I’m dabbling my feet back into SC2 after a few years of not playing. I’ve certainly forgotten quite a bit, but I’ve jumped back into some ranked matches to get the hang of things again. I was 1v1 plat when I stopped, and I’ve been placed in silver now. The odd thing though is that out of my 23 matches I’ve played since I’ve been back, all but four or five have been against plat players. I’m holding my own there but mostly losing. I’ve done very well against silver players and generally won my matches against folks in gold. But I keep falling lower in silver because I’m not winning against guys in high plat. It’s good for my improvement and all but it does make me curious how the game is pairing up players for ranked matches.
Do the gaps have something to do with MMR? Is the game just trying to pair me with the closest skilled player as quickly as possible?
their match making system isn’t the greatest, it’s made to be faster than closer in MMR, sort of the quantity over quality debate. as some people would rather quality over quantity, but people complained in the past about que times so this is what we got.
i think matchmaking is very weird. im diamond, and sometimes i play with guys with good build orders, 200~ apm and multitasking, only to play another game with a guy floating 1000 minerals in the first minutes while doing a weird 1 base timing and losing.
i think it is very annoying because i never know if im supposed to assume my opponent is good
If you have less than 25 ladder games played, chances are that you are still in provisional MMR :
you have a displayed provisional MMR, which is generally lower than your true MMR, and from which your league is base (in your example, silver)
And you have your real MMR, which is used to select the opponent you’re matched with (here around plat3).
So a freshly restarted ladder account could indeed display a silver league and match you with gold-plat opponents during that provisional state. Once that state finishes (≈ 25 games) the provisional MMR will go away, and only the real one will be use to place and match you.
It’s their MMR you should look at. If your silver 1 players have lost a lot recently, chances are their MMR is closer to your bronze 2 than their silver 1.
There are various elements that could affect an opponents’ performance : getting out of their comfort zone, changing style, further MMR (if you play when there are less people to be matched with), and smurfing. More explanations about those factors here.
Yes it’s probably their MMR is close to mine (my league is Bronze1 now, but in profile according to my MMR it now shows gold3). I think that is why I am getting much higher league players. But this makes climbing up a bit harder, since you would expect getting silver3-bronze1 to be be matched against so I can feel platinum players are not happy to play vs diamon1-master3
If you have a gold 3 real MMR and a displayed bronze 1 league, then you’re probably still in the provisional MMR state I described for Valix. Your MMR and your league will align more and more the closer you are to the 25 games required to get out of that state.
I have observed that the average MMR per league tends to decrease with time, so the devs had to adjust the MMR floors to maintain the wished population ratio for each league. That means that for some reason, most players tend to lose a bit more than they win, while a smaller part of the people win a lot more than they lose.
That’s also why I think smurfs are responsible of part of such MMR shifts.
That’s also why people from one league often must be able to beat the less performant users of the above leagues in order to be promoted, which is paradoxical to say the least. For example, even if that bring us back some years ago, to first get into platinum I had to beat a diamond offracing and the main race of two platinum somewhat underperforming.
so I can feel platinum players are not happy to play vs diamon1-master3 