Why do so many players want mmr reset?

[Krow-1913]

@KGB313-1223

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.

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.”

@KGB313-1223

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.

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.

@KGB313-1223

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.

@Kaawumba-1133

One is to start a completely new account, and then play 100 games on the new account and see how it performs compared to the old one. This shows that SR can vary by 1000 SR in extreme cases, and 500 in normal cases (27). There is some evidence that reroll experiments show less variance at higher ranks (28) likely because there are less random variables, such as smurfs, throwers, and inconsistent play.

and

@Kaawumba-1133

In addition, if an account needs a 55% win rate to maintain SR (11), and if win % changes slowly with rank, then it is expected that this will be an additional source of significant error in SR.

If a player gets noticeably better, it can take a long time to get to the correct rank. If a player maintains a 55% win rate, he will only go up approximately 220 SR/MMR every 100 games. Because there are twelve players in a match, one player’s contribution (and ability to carry the match) is limited unless he is playing at a vastly different skill level, so a 55% win rate for a player that is moderately under placed is to be expected.

Put this all together, and we can state that an active and motivated player’s SR is only accurate to +/- 250 SR in normal circumstances and +/- 500 SR in extreme cases. Of course, new players, barely active players, or players that actively break the system can be off by much more.

There are the qualifiers.

@KGB313-1223

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.

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.

@KGB313-1223

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.

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?

@KGB313-1223

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.

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?

@KGB313-1223

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.

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.

@KGB313-1223

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.

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.