at teams sr difference graph

I guess I was looking right then.

11 is a pretty long streak for 189 games. Even a streak of 9 would only occur in 1 of every 6 simulations of 189 coin flips. Edit…I see now it’s 184…stupid phone.

What exactly are you expecting?

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Can you interpret the spectral analysis results?

No. I’ve used spectrum analyzers in chemistry and radio applications…I’m not familiar with any claims to analyze 184 bits of noise. From what I know it looks just like noise but zoomed in to max resolution. Normal spectral analysis has much, much more resolution and any non-noise signal shows a definite peak.

But I want to stress this application isn’t one I’m familiar with.

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Throwers and smurfs are two sides of the same coin. I think that’s the biggest problem with the matchmaker – it doesn’t know what to do with someone who dominates half the matches, and stinks the other half. It pees in the data pool to the point that we’re all swimming in green water.

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You don’t know how a matchmaker could keep track of someone that has left a large number of games? Or notice when a player is playing well above the skill level at a certain rank? Or notice when a player has an unusually low win percentage? I mean…this isn’t hard to figure out.

This would be true if no one ever improved at the game…lol.

Of course, as people get better, they expect to climb ranks…(duh?)

This is actually what their system does.

They give each player a hidden MMR, which is based more on personal performance. SR gains/losses are adjusted according to where your MMR is. That is to say, if your MMR is higher than your SR, you will gain more for a win and lose less for a loss. (it’s also worth noting that your MMR only goes up on a win and down on a loss).

It’s actually a really well designed system. It encourages team play and winning games, while at the same time recognizing that if a player is performing extremely well, he should rank up.

This is another thing worth noting.

I see a lot of these posts about “10 game lose streaks” etc etc, and I usually respond with, “well, what were you doing during those lose streaks? Playing different characters? Playing characters unfit for certain maps? Could you maybe have switched off your one trick to a better fitting character for your composition? Etc. etc.”

Everyone is so quick to look to their teammates, and not to look at what THEY were doing during those streaks.

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You mistook my point. I’ll try to clarify.

It COULD have been the case that they started everyone’s SR far below where they actually belonged. They IN FACT used to do this. I forget what season it was but your initial placements would start your SR below what was accurate and be treated as if they were decayed. They admitted this when they stopped doing it. What I’m saying is that it could be designed so that if a person didn’t improve, they would still go up in SR.

Not that it’s built in a way that assumes no one improves. That would be stupid. That’s why I put “failure” in quotation marks and specified that no one actually expects that, it’s just a design philosophy. The idea is that if someone doesn’t improve no movement should happen, not even after one game.

There are people, believe it or not, that feel that they should go up in SR without improvement and some that think it should be based on number of wins rather than being a ranking. The system could be designed that way, but SR would no longer be coupled with skill at all.

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It does all these things. It’s that the response isn’t to put them on your team to make you lose. The response is to move them to a more appropriate rank in the exact same manner someone who is doing it in a non-malicious way would. There’s no discernable difference between someone Alt+F4ing and losing their internet, no discernable difference between a overranked player and a thrower, and no discernable difference between an underranked player and a smurf.

The system treats them all equally because it can’t tell the difference. Even WE can’t really tell the difference. Especially with DCs. You’ve never played horrible in a game? You’ve never just gone nuts for a game?

The statement he’s making is that it can’t track a bad actor vs a normal player being bad. See Version 5 in post 4. If Blizzard isn’t forcing the loss then stop calling it a “forced loss”, that’s not what it means.

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I started a thread on matchmaker. Basic gist was that when I had a 3.9k smurf on my team (On 2.5k alt) then our games at 2.2k got very hard. Reasons include:

  1. Enemy had their own smurf
  2. Enemy team very well organised, never trickling and attacking in wave after wave of 6 .
  3. Terrible team mates that wouldn’t be out of place in bronze (eg, Zen not using his orbs).

System certainly recognises what players have a high MMR vs. their SR and as match maker balances based on MMR, then opposition ramps up, or team mates ramp down to make match as even as possible.

My point is that on my main, where I ONLY play Tracer/Genji/Zarya, I’ll just take the loss when I’m getting countered. Soldier on high ground and I’m playing tank (Zarya)? Quick swap to DVA and I could shut him down, but I know I’m not good at DVA so even though I might win THAT game, I’d drag my MMR down.

Same with when I’m on DPS. Getting wrecked by Pharah? I do what I can as Tracer (I can one clip her out of the sky without a Mercy pocket) but otherwise if nobody goes hitscan, I just take the loss. I’m plenty competent with hitscan, I’ve been playing FPS games for literally 20 years, but my APM with McCree/Soldier/Widow isn’t as high as Tracer/Genji so I take the loss now so the matchmaker gives me games I’m more likely to win later.

I’ve tested these theories on multiple accounts for 10+ seasons and it rings true. Play heros you’re bad at = drags your MMR down and the matchmaker will give you unwinnable games later. Put another way, if you’re a diamond Hanzo, but a plat McCree, playing McCree is going to cause the matchmaker to give you games designed to bring you to platinum.

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I don’t want to be mean but I don’t even know how to respond to this. All the time, people post how their loss streaks prove the system is rigged. Here is just one of many examples:

This forum is bad for my mental health. Of the last three threads I’ve looked into, one says their streaks prove a rigged system, and another has someone saying the lack of streaks prove the system is rigged.

What can you do when EVERY possible outcome of a series of matches is proof they were rigged to someone?

Look at the bottom right graph. That’s the spectral decomposition, basically representing the “strength” of a specific frequency if you broke down the original signal as a sum of cycles.

Long story short: yours follows the trend of a random walk. Because I don’t to spend time doing the work to show you, here is one example of someone who did:

https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/40899/creation-of-brownian-noise-as-random-walk

See how it’s the same basic exponential curve down. His confusion is people typically plot frequency data on a log scale, not linear, which would make that exponential decay look linear. E.g:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise#/media/File:Brown_noise_spectrum.svg

I appreciate the data, and you could probably see more if you adjusted the scale to cut off the last 2/3rds. I also don’t think your rank is a PERFECT random walk by any means, because obviously your play is impacted by the result of previous games. But if there was some “cycle”, you would see a spike on that line at the cycles frequency.

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Thanks for the explanation.
As for peaks, can values at .35, .95 and 2.7 on the periodogram be considered peaks? Or they should be far more distinctive from other values?

33% or something like that