It is not a rank reset. Please go play some other games before talking nonsense.
Why even have placement matches between seasons if they are just regular matches?
Did… did you not read what I just said? I literally just explained why we have placement matches despite them being pretty much akin to regular matches.
I do play other games. I ALSO linked the wikipedia page for Hearthstone (which you brought up yourself) that mentioned how they handle rank reset, which isn’t even a real reset. It just drops your rank a bit.
I also looked at both HoTS and League and neither of those do a real reset either. I then challenged you to show me a game where they do a true reset, but you conveniently ignored that as well.
If you can prove me wrong, I am more than happy to admit it but I have never seen a game with a respectable ladder system that does a hard, full reset between each season.
The primary reason we were given for ranks NOT to reset each season is that it would be unfair for low MMR players to play against high MMR players for a few games at the start of each season.
The reality today is that Bronze is infested with smurfs and trolls. So what are we really protecting Bronze players from?
The answer is that it isn’t to protect low MMR players. It’s to keep high MMR players on top with minimal requirements to maintain their prestigious ranks. This idea that you only have to climb once is absurd, especially as much of a big deal that these players make out of how easy it is to climb to the rank they deserve. If it’s that easy, you should have no problem doing that each season.
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This isn’t true. I tested the system myself and I ended one season where I rose to some-odd SR while genuinely trying, then the next season I deliberately teamed up with someone I knew was bad (he ended up bronze) and half-assed all of my matches—I borderline threw them—and only won 2/10 placements. My SR only went down ~100 points after basically throwing.
I later found out that this was already known for a good while. Wherever you end your last season is where you’ll get a ballpark placement of the next season. You can’t jump from bronze to GM regardless of how well you do through your placements (if you’ve already done a season, of course). Whether you’re intentionally deranking or trying to climb, there’s no way of avoiding a grind to get to the rank you want after you place the first time.
Well no one is really asking for hard reset but what we get in OW isn’t even a soft reset… it isn’t a reset at all. They are just regular matches disguised as placement matches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvoMLVX_yD4#t=01h01m50s Reference included for you.
It would NOT be a ‘few games at the start of the season’ it would be a problem that exists for MONTHS.
I never said you could go from Bronze to GM in placements? First off, they are only ten games to give the game a rough idea of how well you played. Ten games is nothing.
Second, you played with someone that was much lower than you. Even though your opponents were a lower rank and you were ‘better’ than them, it’s very well possible that the matchmaker still decided you had a less than 50% chance of winning those games anyway and thus doesn’t punish you as hard when you do lose. There is a LOT that goes into matchmaking and deciding how much SR you win or lose. It isn’t just “I’m a higher rank so I’ll drop like a sack of potatoes”
Then stop calling it a bloody reset. Call it something else for all I care. Call it a rank drop, call it an Artificial Waste of Time to Make Me Feel Better. But any kind of ‘real’ reset, whether it artificially drops you 500 SR or completely deletes your MMR will have absolutely no bearing on where you place.
Again, I refer you to Kawuumba’s post and the number of references he includes in there where the devs explain how the system actually works and why a reset of ANY kind is a waste of time for both programming and the players in the question. Here is the link again in case you conveniently skipped over it the first time.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/how-competitive-skill-rating-works-season-15/
Just because you don’t like the system we have doesn’t make it a bad system. I’m sorry, I have to stick with the devs on this issue. For one, they know far more about how the system works and how accurate it is than either you or me.
A reset in any game has never done anything to actually allow people to climb. It just gives them the warm and fuzzy feeling of seeing their SR or rank or whatever else its called climb back up to where they were previously.
Because they don’t know how SR works.
I call it as its name is - a reset
Me and many more. If most ppl don’t like it then that makes it bad.
Also the forums are exactly about that - giving an opinion.
That’s how you get your first rank placement.
That’s not what I was implying. My point was that if there was any level of a reset after a season, placements would have an impact greater than winning/losing ordinary comp games. Frankly, there’s not really much of a material difference between what happens when you win/lose placements after your first time vs winning/losing post-placement comp matches, and nothing you do in-game changes the outcome. You’re pretty much locked into your SR until you grind out and there’s no “reset” of any variety to boost the process.
Not true at all. If you can’t come up with a way to stratify the top 500 from the bottom 500 within 10 games, you’re simply not trying.
Matchmake placements based on W-L ratio, with a preference for players with a comparable number of games played in the season. After a game among 0-0 players, half will be 1-0, half will be 0-1. Group the winless with the winless, and the unbeaten with the unbeaten. You’ll be left with 3 pools…2-0, 1-1, 0-2.
You can continue this process out to 10 games. For someone to reach 10-0, they’d have to win 10 straight games against players who were all previously unbeaten. If someone goes 0-10, it means they lost to 10 teams of players where nobody had previously gotten a single win. Pretty hard to deny that anyone wouldn’t have earned their starting SR.
From there, continue as they do for new accounts. SR would have greater volatility until players played enough games to smooth out the curve. So if you got that troll guy on your team in placements, maybe that set you back…but if you’re melting faces in your SR you’ll climb quickly. Likewise if someone got a lucky draw on teammates initially, that won’t sustain indefinitely if they don’t belong in that SR.
