I’m curious what you think is so strange here that something needs to be “afoot”?
I mean, aren’t you are describing a system that works as intended? It’s not a magic 8-ball that can read your “true skill” and put out one, constant number.
Uncertainty and fluidity are built into the system. You may drop low. It may not be your fault. But you will have easier opponents when you get there AND you may be in a better state of mind (if they are split among sessions).
I’m not sure if anyone actually takes this suggestion seriously but I have suggested it before:
Someone who truly believes that the blue posts are being misinterpreted by Kaawumba AND has a cohesive, alternate theory supported by the same set of facts could easily write a guide similar to Kaawumba’s, using the same set of blue posts as references, and post that guide so that alternate theory could be compared. There are many real-world cases where two alternate theories describe the facts that we know. It wouldn’t surprising and it would be welcomed.
Until someone posts another interpretation of the facts, though, I don’t think that it’s fair to say that anyone is going “blindly” into one interpretation. The anecdotal evidence can be explained easily in the frame of one interpretation. We don’t discount their anecdotal evidence, it’s just that it doesn’t show anything that we wouldn’t expect from the system as we understand it.
Also, there are some paradoxes in the way Cuthbert and others describe the system, notably in that it HAS your “true skill” available to handicap you, but doesn’t use it but rather uses your MMR to make matches. So the system is both really good and really bad. That’s a paradox that isn’t really explained. There are others that I’ve brought up, but suffice to say that an idea needs to be internally consistent to be true.
To be fair, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Cuthbert doesn’t need his particular concept of how MMR works to make his point. There is a lot of discussion in this thread about MMR and balancing, but ultimately we all know that balancing happens, it’s just how often and how drastically. Whether we call it “handicapping” is not an important discussion to have as all it really does is change the frame from intent to effect. (The intent is balance but the effect is handicap.)
The real issue here is whether balanced teams are bad for competitive. I don’t see how that could possibly be true and the OP doesn’t really explain it but rather has repeatedly said that it’s “self-evident”.
It’s not at all clear why two balanced teams competing against each other would be bad, even the player differential on each team had an extreme range. ALL WE NEED is uncertainty regarding the outcome. The more uncertainty, the more productive the match.
Yeah that’s what I think too. None of us can say definitively how Match Making Rating works, because Blizzard hasn’t told us. Whether or not we’re comfortable being in the dark depends on how much we trust Blizzard. That trust is informed by our worldviews, political lives, and opinions.
My experience with online multiplayer games tells me that Overwatch’s matchmaking is more sophisticated than most other games’. We know that Blizzard is monitoring players, and manipulating their experience based on MMR, which is informed by performance-tracking algorithms. I think that for most open-minded people, that raises questions about the nature of the data being collected and how it’s being used.
The American government’s sluggish reaction to Facebook shows us that consumer data is a valuable asset, and that consumer data is prone to abuse. Corporations form data-management policies that fail the interests of the general public, often in pursuit of their own interests (i.e., revenue generation).
My worldview tells me that we should not trust Blizzard to handle Competitive Play responsibly. And I think that if they were doing what they do in plain sight, consumers would not accept their behavior. Something as simple as an in-game scoreboard would shatter the illusion that our matches are being made fairly, by an impartial matchmaking system.
I’m not sure how your OP relates to this worldview.
I’m also not sure what you actually want to do about it.
I, for one, quit Facebook (actually a long time ago) because the value/risk was way too low.
Google, otoh, I use religiously.
Blizz has my CC info, but so does a ton of other retailers. The only thing Blizz knows about me is that I like Overwatch and (due to the forum) that I’m a skeptic.
Video games are inherently addicting. They don’t need to manipulate the system to make them so. They will get more money from a fun, non-toxic game than one that relies on mismatching players and using throwers/leavers to enforce win rates.
I share your worldview on the lack of trust in corporations. What I don’t share, I guess, is your paranoia about this particular aspect of it.
I mean…if their goal with the current MM is to get more people to addictively play…it appears that goal has failed miserably. I don’t know anyone who thinks the MM system in comp is perfect.
So anything to say about f2p, pay 2 win games? Just like Candy Crush and similar that once had “impossible levels” saying so and letting people buy bonus even if the level cannot be finished? Buying loot boxes / hats / gun skins is a way to monetize games slightly better than Free 2 Play and Pay 2 Win games but still it is what has the focus of Bliz, the more you play, the more likely you are to buy stuff, keeping you playing is their main target. For you to have pleasure or getting your true rank faster is secondary.
I’m not saying there is a conspiracy, most problems in software are side-effects rarely made on purpose. Bad companies already created mess on their own to keep you playing and spending money though, so it can happen. But if we can’t check it, basically it is unfair by design and I’m against it and what Bliz has done for competitive.
Agreed. I personnally think they didn’t make this bad matchmaking with this idea in mind. I think that they just badly designed it. Believing you can guess future matches based on stats is skewed material. Wins and losses are the only thing that matters to build future matches and ranks, as it is done in real sport.
To this point I even think they should just put role queues, and imposing 2 2 2 composition with hero switching only within the same category, removing the “defense hero” category that nobody thinks is relevant, allowing to hit deflecting genji with melee for all heroes with damage reduction, buffing rein in some way, showing ult charges of all players including enemies so awareness is promoted, removing PBSR, removing either SR or MMR, ban 1 hero at start of game, increase avoid teammate to 10… there is so much to do!
This game needs structure to be played the way it is meant to be played. Players won’t be able to get there without premades or major training for carrying other unaware players, so it is bad. I prefer loosing flexibility with imposing some kind of team composition and limiting switching than getting double snipers and triple dps every match.
