Again the stupid matchmaking... who wonders

General Discussion
1

I know it doesnt make sense to write such a topic again, at least that blizzard do not support starcraft 2 anymore, only in “emergencend or urgent cases”… but hower… the time has come again:

I start playing again and after some games and with samestrong opponents I climbed from platin 3 up to platin 2. Both leagues I was top 5.

And, oh wonder, what happend again? Four games in a row I lost, and one opponent in diamond I broke up suddenly… Today i got a player same league with a total different understanding of the game so that doesnt can´t stand any chance… wow, blizzard, real good matchmaking, very fair!

so fu… demotivate… one victory, one lose would be fair… but hey, thats blizzard, we have no intresse in our players, and our matchmaking…

It would be make more sense, to wait one minute longer to get fair opponents, instead of waiting 10 seconds to gain opponents who crush you like a beginner…

however… i dont know whetever i answer… just writing my frust down… again… so there are other games…

there would be some players they say “happens to everyone”. yeah, that doest make the things better, and its happen again and again… whatever

2

Matchmaking in itself works reliably, especially in 1v1. What breaks it is if someone is unranked or smurfing. If they are playing on their real account with their real MMR (i.e. not unranked), then matchmaking is working fine. If you get someone much higher or lower MMR than you, one or both of you searched for too long. The only thing you can do to prevent this is to cancel queue, wait a bit, and then requeue. The rest is Blizzard’s fault.

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3

MM itself is fine but the F2P approach lead to a situation where the are now many smurf accounts.

4

Wow, 3 years has passed, my topic is still online. Well, system didnt change, in my ranking (2700-2800) are the count of opponents very very rare, because most of them are diamond or higher. Many smurfs, many “at peak i was 4000” players and so on. Well, should I play on America Server instead of inbalanced Europe? Yesterday 3 defs in a row, today 2 defs in a row - IS THAT REALLY FAIR? OF COURSE NOT! Its a kind of FRAUD.

5

Trust me, it’s not the matchmaking that’s making you lose games in 98% of cases.

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If u most times get stronger opponents, than its the matchmaking :slight_smile: For comparison: You could play as a chess beginner who know the basics (ca. 800 elo online) versus 2000 (advantage in direction to master) - what would happen? The beginner is frustrated to lose over and over again and maybe quit chess; and maybe the 2000er player laughs loud because an easy win over and over again. The cliff between those players in this example is too big that the beginner could better. The same stuff is in ladder: If the cliff is too big in strenght, it makes no sense. So, in ca. 50-75 percent its the matchmaking. But, maybe, after ca. 100 games last season and 50-100 games this season, the system still has me not yet fit correctly; it would maybe explains, why I lose over and over again and minutes ago, I gained GOLD players as opponent which rushed me. Wtf…

7

That’s the nature of match making. The game aims to keep you around 50% win rate. If you’re facing stronger opponents, it means you’re either winning more than you should be, hence need to be facing stronger opponents to even out the win rate, or you need a promotion, in which case you’re going to be facing stronger opponents anyway more consistently, since your skill is improving.

Loss streaks happen too; if you’re going on a loss streak then you’re going to face weaker, less skilled players.

Rushes are valid strategies too, by the way, even if they can feel like a cheap win to the person who is hit by the rush.

By this time, the game definitely knows roughly where you are pretty consistently. It usually takes at most around 25-50 games for the system to know where a new or returning (after over a year) player is. If someone has been playing even somewhat consistently then they’re not going to have issues with matchmaking at all. At this point it’s just a skill issue and nothing more.

You’re losses are ultimately your fault and nobody else’s. Maybe your Macro slipped. Maybe you made some silly decisions that cost you the game. Maybe you lost to many units in a push and weren’t prepared for a counter-attack. Maybe you had poor micro or took a really bad and one-sided engagement because you didn’t prepare it properly.

Those are just the unforced errors that can occur within a game, let alone ones other players can force out of you through drops/harass or forcing an engagement when you’re not ready or, or, or - There’s a zillion things that they can do to throw you off, and just as many things that you could have done better in each and every game - no matter what rank you are.

Even as a pro player there’s always something they can do better or differently to improve or change the outcome of a game, looking back.

Nobody’s perfect, so stop pretending like you are. Stop pretending that it’s anything other than your fault that you are where you are currently.

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8

Dude, just stop talking that nonsense. Its nice if game give u a 50 percent winrate in total, but im miles away from it. Fault ends, when system´s broken.
Ich habe fertig.

9

Are you only playing 2v2 or higher? Because in 1v1 it’s not. And it hasn’t been for a long, long time. Even in teams the match-making is generally pretty good (though it can give you some questionable teammates at best if you’re playing random teams)

Your inability to accept your own faults and mistakes doesn’t mean it’s nonsense or broken.