That’s a 2-minute idea from a non-developer, and you’d pretty clearly be able to separate good players from bad ones within 10 games. At least enough to keep Top 500 from playing Bottom 500 within a game or two.
And too often those opinions are uniformed. There’s a difference between saying “The SR system is bad and here is why” than saying “I don’t like the SR system.”
You are offering nothing more than anecdotal hyperbole without presenting any kind of evidence. I have provided the best evidence I can, which is Kawuumba’s post which aggregates various sources (and LINKS those sources) into one easy to read place that already counters every argument you have made so far.
So yeah, you’re actually making me realize that I’m wasting my time here. You obviously just want to complain while hiding behind your ‘opinion’ claiming that it is just as valid as mine when you are offering no substantial evidence nor fact to support your claim.
I’m confused. Are you agreeing with me or disagreeing? Because it looks like you’re agreeing with me while trying to form it as a disagreement? The only time placements matter is if you have taken significant time away from the game and try to jump back into comp. The matchmaker will match you based on your ‘old’ MMR and if the matchmaker thinks you should have a 50% win rate but you have a lower actual win rate, you will drop. It might not be a lot, you might continue to drop after your placements because you’re still not good enough to maintain your old rank. But the placements can give you a rough idea whether or not you will climb, drop, or maintain your SR in your next handful of games (barring leavers and throwers, of course. Those are impossible to account for)
The situation you presented is a fallacy. You are trying to claim that ‘since grouped with someone much lower than me, I should have lost more than 100 SR’ but you are failing to take into account many more factors that the matchmaker looks at. The matchmaker could have easily decided that each of your 10 games you only had a 40% chance of winning. If that was the case, then you really wouldn’t lose all the much SR. If the matchmaker had decided that you had a 60% chance of winning each of those ten games, you would have lost much more than 100. No one can say for certain because we don’t know exactly how the matchmaker decides what your win % chance should be but we know enough to say this is why it appeared useless to you.
You’re not locked into anything. The game doesn’t force you into anything. If you are not improving at a consistent, steady rate you will stop climbing. People that think they have been hardlocked for X number of seasons are either not playing enough in the first place, or are not playing correctly to improve. It takes an average of 14 hours a week to show consistent, steady improvement. And that’s not 14 hours of waiting until Sunday and grinding it all out. That’s 14 hours of playing games, on top of recording them then looking back to figure out wtf you were doing wrong and taking active steps to correct it, not just playing the game without thinking.
And that system would work perfectly if this happened:
Blizzard reset MMR to 0.
EVERYONE PLAYS 50 GAMES
Only then would it even out in a reasonable amount of time. But in reality, that’s not what happens. People take time off and come back. People play a game here or there. People play their placements at ALL times during a season (A few seasons ago I didn’t do my placements until the last week, and there were STILL other people doing their placements with me). Because of the inconsistency of all that, that is why the problem would persist for months.
Ultimately, all you are doing is destroying the quality of matches for a length of time only to end up exactly where we are right now. You have achieved nothing.
And that’s a 1-minute idea from a non-developer backed up by the words of Scott Mercer.
Translation: I like my rank the way it is, and don’t want it changed.
Presumably, you’re in a high-end SR. As much trash as high-end players talk about how accurate the system is and how easily they climb to their true rank, there should be no concerns.
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I’m mid plat. I started this game in sub-bronze (you know, below 1k where they don’t even give you the honor of seeing wtf your actual SR is) and have climbed to this position over the course of 15 seasons. I am not a great player. I am a player that is barely above average at BEST.
Of course I like my rank, because I’ve earned it. But I also don’t want to see comp completely ruined by a reset just because some people “feel” they should be higher without putting in the effort to actually climb the ladder.
Edit: Don’t get me wrong. At no point have I ever said the system is perfect. In fact, multiple times in the thread I’ve said that it is still flawed. But it is far better than what you are proposing. THAT is why I am so against your suggestions. Not because the system is ‘perfect’ but because it’s still a hundred times better than the situation we would be in if a full reset was performed.
As someone who genuinely climbed from Bronze to GM I can understand why.
When you first do your placement matches when you’re new to the game you get put at an SR that you belong at for your current skill. After time you start to improve and climbing from where you placed is… a chore. In season 5 (my first season), I placed 1100 SR. I finished Season 5 at 2500 after 160 hours of playing (150 hours on Lucio).
That’s a lot of time to put into climbing and improving.
It would’ve been far far easier for me to create a new account and re-do my placement matches than climb to Plat that way. But I’m stubborn. So I practiced more and made it to Diamond in Season 7. Once again, it would’ve been easier for me to make a new account and re-do my placements than actually put in 53 hours in Season 7 to Climb.
Season 9 I made it to Masters after another 50 hours.
Season 11, GM, after you guessed it, another 50ish hours.
An MMR/SR reset would allow those who genuinely improved to re-do their placements and get placed where they belong currently without putting in the hundreds of hours of climbing to get there.
I can see the appeal.
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We’re talking about the placements themselves not mattering.
