Why doesn’t OverWatch just use your MMR as your “rank.” It seems to be the common consensus that the MMR knows your actual skill and drives you up/down closer to it by trying to make your SR reflect that.
So if MMR is so accurate and based solely off your OWN personal skill level, why isn’t that number used instead of SR which is based off one single metric of whether you win or lose.
Why is the MMR kept so hidden?
Because it is too complex for the human eye to see. One man once tried to look at his mmr and was reduced to a stone.
because then the teammate handicapping would be obvious and they wouldn’t be able to gaslight everyone.
Skill Rating is your “digestible” interpretation of the hidden matchmaker rating. From what I have been able to speculate, hidden MMR is more of a fraction than it is a score. Think of it this way, back in season 1, skill rating used to be calculated based on a scale of 1-100 with a meter of progress that would go up or down in fractions between each skill rating point. This system in a way helped guide players a lot more accurately as the “climbed the ladder” but felt more grindy in the grand scheme of things especially if your skill rating became pretty established, only climbing or dropping at most one point per night.
The current 1-5000 skill rating has a lot more perception to showing where you stand. Yes, skill rating is not perfectly matched to the MMR, but instead chases the MMR to the point where as long as you are playing consistently both the MMR and presented skill rating will be accurate to the statistical representation of your skill. Really the only times where skill rating and hidden matchmaking rating is really out of whack is when you are a new player starting out, return to Overwatch after a very, very long break (like months of inactivity), or by some miracle go on a stupid huge win or loss streak (this requires like a 12-game streak these days from what I know).
When ever ANYONE plays the game.
Good thread and good question. MMR is a covert handicapping system for competitive play, designed to make the game as addictive and intractable as possible. MMR is hidden because Blizzard doesn’t want you to know about and exploit its weaknesses. It’s also hidden because they don’t want you to know ranked competitive matches are handicapped. More information in my thread on the subject:
When you say “playing consistently”, do you know about how many games of competitive on average you would need to play before the MMR matches the SR on a new account?
It’s hidden because it’s just data on your performance and probably other things as well. What you play, how much you win. What map are your favourites. What times you play poorly or best.
And if you believe Activision Blizzard actually make use of their MM patents:
What skins you have and how many, how likely you are to make purchases, how likely you are to carry a game, impress some noob to incentivise them to buy gambling crates, how they can influence you to play more and how they can use you in matches to make the game fun for others or decrease their queue time.
No actual proof of this last stuff beyond the horrible match quality for established accounts and the fact that they dump noobs into the most populous ranks…
Every other game is showing mmr no problem only Blizzard is hiding it. Should tell you something.
then how can mmr “catch up” to sr.
why is this phrase used?
what you are saying is that sr is mmr, but thats not what Blizzard says.
Just because others are doing it doesn’t mean it is a set normal for everyone to follow.
The fact the system still accounts for old stats is very poor design and not very predictive of present performance.
It would be like grading someone in college based off how they did in elementary school.
Why is it, that only us players of a “low elo” complain about the MMR system? While the players in the higher ranks seemingly have no issues with it? That’s the question we should be asking imo.
Personally I don’t care if it’s a hidden rating, I don’t even look at my SR 99% of the time, just my current rank.
It has several uses. One is to move new/returning players to their correct rank quickly without them getting disheartened. If they were to see large drops in SR after every game they’d probably leave.
It also helps with penalties. For instance if you get a -50 SR penalty, your skill hasn’t changed so your MMR wouldn’t change like that either.
I think the reason that higher level players don’t complain about the MMR is because they’re able to climb out of the lower ranks since they’re playing 3 or 4 ranks higher than the ones they’re climbing through. So they never feel like they’re being held back by their team because they can carry on a level that most players can’t even really comprehend.
