MMR in Blitz badly needs to be addressed

PVP Battlegrounds
1

It’s really unfortunate how poorly MMR is currently working and it’s going to turn players away. In the end, this isn’t about wins and losses as we all benefit sometimes and not others.

First off, the range between MMR and CR needs to have a limit. For instance, putting a 1600cr player or lower in a 2800+ match isn’t fair to anyone. Lots of times these players are still gearing. Maybe they got a few good wins to start and they are tossed in a range well past their ability and well past what their gear would allow for.

Example: Priest with all green gear outside of 3 pieces is tossed in a 3k match. We get completely wiped almost instantly. Priest said they had low gear. Their max xp is about 1800. In the end, people just get pissed off because it’s a guaranteed loss for them and the healer, to no fault of their own, is left being the target. The priest’s record up to that point was good, so I’d hate to see them be discouraged by it. We all want more healers in queue…

Imgur

However the placement matches are working, the current system is cooked. While I get the goal of MMR is to get players into their ‘correct’ skill range as quickly as possible, it can jump so massively that a few wins is putting players 1,000+ rating above where they may comfortably play.

Second, the MMR death spiral is incredibly difficult to get out of outside of pure luck.

Imgur

This has happened a bunch of times to me already. You get 2-3 unlucky matches and now you’re 200-300+ MMR below your rating. Such that when you finally get a win, you may get close to nothing for rating and you’re still well below your previous MMR range. You have to win 2-3+ matches in a row AND hope they are in a good MMR range.

To that, there is something about the system that tries to average your CR/MMR relative to your teams CR/MMR. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but your entire teams average CR might be 200-300+ below yours, while the entire enemy team is 100-200 or more above your team. This means you’re constantly being put in groups where you’re the ONLY one losing rating. This can happen multiple matches in a row and you can completely tank your rating and potentially lose days or even weeks of progress.

While it’s great to be on the upside of this, it’s awful to be on the downside. I went from being 2400 MMR on one of my shamans to 1600 MMM after a few losses. It’s incredibly difficult to recover from and you basically have to tank your CR before you can make any progress rebuilding.

Lastly, the current system is causing bloat and inflation. While It’s fun to be able to hit those high ratings, it ends up being too volatile and making games very unpredictable.

What can Blizzard do?

Tighten up the acceptable range difference between CR and MMR. While this will slightly increase queue times, it will dramatically bring up the quality of play. I could maybe understand if the game was taking into account other factors, like gear ilvl, previous xp, etc., but it’s obvious that isn’t happening and I’m not sure even that would be a good fix.

With that, award MORE CR to start off as well. The grind starts to early. While MMR is massively out pacing potential ability, CR is badly lagging and it still takes a long time to get rating.

There should never be an instance where only one player is potentially losing rating. A lot is riding on that win for them and the other players may not be as concerned because they have nothing on the line. I see it often. Just happened in my last match. MW is only 1400 in a 2600 match. They died after the first cap and left. Crazy. We had plenty of time to come back and cap again, but nope… they have very little to lose so they just leave. If it’s like shuffle and they don’t want to take that MMR loss, then I get why they’re leaving. If that’s the case, that needs to be addresses ASAP. I don’t want to leave a match to test it, but that’s my guess.

11 Likes
2

Their cr being 1600 literally doesn’t matter if the mmr they’re playing at is 2800. If their mmr is 2800, they’re going to get dropped into 2800 matches. Their cr has no bearing on this.

4 Likes
3

It does matter because it’s a measure of how many games they have played, especially relative to the placement matches.

It’s an extremely consistent metric to go off of. This isn’t complicated.

1 Like
4

The only rating that matters for making matches is the one literally called matchmaking rating.

4 Likes
5

It looks like you want to argue and not present solutions. I’m saying from experience taking both into account would make the game better. If blizzard intends for placement matches to work as they are now, their needs to be an acceptable range. If not, you continuously will have players that have VERY few wins making into matches substantially higher than their gear or ability allows for.

This isn’t an isolated at all. Happens multiple matches in a row where some player, still in greens, is put in a match that well out paces what their gear would allow for.

