Algorithmic Handicapping (MMR) is Wrong for Overwatch

Competitive Discussion
316

I think you underestimate how big a difference even 500-800SR can make when it comes to match balance. Last season I took an alt from 1550-2050 in 11 straight stomps while my main was at 24XX and this season I took the same alt from 2000-2500 with a 70% win rate while my main is sitting at 26XX.

Basically I am saying that it’s not just the GM players that will do the stomping on the ladder with a reset. In bronze for example 80-90% of the player base will stomp and yes it would waste a lot of people’s time but the good players will always get back to were they were while the players that aren’t so good will have to endure a whole season worth of stomping - and no these kind of stomps are not even comparable to the normal stomps in some of today’s slightly unbalanced matches within the same MMR interval.

317

I kind of feel like youre trolling at this point and pretending youre not understanding what im saying.

If the matchmaking is balanced then you are not getting matched against someone better than you, so there is no reason for you to get more points. By matching you with someone better than you the game is basically saying: hell this guy is better than you and you should lose this match by all accounts but lets see what happens. If you do win this match we expect you to lose we will give you more points.

I cant imagine this mentality in any other competitive sport. Oh hey well just randomly throw you into a match with people of a higher bracket and if you win… -I get into the higher bracket?
No, no, we just give you a bit more points than we normally would on the leaderboard, sound good?

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318

You sound like you’re deliberately misinterpreting what’s happening yourself. Matchmaking attempts to make as balanced a match as possible given factors like geography and available players. Since an exactly fair match is not always possible in a reasonable time-frame, it simply takes the obvious step of modifying its rewards after the match to match the expected outcome. If you’ve played at off-hours or at high ranks you’re probably quite familiar with the “long time expected for fair match” warning, which means it’s struggling to find you a fair match; they’ve discussed in the past how lenient it will eventually get as time goes on, and I think right now it won’t ever go past 40/60 odds at absolute worst.

The ultimate limit on how unbalanced the match can be is there to address your exact concern that it’s lame to be dumped into an inappropriate bracket even if scoring is adjusted accordingly.

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319

Prescient…

320

The system wants you to constantly 1vs3 if you want to climb out of gold/plat.
The only way you can do that is genji/tracer as they can avoid zerg rage swarm.

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321

I notice that a lot of the recent arguments in this thread hinge on the word “balance.” But that word just muddies the water. Try to remember we are talking about the practice of “handicapping,” which Blizzard does through Match Making Rating.

Whichever way you want to look at balance/handicapping, the important thing to remember is that it isn’t magic. It is an automated system that explicitly works to benefit the weakest players, at the expense of the strongest players, in every competitive match.

  • Why do we think this is a good thing, in a competitive environment?
  • When we are being graded on our record of wins and losses, why should the fairness of the system be compromised?
  • How does manipulation from big data give us a true competitive experience?
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322

Fair matches benefit all the players, not just good or bad ones. Please stop insisting on this ridiculous falsehood that every match has this heroic “best player” always being dragged down by the system to help some dirty, filthy bad player undeserving of success.

Making fair matches maximizes the opportunity for everyone to impact the match outcome on top of getting closer games and more accurate ratings for each player in future games.

323

Honestly I am not that good of a player. I’m decent i’d say. But there’s nothing hidden holding you back. I’ve gone from 1.8k-3.8k on 3 different accounts now where people said the account is hard stuck. I can stomp hard in gold/plat with hanzo or any dps class its not even fun. People think their teammates are holding them back (sometimes def true), but if you are masters or gm+ you can stomp through plat/diamond with huge WR in a few days. I think I went from 2.8k-3.5 in like 2 weeks of casual play. MMR isnt holding you back. You have to make major impact on every game to climb that’s the secret. If your good enough you will climb for sure. I would say playing tank/healer is a LOT harder to climb unless you group with a DPS friend that’s good. DPS control the w/l healing and tanking just supports them. In lower ranks you don’t even need tanks or heals. GL

324

When we talk about a “fair” or “balanced” match, we are talking about a handicapped match. Handicapping does not benefit good players in any way. It benefits bad players specifically. I don’t see how that can possibly be good for the player community as a whole. Especially not when we are competing in a system that tracks our record of winning or losing to determine our rank.