Lower level players however typically feel like they should be in a slightly higher rank than they’re in. Silvers in gold, gold in plat, plat in diamond, but they feel like their teammates are holding them back because unlike high level players, they can’t out perform 11 other people on their team. So they feel like the games are rigged because even if they are outperforming most people in their rank, it’s not by such a margin that can completely tilt the game in one direction.
It’s the whole idea that if say you were on a team of just yourself. 6 copies of yourself all playing at your current skill level, then you would most likely climb to what your actual SR was, whether that be 100SR more or 1000SR more, but that’s not the case. So if you’re an Ana healing her brains out at a 2500 level, but your DPS is playing at a 1900 level and you lose, well then you feel robbed. You’re a plat Ana who feels like they should be able to make it to diamond. You’re not expecting masters or grandmasters, you’re just expecting to actually get to a rank where you feel like you have an impact but you’re not lost.
Whereas if you were a Top 500 Ana in the same game, healing your brains out at a T500 level, while also being able to out snipe the other plat snipers, while also sleeping a blading genji, then you’re contributing such a higher level of value to your team that it doesn’t really matter what your team or enemy is doing.
In the end, most people should realistically be at a slightly higher SR, but “carrying” as a diamond isn’t always enough to turn the tide of every plat game.
Sure I can agree with some of this, but what you described has nothing to do with MMR, what you described is a high level player purposely playing in a lower elo.
The fact they don’t complain about MMR isn’t simply because they climbed, it’s because they’ve seen that the system works (for the most part).
How it relates to MMR is that since you feel like your actual skill (MMR) is higher than your current SR, then when your SR drops because of a bad game that’s not your fault, you feel robbed. And when it happens enough times, you start to feel like since your MMR is hidden and Blizzard is monkeying with the numbers in the background that you can’t see and have no idea of how they’re calculated, it starts to feel rigged against you.
Even top level players acknowledge it to some extent just not in the same way lower level players do. When Emongg says things like “When you win the first 4 games, you know your next 4 are going to be rough”, it’s essentially the same thing. They’re not calling it “my MMR is rigged”, but they’re saying “there’s a pattern here that feels like something in the background is unfair.”
No I don’t feel robbed when I LOSE a game and LOSE rating based on said game, Overwatch is a TEAM BASED game. If I wanted to play a game that gave me a band-aid every time I lost a match, I would pick something else to play.
I’ve been playing since season 5, I have never once felt as if the MMR was rigged to hold me down, when I started, I placed low silver, fell to the pits of bronze <500, and have climbed through self improvement to high silver-high gold. I have a physical disability that affects how I play from day to day, is that on the MMR system too?
So, you win games, and improve your rating, should you not expect to play against higher rated players? Did I miss something here? I though the players got better as you climb. And Yes, I know of Emongg, I rather enjoy his videos, but the fact is, as you climb, the difficulty in the games also increases, that is how these things work.
It would all work fine, if active player count is high enough to properly balance team MMR.
Weird… it’s like there isn’t enough players to properly balance every match but you won’t see Blizzard releasing the “active” player count, only the total accounts that logged in through a period (such as yearly or monthly if you were lucky).
Wouldn’t want anyone thinking the game was dead or something, haha. Would be pretty interesting to see player distributions across ranks, time zones, etc.
How come a niche MMO like EvE Online owned by a comparatively small CCP gives you live player counts but a huge company like Activizzard won’t? Think about it for a bit. The last time we even got logged in accounts over a period was 2018…
Twitch viewers peaked at 439K back then, we’re at less than 18K now…less than currently active and online EvE online players, just on the Tranquility server alone.
If Twitch viewership has anything to do with player activity that means based on the 2018 40M active accounts we’re at like 1.8M globally now, if that, active yearly.
Meanwhile, CS:GO has had over 600K players active in the last 30 minutes.
Where are the numbers, Blizzard? Is dead game dead? Fess up… it would explain how bad matchmaking is, even without the new flex queue / ticket system.
That shouldn’t really matter if player ranking is even remotely correct (which of course it is not, because of handicapping/MMR)