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Hey TL friends,
My friend was recently in a bit of a predicament. He played his placement matches and despite going 7-3 ended up placed into Bronze 2. In preseason he reached a height of Rank 24 after playing with a friend who got up to Rank 1, but had played a lot of games in the Rank 30-40 range as well. He had an MMR of around 1000.
Naturally he was a bit upset to be beating Gold/Plat level players in placement and getting placed into Bronze. He made his way up to Bronze 1, but lost the promotion game, then proceeded to go on a devastating loss streak which culminated in demotion to Bronze 5. He would keep playing, keep getting wins, then losses, and never getting anywhere. This was, for him, the definition of MMR Hell - that his teammates were simply never consistently good enough for him to put together a winstreak.
I know the player, as I used to play with him myself fairly regularly - and I know he isn't as bad as Bronze 5. But I felt like for him to say that it was his team being the sole problem was too much, and that there was likely a lot he could do to carry the game/improve himself and by proxy the team too. He did not accept this, and so set me a challenge - he gave me 40 games to play on his account to get it to Silver 5 from Bronze 5. If MMR Hell is real, he reasoned, even I - and I am not the greatest player, just Diamond 1 - would not be able to carry these players with any consistency.
The account's record was W31 L44 when I started, at Bronze 5. I completed the challenge in 36 of the 40 games, leaving it with a record of W61 L50. One of the losses was a result of a lag/disconnect.
Individual hero stats are below:
Rehgar W5 L1
Tassadar W1 L0
Sylvanas W1 L1 (disconnect)
Kael’thas W2 L0
Zagara W18 L2
Li Ming W1 L0
Muradin W1 L0
ETC W1 L1
Johanna W0 L1
Sky Temple, Dragon Shire, Tomb of the Spider Queen (the d/c) and Garden of Terror saw 1 loss apiece. Cursed Hollow saw 2 losses.
2 of the Zagara games were post-patch (both wins). All other games were pre-patch.
I was thinking of posting this as some kind of evidence to every bronze/silver player out there that MMR Hell is a myth, and that if they are good enough, they can and will carry themselves out of the league they are stuck in.
I had games where we had teammates sulk and trollpick if their pick got banned. Arguments from draft to the end of the game. Insults, bad calls and feeding all over the place. Sometimes, it was too much to carry through - an Illidan hunting off spawn into all 5 of them repeatedly, for instance, was too damaging to handle on Cursed Hollow. A Raynor deciding to stop Hearthstoning when there was a Boss killing our Core. But often, even with a Vikings player with all 3 together alongside an Abathur saltpick after Nova was banned never leaving our base, I could still carry a win. That there was an 84% win rate (correct me if my maths is wrong).
But anyway, TL, I know you guys aren't as affected by such concepts - but I was wondering if you would think it a good idea to post some form of the above (with screenshots) as a thread on the battle net forums or Reddit? Think it would go down well? Suggestions/criticisms? Open to anything.
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It will be interesting to hear if your friend sinks back down to bronze.
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The mmr is fucked some how, cause I have a 68% win rate, and stuck in silver lolZzz.... But I also haven't farmed games. Even then, it fucking sucks cause it's a nasty grind to get back to my previous mmr/rank (6).
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This is some very interesting data. I am in a similar situation as your friend. Bombed my original placements, got into the 30's but couldn't get anywhere. MANY bad team's and throws and afk's. I got bronze 1 in new season. I am now up to silver 4, and there have been struggles, but I feel I am making progress. This data motivates me, to know that if I continue to study and improve, I will get hopefully get more wins.
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On July 14 2016 11:14 Larkin wrote:
But anyway, TL, I know you guys aren't as affected by such concepts - but I was wondering if you would think it a good idea to post some form of the above (with screenshots) as a thread on the battle net forums or Reddit? Think it would go down well? Suggestions/criticisms? Open to anything.