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325

You can’t see how it’s good in any way to have fair matches? Or you’re willfully forgetting all the times we explained how.

Here’s a way it benefits players: people want closer games and not lopsided stomps. Benefits good and bad players.

Here’s another way: it makes it easier for good players to stand out more easily, because the more lopsided a match is the less likely an overperforming player changes the outcome. Good for good players (and bad for bad ones).

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326

I totally get what you’re saying, but consider this. If you go to the carnival and observe a game, watching person after person lose and walk away unhappy, does it matter whether or not they can explain the mechanics properly?

If they are just like, I deserve a bigger stuffed animal, this is ridiculous, every season I come back and I do better but I get the same stuffed animal. Something is wrong this is wrong. There’s obviously a hidden mechanism that is keeping me down.

Yes, their argument is subjective and silly. But does that mean the game is set up perfectly just because they don’t know what they are talking about?

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327

This is the core of the misunderstanding. We all want fair matches. But what does that even mean? THAT idea of what a fair match is, is why people deny things are ‘rigged’ and why people claim the teams are stacked.

Because it means the same thing. One group of people think the algorithm is over correcting the floating variable it uses to represent their cut of the carry duty, they just don’t know how to explain it in a way that doesn’t sound like “Oh the world hates me and is unfair!”, and the other group just likes jumping down peoples throats when they act entitled.

Really, I think we all want the same thing. We’re just arguing over a faulty mechanism blizzard refuses to acknowledge. That is why this game is so toxic.

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328

I think the system works fine. Not perfect but certainly within the desired range for a competitive ladder.

329

That is exactly what I’m talking about; this assumption that the strongest players have a duty to carry the weak. Blizzard wants Competitive Matches to be evenly contested on both sides, to make their game more marketable. But that is purely a corporate interest, it is not intrinsically fair or in players’ best interests.

In a community environment (if Overwatch players actually knew each other), we would achieve this by voluntary handicapping. I think it’s wrong that Blizzard assumes a right to involuntarily handicap us, especially in a competitive environment where we are playing against strangers.

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330

I don’t know what you’re getting at here. The “winner” in the carnival game is the carnival itself. It’s not a competition between two people at all.

Plus, carnival games actually are rigged and it’s obvious to anyone that watches them (source: grew up in a State Fair town).

Your analogy is…odd. OW and carnival games are nothing alike, games of pure chance are still called “games”.

No. But their statements can be dismissed as lunatic ravings and the grown ups in the room can talk about what the actual problems are. I don’t know where anyone gets the idea that anyone thinks the system is perfect. It’s just not “rigged”, “handicapped”, or “forced”.

331

You have yet to directly dispute my BEST description of your actual position so I assume I have correctly described what you mean. If I am correct in my understanding I do think you have a valid, if mistaken, point.

First, the word “explicit” in this context means that something is stated or written out directly. No matter your beliefs, it’s just not true that the system “explicitly” does what you say it does. I’m certain that nowhere does Blizzard explicitly state that MMR benefits the weak at the expense of the strong. Explicitly, it benefits all players, equally, but has troubles at the upper and lower bounds of skill.

Second, you keep making this claim that MMR benefits the weak at the expense of the strong, but you do so without ANY evidence or explanation. You just, kinda, say it…as if saying it will somehow make it true, as if it’s obvious. It’s really not.

I’ve written detailed descriptions of HOW the system ranks you, WHY it works in that way, and WHAT the general theory is behind the system. I’ve tried to stay away from details of the particular OW system because those details aren’t really relevant to your complaint. Certain discussions just aren’t germane to whether MMR is “wrong”.

Could you at least give us the courtesy of explaining WHY MMR hurts strong players?
What about a “evenly contested” match makes it against my interest or “unfair”? No matter how the implementation actually works, if the match is by your definition “evenly contested”, what’s the problem? How would “unevenly contested” be better? Explain it like I’m 5, please.

WHAT would you replace it with?
What would a system that doesn’t use MMR look like? How would it handle so many people playing so many games at so many skill levels?