Nope. You, read: Y-O-U, can literally THROW your placements and still not lose much SR from where you were last season. I could even place a cat on my keyboard and let 'em play my placement for me and it still isn’t going to do much. Likewise, I could give my account over to Pine, Carpe, xQc, etc., have them play their heart out, and my SR wouldn’t go up very much. So in what universe is the placements system still determining my true skill, that being the case? Like I was saying, it’s not really any different than what would happen if you just went straight from your last season’s SR and did 10 regular comp games.
It’s not a “me” phenomenon, it’s widely observed and explicitly intentional way they had the system operate.
Wow, what a wild and bizarre misinterpretation of what I said. How embarrassing for you.
[quote] And that system would work perfectly if this happened:
Blizzard reset MMR to 0.
EVERYONE PLAYS 50 GAMES
Only then would it even out in a reasonable amount of time. But in reality, that’s not what happens. People take time off and come back. People play a game here or there. People play their placements at ALL times during a season (A few seasons ago I didn’t do my placements until the last week, and there were STILL other people doing their placements with me). Because of the inconsistency of all that, that is why the problem would persist for months.
Ultimately, all you are doing is destroying the quality of matches for a length of time only to end up exactly where we are right now . You have achieved nothing.
And that’s a 1-minute idea from a non-developer backed up by the words of Scott Mercer.[/quote]
You don’t need the entire playerbase playing a block of 50 games all at once. It works regardless.
If you are placing, it would still try to place you with folks that have a comparable winrate and games played in that season. So if you’re waiting to place until the final week, you’ll place with others doing placements or that have played few games in the season. It’s not that hard of a concept to grasp. I suspect you didn’t actually read what I wrote.
You claim it would change nothing. I believe that it would change a great deal:
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I believe old players would be more likely to come back at the start of new seasons, because they would see it as a fresh start.
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I believe consistent high SR play would be more impressive and more respected.
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I believe smurfing and boosting would be much less common, as the player would have to repeat the process every few months.
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I believe players would emerge from placements feeling that their SR was based on the 10 placement games, not stuff they did 2 years ago.
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I believe players would see their SR as being more fair, and climbing more likely. This would encourage more competitive play at all tiers.
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I believe this would reduce toxicity. Because if you screw up your rank, it only lasts a few months instead of for life.
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I believe you’d see less trolling, because players wouldn’t feel hardstuck as often or like they are in ELO hell. When players are bored or frustrated is when they tend to look for alternate means of amusing themselves.
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You’re against all of these suggestions. Perhaps you don’t feel you could get back to Plat. Whatever the case is, I don’t much care.
You’re literally arguing against trying to improve a flawed system. You’re not even offering alternative suggestions, just arguing to maintain the status quo that even you admit can be improved.
I don’t know if NA servers are better, but on EU servers your SR do not reflect your skill at all. You have people with the same SR and MMR and their skill level is like day and night. 4 out of 5 games is like flipping a coin. IDK if a MMR reset would make things better, but it can’t make it worse.
Good you see you still around, Faylen. If I may, what’s your opinion on Mercer’s words saying that the reset would actually cause a huge problem that persists for a long time because of the inconsistency of how people play?
I’ve already agreed to this? I am merely pointing out why placements are there in the first place.
Again… already answered that question?
You literally said that RIGHT HERE. How can I interperate THAT statement any differently?
Correct.
Correct, I guess? Don’t really see the big deal with that one. Even if I was GM I wouldn’t care if my play was respected or whatever.
Maybe. Hard to say. I’d like to believe this one but I don’t have enough evidence to say for certain.
No. They would emerge from placements blaming their teammates for throwing and leaving and causing them to place lower than they deserved… kind of like we have right now.
SR is already accurate to ± 250 in most cases or ± 500 in extreme cases.
Nah. It would just change the toxicity. “OMG GENJI IS THROWING AND GOING TO CAUSE ME A CRAP RANK FOR THIS SEASON I DESERVE BETTER THAN THIS”
I could give you this you.
Were you around for Season 2? That was when they barely adjusted the bell curve of comp ranks. It was an absolute disaster. The quality of games were all over the place. The matches had huge differences in skill between the players. It didn’t go away in a short time, either. It took a while to stabilize. IIRC we were still feeling the after effects up to S4. It wasn’t as bad there, but the ripples could still be felt. But I know pretty much the entirety of that season was a crapshow.
Actually, I’m arguing against what I see as a detriment to an already flawed system. And I’m not making suggestions because I honestly don’t know how I would fix the current system. I’m not smart enough to go “Ah, this is what we need!” But I am smart enough to listen to the devs and take evidence and apply it to your suggestion and realize “Yeah, I don’t think this’ll work as well as you think it will.”
You’re basically asking for every season to be a repeat of season 2. It would be an absolute disaster. And once again I am forced to refer to this video. Listen very carefully at the point when Mercer is talking about Season 2 changes. It’s only a few seconds after the timestamp.
Edit: Here it is. Forgot where it was mentioned. We already had a ‘soft’ reset anyway where you were bumped down and had to climb back up.
Oh, I didn’t even think of that. That’s a great reason!