You could bet me dollars to dump trunks but again, I’m not interested in made up nonsense based on nothing but your feelings of right and wrong.
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so let us agree that the vast majority chess tournaments tell you how the bishop moves, agreed?
Yeah. It’s a system that has most of their entire user base unhappy and they refuse to acknowledge how poorly it is received.
And that isn’t any explanation of how it works. It’s a huge generalization (and contradictory at points) that ends with them saying “look at that! Everyone is at a 50 percent! It works!” which is just asinine and goes to show that as long as it appears to work, that’s all that matters.
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We aren’t talking about chess. Go to a chess website for sciences sake if you want to talk about bishops.
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I’d like you to name one other competitive environment where information is kept hidden. And don’t say cards, because hidden information is part of the game.
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@meaStyy-1739 Calm down. Go outside. Take a walk.
@Tactician-11177 The actual comparison is not the rules of the match, such as how a bishop moves (which for Overwatch are either published or relatively easy to test), but the rating system. In a chess association or tournament you know the exact rules of how your rating will change with each game. Given the rating of the two players, you can calculate how your rating changes with a calculator and then verify that the official number matches. See http://www.glicko.net/ratings/rating.system.pdf for an example (US Chess Federation rules).
This is not the case for overwatch, in which in my summary, How Competitive Skill Rating Works (Season 11), is vague by necessity, in many places. Overwatch could stand a lot more tranparency in its rating system.
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I think it was you who said, what if the MMR system is proprietary, intellectual property. I totally understand this and I want Blizzard to make lots of money because they are an awesome company. I’m just saying, hidden rating systems are a blemish on any competitive environment.
And thanks for clearing up my chess analogy ![:slight_smile:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=5" ":slight_smile:")
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It wasn’t me. Regardless, though, I agree that it is their intellectual property. But there is no law that intellectual property must be secret (proprietary is secret by definition). And there are so many papers and talks out there about rating systems, that it wouldn’t be that hard for a motivated and mathematically inclined person to rebuild a system as effective as Blizzard’s and similar in function.
What Blizzard excels at is polish, fun factor, and long-term support. They wouldn’t lose players (to competitors or otherwise) if they documented their games better. But they’ve always been bad at documentation.
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I’d bet they licensed MS TrueSkill. When to read up on it and compare what they said it’s either TruSkill or the spent the resources to build something just like it from scratch.
Honestly, I’m not sure how much more transparency people want and I honestly can’t understand why.
Are you really gonna break out the slide rule after gathering the SR of all the players (which isn’t possible anymore anyways)? Why?
Are you somehow going to get more kills just because now you know that will give you 2 extra SR?
Like, honestly, what useful questions does anyone have that they haven’t already explained?
Unless you think they’re being deceitful in the whole process, in which case there is no information that will satisfy you.
If I told you why I wanted it, would you fight for my cause. If I convinced you through empirical evidence that my wants were justified, would you take up my banner?
I don’t think you would, so why answer your question
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I’d like it to be like chess: where you could calculate each SR change with a calculator or simple program, given only publicly available numbers.
If more information allows ratings to be exploited, then the system should be changed so it can’t be exploited (No security through obscurity).
This would make conspiracy theories even sillier, allow us to do bug checks, simplify and make more accurate my summary of how the system works, allow people to know what the ideal behavior is to rank up, etc.
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It would be super nice to understand why this happens…
Win a game, total stomp. 3 SR
Loss a game, really close. -25 SR
Win a game, really close, play terrible. +20 SR
Hard to have faith in the match making when the SR/MMR system is so confusing.
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Tact, the questions weren’t really directed personally at you, mostly it was more a general, rhetorical question.
I’m just saying I don’t understand the fuss. I’m curious, but I don’t really have any more questions on the matter that they haven’t explained, other than how groups are handled, but that’s not really anyone else’s concern.
Detailed math might be nice, but it wouldn’t actually matter gameplay wise, though I do agree with your concerns, @kaawumba, those are not the common concerns.
That 3 SR thing is a bug. Been around for more than year.
“Really close / total stomp” is not taken into account. In theory, whether you were predicted to win will be taken into account. But be it that you are in gold, almost all of your matches will be predicted to be 50/50.
See How Competitive Skill Rating Works (Season 11) for what is taken into account.
The discussion in this thread has been more substantive and focused lately. I just want to say thanks to the contributors. Let’s keep being clear with each other, even when we disagree.
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it’s just like the question of balance. I think the game is pretty well balanced, except for Mercy and Widow on the top of OWL and torb/sym on the bottom, but blizz will sort everything out and the community’s outrage baffles me.
Okay. Took a walk. Feel the same state of rational enthusiasm to debate on the internet. Is this a problem? Should I just be ultra-apathetic and resort to passive aggressive tendencies instead?
People like transparency. It’s why we demand it in every sector of business and government. Does it change how they play? No. But it opens up room for discussion and improvement. Right now, people are just speculating and yelling at each other based on nothing but made up pseudofacts about chess. I don’t see how that is any more constructive when the fact of the matter is: people don’t like the matchmaking process. Yes, it’s an opinion to not like something. But if a majority of people don’t like something, that’s different territory and brings us to the questions ‘Are they making this game for their users? Or are they making this game for themselves?’
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Part of my point was that people don’t even believe, choose to misunderstand, or refuse to accept what they have given us. One side of this “debate” is purely speculation. The other side accepts what has been said at face value but asks questions about implementation details.
My point is that the side that thinks everything is speculation tends to also believe what information they have given is, at best, intentionally vague. They seem to want something concrete, but it’s really not at all clear how or why they think what we do have is not enough. I’ve seen mincing, parsing, and rejection of language on a whole 'nother level in these threads. If you won’t be happy until you have the math behind it, fine, but I somehow doubt the same people who confuse “estimated 50% chance of winning” with “forced 50%” win rate are going to be doing anything useful with that math.
I think it’s acceptably clear but could be clearer as an academic issue. MMR systems aren’t really that difficult to understand. It’s not exactly “speculation” to think that it works very similarly to all the other ones when it is described very similarly to all the other ones.
Unfortunately, I also think that the “rigged”, “handicap”, and “forced” reactions that come out of every single explanation of the system actually do more to convince them to keep it hidden than anything else.
I mean…if people take general concepts like attempting to have equally skill matched people on every team and turn them into multi-thousand post diatribes about how teams shouldn’t be balanced at all because it’s against some “competitive spirit”, why on Earth would they give us the detailed math behind each and every player and why they are in that particular match? HOW would they even do that and keep the game…a game…which is all it really is.
They’re not hiding it from people that are curious…they’re hiding it from people that twist words and intentions into something villainous.
Also, people tend to get things confused. MMR and matchmaking are related, but complaints about one isn’t necessarily a complaint about the other. For instance, it’s frustrating to get 5 Mercy mains on a team, but that has nothing at all to do with MMR. Related to that, people seem to want unrealistic perfection from the system. If you can figure out how to perfectly match 12 humans together every time you’ll be very, very rich in no time. There’s a discussion to be had there, sure, but people don’t even try to have a basic understanding before they start the discussion.
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There is a middle ground between being ultra-apathetic and raging about someone bringing up chess rating systems in a discussion of Overwatch’s rating system (which is not off topic, by the way). Stay in that middle ground. Take a break whenever you get angry. Feel free to come back and debate when you are calmer.
When I asked you a question, above, you just gave me a snippy response. That isn’t how debates work.
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