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Well either you have tanked your MMR by losing a lot earlier or the silver/gold players you face are doing really well and are on the verge of promotion.
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What league you and your opponents are in is not important. It's your hidden MMR rating alone that determines what players you are matched against. If you had a win/loss ratio of 8/10 then the system is obviously matching you against players of similar MMR rating. If you had a win/loss ratio of 18/0 and was getting matched against lower league players, it would seem odd, but this is clearly not the case. The MMR system will look to match you against players with similar MMR rating so that you - on average - have a 50% win/loss ratio. You can find more information about leagues and MMR here: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Battle.net_Leagues http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=195273 |
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It would be nice if players were simply ranked according to MMR. :(
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Hell yes! We can but dream. |
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It is the case. Your MMR is directly responsible for the league you are in. It's just not as clear cut as it could possibly be for practical reasons. The boundaries are pretty narrow (especially in gold, actually) and the system is designed this way to avoid something that would happen very often: players on the border between leagues being promoted and demoted every game they win and lose. The way it is, the system ensures your promotion or demotion is warranted before it happens, which makes much more sense to us. |
#7
30/08/2012
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Can't we at least have access to our MMR? :( |
This is the biggest problem with the entire philosophy of making fake ladders and leagues with bonus point inflation where you cannot compare people on the same league and score and know if they are close to each others skill or a gulf apart. It only makes sense to the designers and not the players. Players care about their position on the ladder, which is their MMR, however blizzard doesen't show this or use it to rank us, the ladder is a mystery, the calculations are hidden. Havn't you guys heard of transparency. Every other league system I have ever seen is completely transparent. The calculations and inner workings are carefully and fully documented for all to see, so that everyone knows and trusts its workings. What we have is some stupid idea that is created to "make us play more" by causing our league position to deteriorate if we don't play for a couple of days. Its all so false. Its like you are trying to con us into playing more, while we would all play more by being given the actual facts that blizzard use to rank us. Stop treating your players like stupid kids and show them the respect that you yourselves would like to receive. Every time you come up with an idea that will manipulate your player base, scrap it and come up with another that is instead honest and open. |
We all understand that, and yes ON AVERAGE this means league correlates with MMR. So on average bronze players have lower MMR than silver players. BUT, if I pick two arbitrary players (say a bronze and a silver) who are matched together and I want to know if it s FAIR how can I? This is a real actually practical example that occurs every day and produces whine posts I'm sure you are aware of and the system gives a misleading view. We assume the silver player has the better MMR... yet in this example it is completely uncorrelated. The ladder is of no use at all. Add to this bonus pool, no -ve points, division offsets etc etc etc and I'm sure you'll agree that we have no way of getting from the ladder to a list of players ranked by MMR. Ergo they are not correlated. You may believe it would be unhelpful to allow the community to rank ourselves player A vs player B or even player A vs. Population Average, but you surely can't argue that there is a correlation. The only way I can see my precise skill position in relation to the entire player base is the neat little graph the MMR plugin gives me in SC2Gears and that graph is in no way harmful to the community or Blizzard... but its seriously useful. Why not start making more stats like this and allow filters and analysis in the game client. I want to be able to see win loss ratios for specific maps, game lengths, match ups, times in the past, whatever... what is so bad about that? You realise in sports statistics are a big big deal, so if this is a e-sport why are they all removed so all we see is #games played in total ever and highest ever league????? Thanks for listening. |
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Edited by Spirit on 30/08/12 15:53 (BST)
@Kapeselus:
Another thing is that like you said, the system is set up so people don't move leagues very quickly or frequently. The consequence of this is people tend to stay in a league for protract periods like 6months. They still want to see progress. Did my winning streak last week move me near to promotion or is it still far off? Are the games i play right now crunch ones where I'm on the boarder or being promoted? Since I made it into master league am I at the bottom of the skill range still or have I moved up to mid master? etc etc etc They can't see MMR so they have to look at division rank but, whoops, division rank is not correlated with MMR, it is highly dependant on games played. So for the 99.99% of us who are not about to get promoted/demoted the leagues are again completely unhelpful. They feel like a black box where we could be going up or down or not moving and we have no idea or feature to help us. On the contrary the features like bonus pool and division offset actively hinder us in knowing our performance. This is a critical critical error for a game such as this where the customers are focused on their own performance and desire a way to compete for those of us who do not have the time or skill to enter tournaments. I'm sure you understand this even if you can't admit it as you must toe the company line, but I would really appreciate it if the feedback you gave to the guys who decide things is that we'd like more statistics and analysis features not less. We're not even asking for MMR to be displayed and downloaded to SC2ranks or anything, just a graph like in the MMR plugin that indicates position relative to population and tracks progress relative to league boundaries goes a long LONG way to helping us. But like I said above, tools to analyse performance by map and MU etc are what we also want. The very fact that SC2Gears exists indicates there is a desire for this and that someone making it has not caused the world to end. And the recent changes to the profiles in the opposite direction to what we had all asked for shocked and angered us. Thanks again. |
I stopped playing for over a month because I was travelling so much.. Came back less than a week ago and earned a promotion into silver today. League position doesn't really matter in terms of MMR as far as I'm aware.. (In this sense) |
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You're not good enough to play against Gold players, so they're matching you against players of your skill level.