I wouldn't bother, the topic has been around since the dawn of team based competitive gaming. It's the nature of these type of games with so much player variance that a number/rank is only so accurate, Elo hell could "exist" in all levels of play. All your example shows is that an account can be boosted because you're level of play is significantly higher that you can make up for your team's inefficiencies. The point in which many players cannot accept is that they've hit their skill ceiling and are unable to climb past whatever rank because the game is now more less 50/50. If you were slightly better, or slightly worse, and you played thousand upon thousands of games WHILE maintaining the exact level of play, you would normalize to where you should be, because statistics works wonders with large numbers and Elo is purely statistics. Since the general population doesn't have time to play thousands of games in small periods of time, the concept of Elo hell rose, as players wished they were higher, but can't because the variance of skill on his/her team is higher than the wishful thinker's skill level to break the 50% win rate.
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So MMR hell is when you are placed so low that you cannot carry your team and go back to your "correct" rank?
I think it must be true to some extent.
However, when i got my first placement i ranked up pretty fast, due to my rank adjustment points and also because i kept a good winrate. What should have been MMR hell, after my bad results during placement, never happened.
Now i still got bonus rank adjustment points (doesn't really matter if i have to win the promotion match anyway), but i lost many promotion matches and my winrate started moving towards 50%.
I do think my place is a bit highter up (matchmaking also seens to think so), but facing the reality of my results i cannot be too far from my skill level.
Maybe if you are placed too high the game will overestimate you a bit since you are carried and if you are placed too low it will conversely underestimate? Specially if you are soloQ like me.
I think people tend to overestimate their own skills for reasons that were endlessly discussed. Naturally, they will blame the MMR hell mythological beast, but in truth its just a minor issue.
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Try to play as much support in HL as possible and I show you real MMR hell...
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On July 14 2016 15:23 Superbanana wrote:
So MMR hell is when you are placed so low that you cannot carry your team and go back to your "correct" rank?
I think it must be true to some extent.
I think MMR Hell is usually defined as a place where one cannot win with any consistency due to a perceived lack in ability of teammates being outperformed by the enemy team. This data was to prove that the vast majority of the time the reason people don't win is because they simply aren't good enough to carry. A player will have reached their true level when they cease to be able to carry games by themselves.
On July 14 2016 15:35 Creager wrote:
Try to play as much support in HL as possible and I show you real MMR hell...
This is an interesting point. As you can see from the data I found a great deal of success playing Zagara - and for the record, on my main, I'm only level 9 with Zagara, not greatly experienced with her or a Zag main by any means. My most played heroes are Sylvanas, Falstad and Rehgar.
I was W6 L1 with supports here. The Tassadar win was as solo support and I didn't even take Leeching Plasma at 4 - and I still outperformed their Malf for healing numbers. I am fairly sure that if I picked Rehgar every game I would still achieve similar total results. I was able to be top damage in games as Rehgar.
That said, it is definitely true that specialist/damage heroes are far more reliable to carry with than supports. Being able to simply kill a number of enemy heroes yourself is the most consistent way of winning games, without a doubt. Rehgar's finishing potential is perhaps why he is also quite effective.
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so you went 30-6? for a diamond1 in bronze5, isnt that pretty bad and proves ur friends point? i mean, you're supposed to be borderline masters (or grandmasters, as things now stand), and you're losing your every fifth game vs what should be >absolute bottom< of player pool? whereas ur the shining beacon of heroes player base? and u took zagara 20/36 times, best carry in game. now, u played tank only 4 times, support 7, which means u were in carry role in 63% of ur matches? how the hell did u manage to do that?
even as first or second pick, i usually have to fill, cuz i respect other ppls prepicks or lack thereof and dont want to risk playing in composition without a proper tank or support. my gfs on the other hand mains supports, and is stuck in silver. in TL, which sometimes has up to 4 previous rank1 players, she plays well, instead of dragging us all down. its weird.