HOW would your new system rank players?
You can’t do it simply on Win/Loss ratio unless you force people to play the same number of games against literally everyone, so how do you envision the ranking system to work without MMR?

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332

It doesn’t assume this bs of yours about the strong “carrying” the weak. In a fair match a game is tipped towards one side more by an overperforming weak player than by a strong one performing as expected. The system makes exceeding yourself the best way to win, no matter who you are. It is better for EVERY player to have fair matches, because every player then contributes to victory.

Nevermind how tight skill is across most lobbies anyway… You consistently act like there’s some champion being dragged down when really everyone is roughly equal.

333

…But it is handicapped. And in this context, that means ‘rigged’ and ‘forced’. Just like you said, it’s obvious to anyone that watches.

And I used that analogy because, like you said, the ‘winner’ is the carnival (Blizzard). They don’t care about what we want, they just want to show off their ‘look how fair we are!’ numbers. There isn’t any competition, how more fair can you get!

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334

In Overwatch, whether your MMR goes up or down is contingent on winning or losing. But there are a number of factors that determine how much that rating goes up or down. For example, what map you’re playing on and whether you were attacking or defending is factored in. We know the win rates on attack/defend on all of the maps and we normalize accordingly. Not all wins and losses are equal. We also look at your individual performance on each of the heroes you played during the match. Everyone has better and worse heroes and we have tons of data showing us what performance levels should be like on those heroes. We also look at your opponents and whether or not their matchmaking rating is higher or lower than yours. These are just a few of the things that are considered when determining how your skill should go up or down. At no point in MMR calculations do we look at your win/loss ratio and win/loss ratio is never used to determine who to match you with or against. We are not trying to drive your win/loss percentage toward a certain number (although the fact that so many people are at 50% win rates makes us extremely happy). All the system does when it comes to matching on skill is attempt to match you with people of a similar number.

What they don’t aknowledge is the fact that, while they don’t look at the win/loss ratio, all of the numbers they use reflect that ratio. If I lose a match, it’s likely I was playing against better players, so I’ll have less kills, less medals, more deaths, etc etc. If I am better than the other team, and win, vice versa. Just the lack of understanding is enough to give me doubts of their competency to fill teams correctly.

Regardless, that is literally what handicapping is. They assign you a floating variable that says, based on past performance, our algorithm is asigning this person a number. When we match players, we want their teams combined numbers to be equal. If they aren’t, we give more mmr to the underdog if they win.

That isn’t inheriently wrong. It is extermely difficult to do, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for not crushing it right off the bat. In fact, it’s so difficult, that doing it so well that you have perfect 50/50s all around, is way suspicious. And saying that it isn’t a number that is taken into account, that everything is just magically perfect, and no you can’t see the details of how it is done, COME ON HAVE YOU EVER SEEN WIZARD OF OZ?!

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338

This is not at all what I said. Not even a reasonable interpretation.

Most people claim to want fair matches. In fact, “fair” is usually the opposite of “rigged” so it’s not at all clear what YOU want. You don’t like “fair” but you don’t like “rigged” either…do you even know what you want? When pressed, OP and ilk usually describe the system as designed.

What people also tend to want is a 60-70% win rate. That’s simply not possible unless you have bots assigned on the teams to throw. Sometimes no one cares what you want because what you want isn’t reasonable.

You realize that you’ll lose a match against someone that is JUST AS GOOD as you about half the time, right? Almost by definition? You’ll lose against someone WORSE than you quite a bit as well unless they’re considerably worse. See what I said above about throwing bots and reasonable expectations.

It’s not really that hard dude. Especially with a competitive ruleset which cancels out most of the estimation that the description you quoted describes.

Blizzard didn’t invent this, you know. All you have to do is increase the difficulty until you lose, then decrease it until you win. That’s it. You’ll settle into your difficulty range and you’ll have a 50% win rate over a large set of games. The 50% win rate is the proof, not the goal, of finding the appropriate difficulty.

It’s really basic.

For all the complaints, no one that thinks this system is fundamentally broken can describe a better way to do it. No one says it’s perfect, but it functions well enough given realistic expectations though it could be tweaked a bit.