1 Like
6

Delete inflation so starting mmr the last week of the season isn’t 2800 or whatever it is.

7

That’s not the problem. This has been the case since the start of the season.

8

I only played blitz at the start of the season and it was never a problem.

9

I played blitz from the start of the season and my first shaman hit 2700 MMR in placement games. I wasn’t even fully geared…

10

It doesn’t make sense for someone who went 5-0 on their first few games to be nearly 3k mmr, especially when a lot of those beginning games are purely luck

4 Likes
11

It does when they’re being dropped into and winning games at 2k, 2200, 2400, 2600, and 2800 mmr. The mmr from your first games are going to be more volatile as it tries to figure out where to place you and mmr in blitz is extremely inflated to begin with.

12

It’s just unfair from the other perspective, because when they finally fold for many of the reasons OP said, it makes everyone else on the team suffer.

2 Likes
13

That isn’t what’s happening. I had a ret with some blue and green gear in a 2600 match. Their record was 6/9.

You don’t understand the problem.

14

Ignoring the part where the gear is scaled up so the difference is extremely minor, they still won 66% of their games around that mmr.

15

They had 9 games played total and 3 of them were losses. As I said, if Blizzard wants MMR to be that dramatic, then at the very least, have some additional qualifiers to improve that system. Or… sure, we can just bump down MMR gained substantially as well. Whatever. I think keeping MMR a bit volatile to start isn’t bad, but just tighten up the range a bit and players can still get to their ‘intended’ MMR range quicker.

16

There should not be any volatility. At one point everyone started at 1500 in arena. You either went up or you went down. BGB needs to use this system for mmr and cr at start even though arena dropped it. They are two different beast. I know they would have to alter the reward structure for elite mog purposes but imo the elite mog should be an esemble like you buy on the trade post for full set at 1800.

Anyway the current system sucks and needs improvements. Whether it’s something like i said or everyone starts at 0 everything…

1 Like
17

3k is low though so to be that dramatic to find the median of belonging for that person is probably okay. this is relative to the time of the season too.

Until a better system is created, this one isn’t that horrible.
It’s only when you get those type of players who impact the games of people who are playing for a R1 title

they need to change the cap for cr from 24 back to 192.

18

I honestly feel like they have something in the background that actually adjust for low population in the queue and makes things worse. Just a hunch but I think because pvp has been so over run with so many issues the pvp population has plummeted.

Anyone have a place that shows pvp player (not character) numbers? Would be very interesting to see what it has done over the past few years.

1 Like
19

The pvp population is split between 4 iterations of WoW. Bgs pop fast on cata, sod and era faster than retail.

1 Like
20

No, at the start of the season, most of the top of the ladder and/or the people with the most games played had roughly equal MMR and CR. The inflation kicked in after 2-3 weeks when alts became a larger factor in games, in part because of alts using duo queue with mains.

When 2100-2400 was top of the ladder, the MMR wasn’t much higher.

The reason Blitz MMR/CR is so volatile is two-fold;

  1. The system wasn’t actually designed with duo queue involved, which really messes with the math of game formation when pairing highs and lows.
  2. The low point gain from wins is indicative of a bracket that is trying to average outlier ratings over hundreds/thousands of games played, which the average player is simply not playing.

Everyone eventually trends towards a 50% winrate after hundreds/thousands of games, and eventually MMR/CR begin to equalize as a result, but not if you complete your “goals” at 65% winrate at 2450 rating and 3k MMR. Realistically, many of those people in that particular situation would even out to roughly equal MMR/CR at around 2600-2800, if they chose to keep queueing. Instead, many of them take breaks or swap characters.

tl;dr Blitz is designed for more individual player activity than the average player in the bracket sustains, and duo queue breaks the game formation math, particularly early in the season, promoting initial inflation, which feeds back into the first part of this run-on sentence.

I’d encourage you to go to one of the leaderboards tracking player activity and sort the bracket by games played and looking at winrates, and compare/contrast what you see there versus sorting by winrate. Might make my point better than my wordy explanation can.

1 Like