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Edited by Telenil on 31/08/12 14:45 (BST)
The question is meaningless: if these two players were chosen by the matchmaking system, then it's a fair match by definition - they face each other because they have the same MMR, give or take the "slightly favored" disclaimer. This is assuming the matchmaking system works properly, but if we don't, that's an entirely different discussion. We assume the silver player has the better MMR... yet in this example it is completely uncorrelated. The ladder is of no use at all.Phrased that way, no. I know what you mean, but these are overstatements. From what I got from the various topics describing the system, the MMR fluctuates heavily at the beginning of each season, and when a player has a huge win or loss streak. It has too, or players would be stuck against inappropriate opponents for a long time if they somehow get placed in the wrong division. In that situation, MMR has little correlation with division placement. But once the player reaches a 50% win ratio against a given MMR range, then his own MMR stabilizes and the division placement start matching the hidden MMR. You will still face players from higher or lower division from time to time, but only because *their* MMRs are not stable at that moment. The bonus pool is a necessity because if it didn't exist, players could stop playing once they reached a high amount of points, and remain at the first place until the end of the season. The only alternative is to remove points if the players doesn't play X games per week, as in Warcraft 3, but I find the bonus pool to be a less frustrating solution. So, is there a way to rank players by MMR from the current ladder information? Yes, if these players are not currently on a huge streak and don't have much of a bonus pool (that is: if they have played a fair amount of games and still do). In that regard, a visible MMR wouldn't help: from what I've understood, the MMR only measures "skill" once it has stabilized, at which point it is is more or less equivalent to your division + number of visible points. |
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@Telenil
I disagree that league position ever correlates to MMR. If you take any league and take any 10 players e.g. players at 11-20 in their league. And then you compare their MMRs they will not run highest to lowest MMR in sequence. You can't even look at position 11 and 12 and say these two players are similarly skilled with similar MMRs. The reason is your points are based on your performance against yourself each season. This comes back to your starting MMR for the season. Say person A starts at 100 MMR and person B at 1000 MMR but are in same division. If they both win 20 games and lose 20 games against similarly skilled opponents they both will have same points and position in league but will still be bottom and top of the division MMRs. Ergo, you cannot compare them in any meaningful way. This gets even worse when you consider all leagues are not equal. Say you get in on day 1 of the season, you will join a league full of players that play alot, getting to Number 1 in this league will be very difficult. If instead you wait a week or two, your league will be full of people that rarely play, and just by virtue of emptying your bonus pool you will be able to be first place in your league. In fact I proved this to myself in season 2 when I was well bad (Im not much better now but meh). I waited for 2 weeks before playing my placement match and stayed at rank 1 all season but I would have been lucky to be about 25th in a busy league. My conclusion is the league system is utter crap, but I don't care because matchmaking is decent enough. Just a shame we have no way to gauge our progress in the game outside of third party addons. |
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Edited by Spirit on 31/08/12 16:49 (BST)
What Fastlane said... but also this:
The question is meaningless: if these two players were chosen by the matchmaking system, then it's a fair match by definition - they face each other because they have the same MMR, give or take the "slightly favored" disclaimer. The example was given because it often comes up on the forums. However, it need not be 2 matched players. Lets say I want to compare myself to my mate. I am Platinum rank 43 he is Platinum rank 16, who is better? What about our third friend who is Silver rank 3? (answer: we're all the same skill... ergo, no correlation to MMR).