10

I think you don’t understand him.
Basically, he says he often plays against smurf and that this is frustrating.

the idea of MMR is that two equally strong players play against each other. if this system does not work or is exploited. stronger players then play against weaker ones.
What does the weaker player lose because of mistakes? because the better player makes fewer. Miro, you’re onto something big…

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11

While smurfs exist, they’re not that common that he’s running into them game after game after game. One every 10 games? 20? If that? Sure. But every game as he seems to be claiming? Really?

Personally speaking, I’m playing in the largest MMR bracket-range in the game currently. If there are going to be smurfs anywhere, it’s going to be in my league, given that it’s the equivalent of literally the entire ladder put together. But I run into them easily less than once every 20 games. Every game I play, whether I win or lose, I can look at and see the mistakes I make that lead to that loss or victory, and compare them to my opponent’s play.

And sometimes I genuinely question how some of those players are at the MMR that they’re at.

Gameplay varies a lot in leagues. Massively so. Even within the realm of 100 MMR difference the gameplay variation and skill variation can be quite startling. But I definitely wouldn’t say they’re smurfing.

I realise that’s sarcasm, but he genuinely seems to think that he should be winning most, if not all games he plays. Which, obviously, is not how this - any matchmaking, really - works.

I haven’t even gone into how MMR works either, which I could very easily go further into. Even match, favoured, slightly favoured, unfavoured, extremely favoured etc and all the points that are generally associated with them.

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12

It is also the ladder was so dead years ago I was matching same players over and over as if it was GM. I can imagine now.

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Are we really to the same discussion again ? I told you, smurfs (regardless of numbers) are very bad because they make ladder one big mess. They push good players into lower tiers. In Diamond 3 MMR (3.2k - 3.5k) i see lots of dia 2/dia 1 players. I understand his frustration, because i am frustrated too. Why bother playing this game if majority of your oppoenents don’t even belong to MMR range you play ?

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No. No they don’t. Because for them to do that, you would have to be facing an absurd number of smurfs for players to be consistently pushed into lower tiers.

And frankly, if you’re in a lower tier and you’re not progressing up, it’s because you belong there for one reason or another.

Ok? The only reason I ever see D2 players in D3 is if they’ve had a loss streak and are lower than what they usually are, or if they’re offracing; both of which are perfectly acceptable reasons to be playing against them. Such streaks do happen - I’ve had loss streaks where I’ve dropped almost 600 MMR (for context, that’s the entirety of D3 down to plat 2) because of how tilted I was or how badly I was playing that week. Every person has days like this; perhaps not to such a degree, but they do happen.

If their MMR is legitimately in high D2/D1 range while you’re in say, low D3, then you losing isn’t going to matter because you’re not going to be losing that many points at all because their MMR is way further away than yours is, such that you’d really only lose a few points, rather than say, 20 points.

The system categorises each player as follows: Extremely Favoured, Favoured, Slightly Favoured, Even, Slightly Unfavoured, Unfavoured, and Extremely Unfavoured.

If you’re playing against someone who’s MMR is so drastically above you, then you would be considered unfavoured or extremely unfavoured and therefore you lose significantly less points if you lose, while they gain significantly less points for beating you. By contrast, if you win against a player who is extremely favoured against you, then you’re gaining a LOT of points while they lose a lot of points. I’ve gained upwards of 100MMR from beating players that should have beaten me easily.

Serral is the perfect example of this as he’s so far up on the ladder that the ladder considers him extremely favoured against almost every person he plays such that he generally gains only 1-2 points at a time. However, if he loses, he usually loses a lot more than he gains because 95% of the time, he should be the one who is winning.

It’s no different for us, except that we face people who are favoured/unfavoured significantly less than Serral does.

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15

Yes, they do. Here is an example of a guy who made complain thread about this:

Perhaps because you play on NA. Not sure about NA but it is general opinion that EU ladder is infested with smurfs to a much higher degree than NA. I’m afraid that none of us can confirm that because we’re playing only on one server (at least i am - never played on NA) and trust me there are plenty of dia 1 players sitting at dia 3 MMR. Some of them may have dropped because their skill deteriorated over time and they no longer belong to dia 1 but many of them have like <5% winrate in specific MU and losses under 1 min which signifies they are freelosing on purpose.

16

It’s a non issue because the mmr algorithm is self equalizing. Yes, you lost, but this means you will face easier opponents to compensate. People just like to complain, and they find things to blame. It has less to do with reality and more to do with their emotional state. They are unhappy, they can’t rationalize why, and so they find something to blame. There must be something out there causing their dissatisfaction, and they are on hunt for what that is.