maybe i should start being more selfish in draft phase. after rank1, placed diamond4. went on a huge losing streak and dropped to p2. then i started doing my "friendly russian guy" persona and went back to d5, had like 12 win streak. lost my promotion game to d4 and kept playing until 5am on weekend. boy was that a bad idea. needles to say i stopped communicating with my team, started raging and got silenced that night, first time ever. so, if we take into consideration im somewhere near d5 or p1 skill level, would u belive me if i said i find playing on my gfs account harder than my own? isnt that definiton of elo hell? (worth noting she mostly has supports unlocked, lili/morales level20 hahahaha, but still)
edit: worst part of current system is that once u have negative winrates, winning gets u ~190 and losing ~210 points, so even tho i was on 12 game winning streak, i was losing points up until i reached 50% again. so maybe its advisable to throw some of the placements and farm easy wins in ur opening games. i also hate the fact that ppl with 200 games are paired with teams where players have 2-5k games (and there are TONS of returning players like that). in my experience they consider draft only a formality, and will never switch away from their nazeebo, illidan or nova. if ur first 3 picks go for damage, good luck winning without a tank/support
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Discussion about this subject is too filled with ignorance and lack of knowledge. Don't bother with it.
The trueskill system does a good job of finding your MMR pretty quickly even if you have been playing a ton of games. A problem many players have however I think is that they can't really play well in poor teams. So you have players who can function fairly well in higher level teamleague or if they got placed around diamond 2 for example, but they start sucking themselves as well when the games are silver 2. Low level games require some different skills too, knowing how to compensate for the flaws of your teammates instead of just not doing something weird yourself. And most of all managing toxicity, unresponsive players, chaotic games and so on.
You see this in many sports. How good you are is not just what level of opponent you can beat but even more so how easily you can beat low rated opponents. In tennis for example i very often see kids which play really well and can beat high level opponents but they break down against players they 'should' easily beat and don't play normal modern tennis. As a result these kids are usually not rated that highly for how good they look on court.
The same thing is in HotS, plenty of players that can play well in normal decent games where everyone plays a bit standard. But they don't know how to cope with poor games, toxicity and all that comes with it. And any pro games or anything you watch doesn't really help much for these games either, tactics in crap games often need to be very different.
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One of the most reasonable explanations I have read for "MMR hell" is the player who played a ton of games with Heroes of the Storm as their first MOBA ever and sucked, now they are significantly better and keep getting negative adjustments because their previous MMR says they should be lower. They make a brand new smurf account and get ranked significantly higher than their original account and are able to maintain that rank, and that is their "proof" of MMR hell.
It's also reasonable to argue MMR hell doesn't mean that the player who feels they are stuck there is a grand master being held back by the system. They might just be a silver or gold stuck in bronze, or a platinum or diamond stuck in silver or gold. Good enough to hold their own with higher ranked players than where they are like your friend, but not good enough to carry a game if their team mates are bad. I can see that being a form of "MMR hell". I definitely don't agree with people who think they are in MMR hell and don't see any room for improvement in their own play.
I agree that playing in lower MMR games takes a different mindset and approach. Your team is going to do things they shouldn't and players instinctively will try to do the "right thing" but often it's better to go with the team on their bad call than let them die 4 vs 5, and just hope that someone on the other team also makes a mistake you can punish. Theoretically they should be roughly equal skill to your team mates.
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It's just something for players suffering of Dunning-Kruger effect to blame, as blaming oneself obviously doesn't happen if one is delusional.
This is what happens if you're actually better than what the system tells you:
(Solo QM, I was away for a month on holidays as the ranked changes game, so other players have had time to grind their mmr back up after the squish+uncertainty reset, meaning that since I hadn't done so, I'd be matched up with players that are below my usual level.)
![[image loading]](https://i.snag.gy/52hORW.jpg)
Went 12-1 yesterday and have no doubts about being able to keep that up until I reach my level.
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On July 14 2016 23:10 karazax wrote:
One of the most reasonable explanations I have read for "MMR hell" is the player who played a ton of games with Heroes of the Storm as their first MOBA ever and sucked, now they are significantly better and keep getting negative adjustments because their previous MMR says they should be lower. They make a brand new smurf account and get ranked significantly higher than their original account and are able to maintain that rank, and that is their "proof" of MMR hell.