Every game (and every company) has a business model. Some are free to start but cost to operate. Some start with a higher cost and have free content. OW starts with a moderate cost and is supported by cosmetics (maybe OWL, too).
In that particular quote “they” refers specifically to the OW developers. I understand that may not be entirely clear, my apologies. My main point remains, if getting you to play more is their main target (and I don’t dispute that, really) then a functional, sensible MM system would be their goal, not this convoluted system that the conspiracy theorists conceive.
Their stated goal is to find players that are as good as you. I can’t be bothered to look up the quote, but they mentioned that players SAY that a close win or a close loss is a good game, but their actual behavior shows that what they really want is a win of some sort.
I think this view is completely incorrect.
I think what most people want has nothing to do with a win or a loss, but rather to have teammates that they trust are doing their job and trying.
Their current system discourages group play and doesn’t do anything to show that their teammates actually care.
THAT’S what is broken and designed poorly, IMO. The effectiveness of the MM to find 12 people that are of equal AVERAGE skill, though, is really good. It’s just that people define “skill” differently so it’s hard to see how some people got to the same level as you did.
Gaming industries are always trying to maximize engagement. That’s why casinos rig their machines and keep clocks off the walls. Those industries don’t owe consumers any protections unless they’re signed into law.
I would suggest that there should be laws against practices like Match Making Rating, which handicap matches without the knowledge of the participating players. MMR divorces individual players’ rank from their true merit, and converts skill from an asset to a liability.
100% agree, feel like I have improved so much since I started playing the game 2 years ago, yet at the same rank I was then because it is basically win one game lose another, win one game lose another because everything has to be 50/50 instead of putting SR vs SR not MMR vs MMR
yeah loooooooooool just make a law because a hardstuck silver thinks hes better than his teammates and that he’s stuck at his rank because of the bad system loooooooooooooooool MAKE A LAW DUDE LOOOOOOOOOOOL
no. if you keep winning you’ll get thrown into 50/50 matches of higher sr, which means you’re ultimately better than your previous sr, which means you’ve climbed. It doesn’t forcibly place you with lower-tier players, it matches you with equally good higher-tier players, that’s why you get the illlusion that games are equally hard, because your teammates are better than ones at previously lower sr and the games are equally hard, but in reality you’re just in a FAIR match at a higher sr, and there’s nothing wrong with that
When lower ranked players speak about hero balance and game mechanics, they are usually ill-informed. However this thread is about the theory of competitive match making, something we don’t have a lot of information on.
Both sides of the argument have their valid points, I don’t really think you can discredit his stance and points by attacking his rank on this matter.
It’s always worth revisiting this thread every once in a while to see what ridiculous thing Cuthbert thinks is going on or is a good idea in a given week.
Make a law against MMR. lol. That’s funny even for the nonsense in this thread.
Agreed!
If skill is a liability in the system, then why do good players consistently reach there main accounts SR on smurfs fairly quickly?
Why is it that every time someone has tryed to “prove to me” that the matchmaker is holding them back by making a fresh account, that account has ended up stuck in the same place there main account is?
The fact is that while there are issues with the matchmaker, skill is the most important asset a player can have. Personal skill, not luck, is how you climb, and if your more skilled then the players at your rank, you will climb out of that rank every time.
lots of players will buy additional accounts and often share how they fair better.
Except, the way in which this is calculated is heavy handed and over corrects - which leads to the streaks that everyone is complaining about.
I’m curious to know how many of the matchmaker’s victims keep throwing themselves into the meatgrinder in a match that’s a lost cause?
I’ve had a better experience trying to limit my deaths on lost cause matches. It seems I get placed less with bad teammates and more with good ones. I’m not saying to throw, but don’t repeatedly suicide into the enemy in some misguided attempt to carry.
Doesn’t say much about the handicapping of the game. Again, I’ll say it : it is indeed possible to rank up by training, “skill” as you call it, but it can take an awful lot of time especially for tanks and healers that PBSR tend to screw (bad team means tanks / healers can’t have that much great stats to climb quickly).
Games are a lot more random than former seasons to my mind. Maybe it is an effect of less players, lots of smurfs accumulating, changes on the MMR calculus, the drop of Mercy mains OTP ? Also a lot of game screwed by mixing only healer mains / tank mains against other balanced teams.
After dropping high gold / low plat (playing during last days of seasons 8, very random), it took me 400 games to get back to diamond this season as tank main / healer in solo Q. Possible, but slow. For me it is one of the worst season we got so far.
Yeah, silver was my rank the last time I played Competitive Overwatch. But my rank has also gone as high as Platinum, and as low as bronze. None of these fluctuations mean anything about my development as a player. When Competitive Play is handicapped, players are not ranked according to their merit.
I quit regular competitive due to this absurd handicapping and I can’t stand 6v6 elimination due to same reason.
Win few games in a row, and you get trolls, griefers and all sorts of sabotage - basically unwinnable games. Lose few in the row and you get absolute freelo, because hey - you are bound to X MMR. Breaking out even by just 200-300SR requires absurd skill improvement not proportional to rank increase, or tedious no life grind (for hundreds of games and praising RNG) to bump your average MMR a notch higher.
“My worldview tells me that we should not trust Blizzard to handle Competitive Play responsibly. And I think that if they were doing what they do in plain sight, consumers would not accept their behavior. Something as simple as an in-game scoreboard would shatter the illusion that our matches are being made fairly, by an impartial matchmaking system.”
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.