I played 100 RBG Blitz's and you should too! The MMR system is actually really good

PVP Battlegrounds
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Hello. I am a Old player of this game, been playing since 2007. I have for the most been a pver and when i got the opportunity to play TWW i decided to play RBGS since they finally added Solo que and i have been having a blast. Even tho it wasnt always a blast. (This forum is way too new for me so I havent yet figured out which character i am posting on). however.

There are 3 systems you need to know about when it comes to the MMR.

Visual mmr (basically your grading card)
Hidden mmr (the improvement you do with your teacher between tests)
MMVR(Matchmaking value rating) The grading your teacher assumes you get per test consistently.

I have a fresh MMR, so I assume in this post that your hidden MMR starts at around 1000 MMR (this is important) And when i was done with my placement games I got 1577.

First 10-20 Games.

In my first 10 to 20 games I had a win ratio of pretty much 50/50 give or take a couple of losses more, a couple of wins more here and there. I Queued at green (blue) PVP honor gear so i was at the lowest ilvl bracket that you should enter ranked matches. I got a visual rating of 1577 so almost 1600. I was HYPED cause my goal this season (starting late) is 1800 so i was close. I had 50/50 win ratio here pretty much.

20-70 Games.

In my next 50 games I won maybe 7 games in total
 I went on the biggest losing streak i have ever witnessed in my life, not even other MMR games has allowed such a losing streak to happen I think. I went from 1577 rating down to 1200 rating. It was so bad that I struggled to even get a daily win in for my daily conquest bonus. I thought that it was skill, or lack of gear or bad team mates and it happened to be neither of these honestly.

70 -100 Games.

I said earlier in the post that i assumed that 1000 rating is the baseline hidden mmr for this game, and that explains why I got such a huge losing streak when i had fallen down to 1200 rating my hidden mmr was also 1280 (shown at the end of the BG screen).

What happened at 70 games is that my games returned to normal, I had normal people in my RBGS, I wasnt 1400 player queueing with 300-500 people anymore. The system basically does not believe I am a smurf and now gives me normal games. Since i am basically 30% Win ratio the matchmaking are now trying to take me back to 50/50 win ratio (this is what it wants to do ideally). in 100 games i reached back to 1600 rating. And my games has been really good. I am now 1677 as of writing this post.

So the way the matchmaking works is that it is always gonna try to balance your hidden mmr with your visual MMR. If you got “Lucky” i say lucky cause you get to experience the biggest losing streak of your life. If you got 100 rating at the start and the game put you at 1500 - 1700 but your hidden MMR is 1000. the game does not think you deserve to be at that high rating so it will purposefully match you with worse team mates (Expecting you to be the carry) until it has a baseline on your performance. (It could’ve been smother honestly).

Your own performance is more important then winning or losing. For example I am 1677 rating currently but my matchmaking rating value is 1800 so i always get put in games that are around 1800-1900 rating. The game cant simply know wether you win or lose based on YOUR performance or AFK’ers and griefers or other carries. so the game needs ways to track your performance. This could be (not sure) Damage done, Kills, Objectives, Deaths, Healing done, Defending, Offensive objective playing. So even if you are losing you should focus on playing as good as possible if you aim to climb in the ratings. (Own performance affects Hidden mmr AND Matchmaking value rating) even if you dont win.

The objective is of course always to try to win
 but every game is not winnable (Especially in blitz) where you might neeed more objectives to win a game). And every Loss does not matter (unless you give up). Even tho its extremely hard to do you shouldnt focus on wether you win or lose. If you are playing better then your current rating the matchmaking system will know that and eventually try to climb you up the ratings based on your performance. but keep in mind Kills isnt the only thing that matter. If you have 50 kills but 30,000 damage done while other people have 5-6 kills and 300,000 damage done that damage will be valued more than just topping on the killing blows statistic.

Even tho i wish i didnt have to experience a losing streak of 40 games so the mmr system could track and rate my progress and give me a proper MMR. I have to say that this is probably the best and fairest MMR system that exists in any game and while i am not as familiar with other mmr systems I assume they work very much the same. You just have to grind through the first 100 games and trust the system. (as hard as that is.)

There is no math here, there is no science here, this simply my obeservation of 100 rbg games. And if you are currently experiencing a huge losing streak it could just simply be that you havent yet played enough games. :slight_smile: and that it will sort it self out if you give it time and trust the mmr system that is SUPRISINGLY GOOD.

I

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The main thing people overlook with Blitz is that it’s not designed for you to play 50-100 games, get your rating, and quit for the season. It’s designed for playing LOTS of games. It’s meant for those players who previously queued mostly random bgs and yolo rbgs, as something with more consequence than random bgs, but less downtime than yolo rbgs.

Most people have not played the appropriate amount of games to equalize their MMR and CR on a given toon, including a large majority of the “high rated” playerbase, because they’re swapping toons frequently instead of grinding out those equalizer games.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, that’s up to the individual, but Blitz isn’t a format designed for you to finish quickly. It’s built for long-term patterns, not short-term patterns, and everyone approaches a 50% winrate in the long term; something many people overlook when they’re at a 75% winrate with a small number of games played, and then subsequently crash out as the winrate lowers, even as rating itself may be increasing.