As someone who couldn't get out of rank 30 for several months, I have a very deaf ear to these kinds of complaints. I must have had two thousand games in before I started visiting these forums and focusing on improving my play, and I rose fairly quickly(within a two-three week period) to rank 10, then to rank 5 at my peak.
Sure, when I started a smurf I got diamond in QM on hotslogs really quickly: but the system was matching me with brand-spanking new players every single game. I was able to singlehandedly carry as raynor because players kept letting me kill them over and over all game long.
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On July 14 2016 19:38 snailz wrote:
so you went 30-6? for a diamond1 in bronze5, isnt that pretty bad and proves ur friends point? i mean, you're supposed to be borderline masters (or grandmasters, as things now stand), and you're losing your every fifth game vs what should be >absolute bottom< of player pool? whereas ur the shining beacon of heroes player base? and u took zagara 20/36 times, best carry in game. now, u played tank only 4 times, support 7, which means u were in carry role in 63% of ur matches? how the hell did u manage to do that?
even as first or second pick, i usually have to fill, cuz i respect other ppls prepicks or lack thereof and dont want to risk playing in composition without a proper tank or support. my gfs on the other hand mains supports, and is stuck in silver. in TL, which sometimes has up to 4 previous rank1 players, she plays well, instead of dragging us all down. its weird.
maybe i should start being more selfish in draft phase. after rank1, placed diamond4. went on a huge losing streak and dropped to p2. then i started doing my "friendly russian guy" persona and went back to d5, had like 12 win streak. lost my promotion game to d4 and kept playing until 5am on weekend. boy was that a bad idea. needles to say i stopped communicating with my team, started raging and got silenced that night, first time ever. so, if we take into consideration im somewhere near d5 or p1 skill level, would u belive me if i said i find playing on my gfs account harder than my own? isnt that definiton of elo hell? (worth noting she mostly has supports unlocked, lili/morales level20 hahahaha, but still)
edit: worst part of current system is that once u have negative winrates, winning gets u ~190 and losing ~210 points, so even tho i was on 12 game winning streak, i was losing points up until i reached 50% again. so maybe its advisable to throw some of the placements and farm easy wins in ur opening games. i also hate the fact that ppl with 200 games are paired with teams where players have 2-5k games (and there are TONS of returning players like that). in my experience they consider draft only a formality, and will never switch away from their nazeebo, illidan or nova. if ur first 3 picks go for damage, good luck winning without a tank/support
I dunno, I don't think 6 losses, 1 of which was down to me placing faith in my teammate to stop a boss instead of backing myself, and 1 disconnect is bad for 36 games. The point being - again, not to trump my own skill level which isn't crazy high - is that if a bronze, silver, gold league player gets to a similar skill level as me, they will be able to carry themselves out of whatever league they perceive themselves to be 'stuck' in. I didn't get to Diamond 1 level by grinding HL games - I got there by playing QM, honing my mechanics vs the AI, and playing HL in short, sharp bursts (~600 games total out of 2600 total games).
You should pick what you're strongest with if you want to carry. Forcing yourself to fill because of prepicks is a bad move. I've lost games at Diamond 1 against teams with no support, and won games at Bronze with no tank or support. If you can kill them/stop them killing you, you will most of the time win the game.
The rest of what you said indicates to me the real reason of the issues you faced - getting angry/tilted, not communicating/flaming etc - none of that will help you. If you find it hard to carry silver league against silver league, you're doing something wrong.
On July 14 2016 22:03 Markwerf wrote:
Discussion about this subject is too filled with ignorance and lack of knowledge. Don't bother with it.
The trueskill system does a good job of finding your MMR pretty quickly even if you have been playing a ton of games. A problem many players have however I think is that they can't really play well in poor teams. So you have players who can function fairly well in higher level teamleague or if they got placed around diamond 2 for example, but they start sucking themselves as well when the games are silver 2. Low level games require some different skills too, knowing how to compensate for the flaws of your teammates instead of just not doing something weird yourself. And most of all managing toxicity, unresponsive players, chaotic games and so on.
