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.
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.
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:
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.
I believe consistent high SR play would be more impressive and more respected.
I believe smurfing and boosting would be much less common, as the player would have to repeat the process every few months.
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.
I believe players would see their SR as being more fair, and climbing more likely. This would encourage more competitive play at all tiers.
I believe this would reduce toxicity. Because if you screw up your rank, it only lasts a few months instead of for life.
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.
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.
Obviously players at the top would be almost exclusively negatively affected. One doesn’t simple get placed at 4000+ SR. They’d get placed somewhere between 2500-3900 when you’re a top player. Jayne once said that even Top 500 players get their accounts placed in Plat on new accounts that they try-hard on.
So almost every GM player and Masters player would have to re-establish their SR.
Some lower SR players would get put to a higher SR either by luck or just doing well that particular day. But eventually fall back down. This would poison their experience as well.
The only people who’d benefit would be people who don’t play very often, did their placement matches a long time ago, but have genuinely improved since then. Due to their lack of time to play climbing isn’t an option.
Only those individuals would benefit. Everyone else would suffer as it would be a very chaotic time for tons of people.
However I’d love to see people like Chipsa get placed in Plat-Masters (Like everyone else at his rank would) and listen to him complain about how unlucky he is.
To place you in a rank the first time, then for show.
Golly, couldn’t do that with normal matches. No-sir-ee.
I’m not going to bother explaining it to you. Trying to get you to comprehend the paragraph that sentence was is going to be more effort than you’re worth.
I don’t see how this is hard to say. Someone paying a GM player to boost their account is much less likely to do it every 3 months than once. Likewise for someone sandbagging placements. It would make both of these activities more work for a shorter payoff. Oh, and those high end players would be spending time climbing instead of boosting people or smurfing into Bronze.
RE: Feeling placements were based on placements
If a player had throwers and leavers in their placements, they may indeed blame those as a factor. But there’s no denying that the placement record and the starting SR would make perfect sense. Contrast this to folks going 1-9 into Master or 8-2 placing into sub-1000 Bronze. Current placements have almost no impact on SR compared to previous season SR.
RE: Perceived SR fairness
Why? Because you say it is? At best, you’d need to put some serious qualifiers on that statement. At worst, it’s pure speculation.
RE: Toxicity
People care a lot about losing SR right now because it is lost permanently. They are always going to care about a thrower, but I believe in most cases it would bring the tension down a little. Zarya getting her Grav eaten by DM could be dismissed as a good play by the Dva instead of drawing the wrath of Zarya’s entire team over a minor mistake.
I get upset with myself when I lose at poker, because I have to work to get that money back. I get a lot less upset when I lose at Apex, because there’s nothing at stake that isn’t meaningless 30 minutes later.
RE: Placing
I’ve been around since beta. Season 2 was not nearly as bad as you’re making it out to be. A lot of the adjustment was that it was an entirely new rank system from Season 1.
They also didn’t do what I am suggesting. They did something quite different (and not that unlike what they do now), and that crapshow is still a factor in ranks that people hold today because the system was built on those ranks.
RE: Defending the status quo
[quote] 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.[/quote]
I’ve seen the video. You’re repeating what he said like it’s gospel. It’s an offhand comment that isn’t even relevant to our conversation aside from you mischaracterizing my suggestion as being identical to Season 2.
They could easily distribute the SR more reasonably than it was in Season 2 based on what I’m suggesting. Even moreso if an actual dev took the idea and ran with it.
Bottom line is that placements can easily be made to matter a lot more than they do now (i.e. a soft reset), if not a full blown hard reset. We don’t get it because devs and high-end players create a feedback loop that keeps things as they are.
So a small percentage of a fraction of the playerbase gets catered to because they are very hardcore and very vocal. Meanwhile, most other players (even some of them high end, vocal, hardcore players) have moved on to other games.
In reference to boosting specifically, you’re probably right. But smurfs would still be a think. They would purposefully STILL play poorly during their placements to place low just to eat up the lower ranks afterwards. In fact, you’ve made it EASIER for that to happen because if they climb too high then they can just wait utnil the next seasons. This is why I said “Maybe.”
If you go 1-9 and still place masters that is because your Ranked MMR (not SR) still believes you are in Masters. But a FRESH account played by that same player cannot hit Masters from placements alone. They’re usually around diamond/plat level and have to climb back up.
and
There are the qualifiers.
SR is permanent? Wut? If I lose one game and win the next, then I’m pretty much back where I was. Maybe I’m just not understanding the statement correctly. Possible. I’m in a rush with this post 'cause I gotta leave as soon as I’m done.
I would still argue that it would change the kind of toxicity or even increase it as each game played is even MORE important than it is now to your overall rating.
Yeah. You’re asking for the bell curve to go from a slight squeeze (which was S2) and turning into a flat plane. Just like Mercer mentioned?
Do you honestly believe that Blizz has never considered that exact situation? That they’ve never sat down and asked themselves about the possibility of a reset and how they could do it? Especially with how often people complain about it?
You’re asking to remove MMR data at the end of every season. A fresh slate for everyone. That’s literally the definition of a hard reset. There would be no match making based on how you performed in previous seasons/games.
If you’re saying just do it for SR and keep MMR then… that’s just as pointless. Match maker in comp doesn’t care about your SR. It looks at your MMR. That’s why someone that has decayed from High masters down to Diamond will STILL get placed with high masters players, because their MMR is high masters.
Everyone gets screwed. The top players constantly have to fight their way back up to the top, while the bottom players might get lucky and get placed higher than they deserve only to fall back to where they were over the course of the season and that’ll just feel even worse. The people that only do their placements and call it a day would be the only ones to benefit.
Jeff Kaplan already stated that within 15 games you will reach your true MMR. 10 of those would be placement matches and 5 are probably fine tuning it. So even with a MMR reset after placements and a few games people will be where they belong. So, just let resets happen.
This happens anyway because you will see Top 500 players who have de-ranked all the way down to Bronze, taking who knows how many people down with them if they are doing it solo or in a Group of less than 6 people.
Bought a 2nd account 2 Christmases ago, 2nd account is STILL over 1.5K higher in ranking. So no, that would not always be the case. I just don’t have as many Achievements nor Skins as my first account, other than that I play the same Heroes the same way but in a higher rank.