In reality, they are probably just bored or stressed. If you’re having a good time, minor inconveniences really don’t matter. Minor problems start to matter only if you are kinda on the edge for whether you are having a good time or not. If you are having a bad time, that’s when minor problems seem like big problems. Really it’s an issue with players not being aware of themselves, their own emotions, and how they get to where they are at. It’s called introspection, and they aren’t old enough / mature enough to do that yet.

That’s why mania (extreme happiness) causes people to take big risks. They will gamble their life savings away at a casino for example. Their threat sensitivity is low because they feel like they are on top of the world, and that makes them ignore problems (even the biggest). If you are having a good time, you won’t even care about smurfing. So if you are upset over smurfing, smurfing probably isn’t the issue.

Smurfing is just an issue with 14 year old rage-balls not having enough emotional maturity to realize they are bored and need to find something else to do.

That said, smurfing does create certain objective issues with the ladder. For example, the top 200 isn’t accurate because there are so many duplicate accounts in Grandmaster. That’s an objective issue that interferes with a function of the ladder. Outside of that, smurfing is pretty much harmless.

17

I don’t know that I’d say harmless, at least for the game, but I also wouldn’t say it’s that common either.

Smurfing - particularly for low, low level players - can be very demoralising because you’re literally just beating up on players who are well below your rank, and that can be very, very demoralizing for those players. Those same players who are in those leagues often need basic macro mechanics that they simply don’t have. They don’t know anything about the game, and to get so thoroughly smashed by a smurf - especially an obvious one - simply makes them not want to play the game - in the long run, that’s bad for the health and player retention of the game, and subsequently its lifespan.

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18

That’s just an issue with their system that allows infinite free accounts. When a new account is made, you have no idea if it is a new player or a veteran, so it places them in a middle league where they have to plow through a bunch of noobs. Instead of allowing anyone to create infinite free accounts, one account should be able to have multiple profiles, and then the system can copy information between the profiles (like mmr). It’s easy to prevent players from logging into multiple accounts. You just hash their IP & system information (ram, etc) and add it to a list of unique hashes. If an account tries to log in with the same hash as an account that is already logged in, they are given an error message that says they can’t have two accounts. They would have to use a proxy and a new computer, aka the hassle to use multiple accounts wouldn’t be worth the benefit. This would allow them to offer free to play & also allow people to have multiple profiles to play on the ladder with. It would fix the smurfing issue because new accounts don’t plow through a bunch of noobs as they boost up to the proper mmr value.

TLDR limit players to 1 account but allow each account to have 5 unique profiles that can easily be toggled between. Smurfing fixed.

I’ve designed & implemented these kinds of systems before. There are easy solutions but big corporations have so much red tape that you’d have to bring the idea up at a meeting and they’d have to review it & then you are green-lit to implement a test case and then the test case goes off to the beta testers & then they do a market analysis to see if it’s going to negatively affect revenue and then you finally get the green light to deploy it & have to create a deployment strategy which has to be reviewed by upper management & then implemented & you have to wait for the launch date before deploying it. Oh and you have to test the deployment strategy on a dummy server to make sure it will work. It’s ridiculous.

Another option is just to add an “anonymous” mode to the ladder. That’s really what players like about smurfing. If you are anonymous, your profile is hidden & your name is blacked out. It’s like you have a new account that can’t be tracked. This would be a huuuuuuge nerf to Serral, by the way, because he O B V I O U S L Y tracks his opponents’ accounts and keeps tabs on what builds they are practicing. If I were a pro player right now, I’d be queuing a new account every day. Some of them would have the same name as other professionals. I’d use a hotkey remapper. I’d program the firewall to block random servers so you can’t tell what region I am from. These guys are being metagamed so hard it’s actually sad. The worst part is they don’t even realize what is happening.

Their approach to the game is “I am going to memorize this build until I have it perfected and it won’t matter that my opponent knows what’s coming because the build is so strong with my perfect execution” and then Serral claps them with a hard counter specifically designed for their exact build. The sheer inanity of it is that they keep rinsing and repeating. It’s painful to watch. The pro scene is apm spammers spamming apm at other apm spammers until one apm spammer doesn’t quite have enough apm to spam so he makes a mistake and the game spirals out of control. It’s ClickSpammer 2. The game has so much emphasis on APM spam that professional players clearly do not need strategical thinking, because, if they did, they would realize they are being metagamed & that their play is way too predictable (likely because they practice on known accounts on the ladder). You don’t need a good understanding of strategy to be a GOAT sc2 player. The only requirement to be a GOAT sc player is that you click fast, and smurfing ironically proves that point.

I was watching serral stream and he said “It’s clem. He always does 211 with this opener” and then it was 211, lmao. Way too predictable.