Indeed, this is a very good point. Bronze league HL is an entirely different skillset to Diamond league. I learned quickly that it is okay to have an empty lane if it means you are participating in a fight with your team since it will normally allow you to get kills and get ahead that way - even if you miss soak, which should never happen at higher level. Capitalising on their positional mistakes and decision making - and in doing so, offsetting your own team's - is more important than trying to play standard in many cases.
On July 14 2016 23:10 karazax wrote:
One of the most reasonable explanations I have read for "MMR hell" is the player who played a ton of games with Heroes of the Storm as their first MOBA ever and sucked, now they are significantly better and keep getting negative adjustments because their previous MMR says they should be lower. They make a brand new smurf account and get ranked significantly higher than their original account and are able to maintain that rank, and that is their "proof" of MMR hell.
There was a soft reset, though? I know it took some of preseason into account but it wasn't the driving factor (correct me if I'm wrong). I'm sure anyone who makes a new account will initially have a higher mmr/placement than their old account, but if they record the same number of games I expect they'd end up in the same place. A player who gets Rank1/Masters or whatever after 100 games is not the same as one still there after 1000. But yes, it is the other type of MMR hell I am referring to.
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On July 14 2016 17:56 Larkin wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2016 15:23 Superbanana wrote:
So MMR hell is when you are placed so low that you cannot carry your team and go back to your "correct" rank?
I think it must be true to some extent.
I think MMR Hell is usually defined as a place where one cannot win with any consistency due to a perceived lack in ability of teammates being outperformed by the enemy team. This data was to prove that the vast majority of the time the reason people don't win is because they simply aren't good enough to carry. A player will have reached their true level when they cease to be able to carry games by themselves. Show nested quote +On July 14 2016 15:35 Creager wrote:
Try to play as much support in HL as possible and I show you real MMR hell... This is an interesting point. As you can see from the data I found a great deal of success playing Zagara - and for the record, on my main, I'm only level 9 with Zagara, not greatly experienced with her or a Zag main by any means. My most played heroes are Sylvanas, Falstad and Rehgar. I was W6 L1 with supports here. The Tassadar win was as solo support and I didn't even take Leeching Plasma at 4 - and I still outperformed their Malf for healing numbers. I am fairly sure that if I picked Rehgar every game I would still achieve similar total results. I was able to be top damage in games as Rehgar. That said, it is definitely true that specialist/damage heroes are far more reliable to carry with than supports. Being able to simply kill a number of enemy heroes yourself is the most consistent way of winning games, without a doubt. Rehgar's finishing potential is perhaps why he is also quite effective.
I play Rehgar as main since alpha, he's always been really good (even during his healbot period) and I'm pretty confident in my abilities playing him, but let me tell you, it's no use to be able to finish people when your damage dealers have absolutely no idea on what they're doing.
I've played approx. 2000 games, half of them as support, 600 games with Rehgar alone and yeah, I might be suffering from Dunning-Kruger-effect as well, but let me tell you that when I play with a friend who has much higher rank, games are almost too easy as players up there just KNOW what they're doing, I can read patterns way better, decision making actually starts to make sense, people react to what I am doing, e.g. seeing when I drop a totem to chain stun and just going in for the kill. The idea that I'm just bad and belong to Silver has popped my mind several times, yet it's astounding how smooth games go when playing with people way above my suspected skill level.
The game just isn't fun like this, supporting doesn't feel rewarding when every heal you dish out feels like a waste of mana and even commiting to wrong plays just for the sake of team play is just frustrating (even when telling them not to do it beforehand).
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How do you manage to play every game as a hero who can actually carry?? Most of the time the first 2 picks in my team are assasins. What should i do? Pick a 3rd one ? I find it impossible to carry a game simply beacuse no one wants to heal or tank. People like to do damage and get kills because its fun. 95% of my games i play a tank or a support so i'm obviously doomed and can only dream about Platinum.