No, only at the beginning of a players career. Points fluctuate heavily at the beginning of each season and points are all we see... another reason why leagues =/= skill. Until the end of the season even in a best case scenario there is no correlation because the beginning is so variable.
No. Because of division offsets and bonus pool. How can rank = MMR when your rank changes even if you have not played due to other people playing. Your MMR hasn't changed but your rank has. Its not correlated. |
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Edited by NewbieOne on 31/08/12 18:01 (BST)
I remember getting promoted and demoted a lot between gold and silver. Maybe not a lot but (after S1 where I placed silver, got demoted to bronze, came back after like 2 weeks or so), I basically played vs gold or even plat in late S1/S2, finally got placed gold after the placement match in S3. Then, after being ranked high gold, I got demoted to silver late August 2011 (don't remember which season), put back to gold in like 5 days. Worth nothing, around the demotion time, the system insisted on giving me lower and lower ranked opponents until I actually lost to bronze players (who were more difficult to deal with than the gold guys I'd played before demotion; notwithstanding that bronze is already dangerous due to all the new accounts of good players, rass-changing people, derankers, smurfs etc.) to the point I felt the system wanting to demote me further. I somehow broke the losing streak, and from that point on it was easy. Got myself back to gold and things returned to normal. Also, I've had numerous episodes of being matched against plats, after defeating top golds, and almost invariably losing to those plats. Then it seemed that whenever the system decided it couldn't promote me (despite trying ;)), it then initiated an attempt to demote me. This was awful to deal with not in the least because the lower ranked players I was getting in such losing streaks were harder to defeat than my normal opponents from my own league from before the system going ballistic on me. It may be a series of coincidences plus different metage between leagues and perhaps small skill differentials between neighbouring leagues, and perhaps even some degree of subjectivity on my part (e.g. it is only a feeling, hunch, that the system initiates an attempt to demote you immediately after the failure of an attempt to promote you), but the overall experience is very frustrating and I don't think it's all working well. When I think I've never actually been promoted other than to correct a demotion (within a couple of days, so this makes the demotion look so unnecessary), and I've been demoted twice, it makes me feel negative about the system. (Not to mention the many swings back and forth in the apparent judgement of my MMR that didn't end in an actual reclassification.) |
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Edited by Telenil on 31/08/12 22:03 (BST)
No. Because of division offsets and bonus pool. How can rank = MMR when your rank changes even if you have not played due to other people playing. Your MMR hasn't changed but your rank has. Its not correlated.First, "not correlated" would be a massive exxageration even if you were correct. Second, players that have 0 bonus points in their pool all have the same offset, so you can ignore it. A ranking system has to take player activity into account, or people can just stop playing when they get to the highest rank and stay at the first place until the end of the season. As I said in the previous post, rank only "equals" MMR when you play enough games to keep your bonus pool low (which I personnally finds difficult, but that's an other topic). The example was given because it often comes up on the forums. However, it need not be 2 matched players. Lets say I want to compare myself to my mate. I am Platinum rank 43 he is Platinum rank 16, who is better? What about our third friend who is Silver rank 3? (answer: we're all the same skill... ergo, no correlation to MMR).Again, this is only because your players didn't play enough games. If they do (and still have the same skill) they will be promoted or demoted appropriately until they are all in the same league and have about the same number of points - not necessarily the same rank due to variations between divisions. Fastlane is right to say that players in divisions don't all have the same skill, but players in a weaker division will have fewer points than players in a stronger one - so you could still rank the players by MMR by looking at their points. I don't claim everything I wrote is 100% correct, but the general idea makes sense. This comes back to your starting MMR for the season. Say person A starts at 100 MMR and person B at 1000 MMR but are in same division. If they both win 20 games and lose 20 games against similarly skilled opponents they both will have same points and position in league but will still be bottom and top of the division MMRs.Nope, there are additionnal corrections made to get players to their appropriate rank. If A and B both have 1000 MMR but are at the bottom of their division, each of them will see the other as Favored. The winner will gain 18 points and the loser lose 6 points, so both of them will climb the ladder quickly. It may sound far-fetched, but it is fairly visible at the beginning of a season. Check the number of points your opponent lost the next time you win against someone Favored, it is likely to be much lower than you would expect. This is also why you often see the opponent as Favored, but rarely see yourself as Favored. |