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I appreciate your post, and your focus on good gameplay, win or lose. My personal life (work, wife, family, friends, band rehearsal, etc) keeps me from playing as much as I’d like, and I haven’t even gotten 100 games in yet (on Blitz, anyway) but when I play, I play to win, and to be a teammate. I enjoy just being on a Battleground! Did someone just kill me? Yeah. But we had fun while the fight lasted! I don’t get people who rage quit, or desert a game because things aren’t going the way they want them to. That’s life! Every BG / BGB is a learning experience, and a time for fun!

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Would be a great system if they ever manage to create a format where queue times aren’t bottlenecked by healers.
I think a big part of the appeal of random BGs for most people is relatively instant action.

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Well OP, I am glad you have enjoying the game and having a good time, that is a good thing!!!

BUT, its not reflecting in the numbers, tons of players are not happy and leaving the game, its a massive player drop off thats going on atm. I think its more related to the problems in PvE since the pvp community is soo small.

You can get decent gear in Delves but the better gear you need to do Mythic+, its near impossible to pug and toxic, so the easiest way to get that high key gear is read trade chat
 Tons of PRO teams selling carries for gold
 Evil system that nudges players wards the wow shop to buy those tokens.

I used to love heroic raiding, but when the age of get your AOTC fast, just a wow token away in trade chat, it just became boring. Came over to PvP a couple expansions ago, even the 1800 transmoggies is a sweat fest, you will face many teams on Glad mounts at low rating, not fun lol.

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Wowhead has an MMR guide on how it all works here:

It’s a ‘living’ document so changes as things change. Last updated: 11/14/2024

Anyway, if ya want the math and direct break down it is pretty much all there.

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I’m not entirely sure the bottleneck is actually caused exclusively by healers in Blitz, though.

Duo queue was implemented to try to prevent that bottleneck, but I fear it actually just created its own bottleneck in its place, which indirectly appears to be a healer bottleneck (since duo queues require healers)

The bracket’s ratio of healers to dps isn’t as dire as Shuffles, nor does it feel as punishing for them, but by trying to “prevent” that situation from occuring, they may have simply created a situation where there are too many duos attempting to queue at certain MMR levels, which results in longer rather than shorter queues.

If people at a particular level have the impression that they will all be more successful finding a healer to duo with than queueing by themselves, it creates a deficit of actual solo players while the duos are sorted into independent lobbies.

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That is how it used to work with arena too. If you played 50 games versus 500 to 1000 there was a big difference in rating.

:surfing_man: :surfing_woman:

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The reality is that if you want good competitive BGs, just do random BGs and try to queue with others in a premade. Don’t do Blitz.

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Listen, I’ll tell you something, I think it’s fine that you write your opinion and even more so that you’re enjoying the game.
But in the same way that you have the freedom to publish whatever you want, you must face the consequences. First, given that there have been like 400 posts complaining about Blitz since the expansion started, I thought it was troll posting, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Your logic is something like “I watched 100 horror movies on Netflix and you should too! Those movies are actually really good” and the reality is that there are no good horror movies on Netflix.
Beyond the fact that you could have been lucky to raise your rating, I think it’s a bit out of place to say that the MMR system is “fine” when it seems that you only played with one character, given that there are 13 classes with many specs, it’s very unobjective.
If you enjoy the game, I congratulate you and keep it up, my friend, but I sincerely hope that no Blizzard PvP Developer uses you as a reference.

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I hope blizzard dont use me as refference either
 I Literally started rated pvping a few weeks ago :slight_smile:

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I’m really glad you’re enjoying the Blitz bgs, congratulations!

As a solo player who does everything on my own, I never really liked the traditional arena or RBG because they require reliable teammates. My experience with finding teammates through the Look-for-Group channel wasn’t great (they called this yolo run). I gave arena and RBG a shot for about two weeks, and then I didn’t touch any rated PvP for six years.

This is why I think Blitz bgs are fantastic, I can solo queue, and Blizzard does a good job of matching me with teammates who are on par with me. No premade GY farming, no 13 healers vs 1 healer, and 90% of your teammates focus on objectives. I even get carried many times. If you stop worrying about your rating in Blitz bgs and treat them like enhanced regular random bgs, you’ll really enjoy it.

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/shrug. I just play the game. People care too much about MMR instead of playing for fun first, and then a big maybe, MMR second.

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Something that I noticed (on my BGB Lock) is that even with my losses, the matches are always somewhat competitive. I’d say 80% of the lost BGs were like
 for just a tiny difference like 50 points on a AB, for example.

Which makes me feel a little better to lose there, because there’s an actual effort to do something, as opposed to having devastating losses to premades in the RBGS. At least was my experience so far;

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It’s still too much of a gear war for me. You can socket many items 3 times and custom gear has a sizeable advantage.

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I would agree, but I think a much larger issue is people steer clear of playing a healer for reasons such as wanting/liking the idea of dps, but one glaring issue is the pure amount of heat healers receive in PvP makes it a very unpalatable position to be in. They need the position to be more attractive either through rewards, or something tangible. Also, people need to calm down with the terrible communication.

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It’s not though, that’s the weird thing. On my healers I still get 10 minute queues even in populous ratings ranges like 1300-1600. It’s still lower than the 10-25 minute dps queues I’ve seen, but I would have thought healers would have instant queues. Something else is causing these crazy wait times.

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It’s duo queue.
The reason there are so many lobbies being played is because there are too many duos attempting to play, which is lengthening queue times by artificially segregating players into new lobbies that take longer to fill, rather than quickly filling shorter ones. The 6 duos waiting must be sorted into seperate lobbies rather than the system simply being MMR + first in/first out.

The fix became the problem.

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