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Carrying as support might be challenging but carrying as tank is extremely doable. (Mura/Diablo/ETC are all great heroes for that)
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On July 15 2016 09:11 Mnemic wrote:
How do you manage to play every game as a hero who can actually carry?? Most of the time the first 2 picks in my team are assasins. What should i do? Pick a 3rd one ? I find it impossible to carry a game simply beacuse no one wants to heal or tank. People like to do damage and get kills because its fun. 95% of my games i play a tank or a support so i'm obviously doomed and can only dream about Platinum.
if you play a good "solo" hero (falstad, xul, sonya, abathur, vikings, pre-nerf thrall etc etc) you can win with literally any composition because of how much you can do for the team by yourself
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Says it;s a myth, confirms that it takes 40 games for a diamond player to move up from bronze to silver. Right...
If this were sc2 and a diamond players was on a bronze players account, in 40 games they would probably be back in diamond.
Half the HL games are lost before the match even begins. Teammates not highlighting their picks or talking at all during draft about picks or bans. Players auto picking shit that is terrible vs opponents picks. Players afking their bans or picks. Players not even making coherent team comps (nova, zera, valla, sonya, azmodan or some shit)
I barely played HL prepatch, and I was rank 10.
Went 3-7 in placement and was placed gold 1. played with all these idiots and lost most games before they even started. Can't even ally with people on my friends list to rank up because they are diamond, people who were on the same skill level as me that I added since playing in alpha and recognized my abilities. I am best suited playing a tank or support, which can't carry at all.
Not even going to go into the toxics, retards that claim they are 100% right and are always wrong, people who can't simply watch a minimap or soak lanes, people who do not know when to engage (team has full coins on BHB and chasing enemy team/pushing into fort), people who afk or DC, people who are straight up new to the game and asking questions about their hero or the map, people that do not know level 4 level 7 and level 10 power levels are important for deciding when to contest map obj or when to keep soaking/grab mercs instead, people who pick nova/zera and just run around the entire game solo trying to gank full hp heros when they are out of position (not watching minimap of course), etc etc
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On July 15 2016 15:37 MarlieChurphy wrote:
Says it;s a myth, confirms that it takes 40 games for a diamond player to move up from bronze to silver. Right...
If this were sc2 and a diamond players was on a bronze players account, in 40 games they would probably be back in diamond.
Half the HL games are lost before the match even begins. Teammates not highlighting their picks or talking at all during draft about picks or bans. Players auto picking shit that is terrible vs opponents picks. Players afking their bans or picks. Players not even making coherent team comps (nova, zera, valla, sonya, azmodan or some shit)
I barely played HL prepatch, and I was rank 10.
Went 3-7 in placement and was placed gold 1. played with all these idiots and lost most games before they even started. Can't even ally with people on my friends list to rank up because they are diamond, people who were on the same skill level as me that I added since playing in alpha and recognized my abilities. I am best suited playing a tank or support, which can't carry at all.
Not even going to go into the toxics, retards that claim they are 100% right and are always wrong, people who can't simply watch a minimap or soak lanes, people who do not know when to engage (team has full coins on BHB and chasing enemy team/pushing into fort), people who afk or DC, people who are straight up new to the game and asking questions about their hero or the map, people that do not know level 4 level 7 and level 10 power levels are important for deciding when to contest map obj or when to keep soaking/grab mercs instead, people who pick nova/zera and just run around the entire game solo trying to gank full hp heros when they are out of position (not watching minimap of course), etc etc
Yep, I feel you, got 6-4 and placed in Silver 1, just can't play with the majority of these people, my buddy who I've been playing regularily with is dia 3, guess what, it's all QM and unranked draft for us now. I get that it fucks up match making when a rank 30 player teams up with a rank 2, but to be perfectly honest, we usually got mates and opponents from rank 5-20 and yet even those matches were far more fun to play and easier to win than this noob bullshit crap I'm in right now.
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EPT
