What I don't get about "forced losses"

Welcome to conspiracy land. It’s best to just identify, report (literally and figuratively), and move on. You can’t convince someone that a conspiracy doesn’t exist because YOU then become an “actor” in the conspiracy. Just look at how many time Kaa and I (and probably you too) have been accused of being Blizzard employees. Kaa and I have been accused of being the SAME Blizzard employee.

We’re better off convincing people that hear these conspiracies but aren’t certain of them yet. The only way to do that, afaik, is to present the truth not as “what I know to be true” but as a reasonable alternative that just makes more sense. Don’t tell them they’re stupid. Only really super smart people think they’re stupid.

Take that kitten person, who thinks they get put in hard matches to bring their SR down to where it belongs. We already know the method by which SR is moved to match MMR, it’s the same as with decay. There’s no need to attempt to force a loss as that’s not guaranteed and it’s unnecessary.

No matter what the goal, directly intervening in matches to make them imbalanced to an extent that the match can be considered “forced” is the most inefficient way of doing things. Even if you accept that they wanted to “force” matches in some way, that’s not how they’d do it.

Some people will never understand that it’s harder to fake a moon landing than it is to just send some poor schmuck to the moon. The interminglings of millions of people playing OW is complicated and has strange results sometimes. Some people just can’t intellectually or emotionally handle that.

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2018 was a busy year for me. I see that I missed an interesting thread about Match Making Rating/algorithmic handicapping. Lot of thoughtful posts here.

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… necrobumped it?
why?

yeah posts had hella more thought in 2018 though

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Well I’ll tell you one thing, its commonly said on this forum that the Matchmaker tries to pair you so that you have a 50/50 probability of winning. If you were for example to have a 50/50% of winning each match, there would be no hard ceilings or hard floors in terms of your rank because every game would have the possibility of you winning/losing. You’d either stagnate in rank or fluctuate wildly but what would happen, it would be completely out of your control if we assume 50/50 probability since the probability is determined beforehand it already takes into account your skill into that equation.

The problem is, if the game is always setting the predicted probability of the match to 50/50 lets say you are better than the average person in your rank, there are still smurfs and people like you in your rank so instead of fighting a team of “true” gold ranked players your Fighting a team of 5 true golds and 1 person who shouldn’t be gold just like you (either because he’s in the same boat as you or a smurf), so there goes your advantage and you will never reach plat so long as your facing other plat skilled gold rank players. Of course people who smurf way out there rank wont have this issue only normal players a crappier smurfs.