[HotS] The Hero League Dilemma - Page 2

These can of posts are cringeworthy and just awful.

The writer and most pro's and people writing these articles know nothing about the finer details of these matchmaking systems and just spout nonsense into the ether thinking they can easily solve all issues.

First of all the length of placement matches, the cap and so on has practically no influence on matchmaking. Matchmaking is done by MMR and rank is only a facade on top of that. Placement capped to diamond or to masters 1000 doesn't matter, matches are done by MMR and it only matters for the discrepancies in rank you'll see in matches.

The introduction of MMR decay is also a stupid naive suggestion by many as if it would fix any problems. It's just incredibly arrogant to think and try to reason how MMR should work. Blizzard has actually just looked at the data and seen that players who come back from a hiatus perform as is expected for their MMR despite having been inactive. You can theorize whatever the hell you want, it has been shown time and time again in sports that decay isn't much of a thing. There is a slight period that you have to readjust and then you're back to your old level generally and adding much decay would only make matchmaking actively worse. Note that there already IS a small form of decay by the soft resets that happen between seasons..

The suggestion to bring back PBMM is also naive. There is nothing to indicate such a system actually works. There is a reason basically no game or sport uses such a system. Using data other than win/loss is tremendously fickle as it's very hard to pinpoint how the data actually indicates someone is doing better or worse than what is expected of him. It isn't like you just plop ~50 indicators into some machine learning and voila, the system can determine how you do based on stats. It doesn't work that well, such stats based approaches don't work well in some problems and determining player skill seems to be one of them. PBMM is unlikely to help at all and the failure of the first attempt only confirms that. At best I see it being used for low leagues while the system is disabled at higher level, which is how Overwatch uses it I've heard.

All in all these kind of posts just infuriate me, a bunch of naive writing from people who think they can just easily fix these problems while they don't know much about statistics and matchmaking systems.

Also some are just acting like it's a "fact" matchmaking is at fault. There is no objective data to show that "matches are more uneven". It could be the case but it could just be a circle jerk with players thinking their matches are worse and 'confirming' this by the posts they see. The ability of players to reliably gauge the skills in their own games is notoriously unreliable. Dunning-Kruger is a thing. Players in videogames overrate themselves and use any excuse (bad matchmaking, luck blabla) to find excuses for their own performances.

This topic is just not suitable for reddit and forums like these, the majority simply has no clue what they are talking about. Everyone just brings out the pitchforks and writes the most stupid stuff. "HL should not be seeded from MMR!!!", "MMR decay needs to be introduced!!", "Placements should be capped!!". Knowing how glicko/trueskill systems work these kind of suggestions are just laughable, they won't solve any issues at hand which is hard to tell in the first place.

The only thing I'd wish is that Blizzard would release an API, some more sensible things could be said then at least. Now it's just a cesspit of ignorance whenever matchmaking or MMR comes up as discussion. Too many community figures and pro's make fools of themselves saying ignorant things about things they don't know the details of. Some subjects are just not suitable for the internet where number of posts and likes determine what makes the headlines and not actual knowledge of a subject. Statistcs, matchmaking, probability and so on are subjects which are deceptively tricky and barely moderated forums like reddit and these here are just a joke. The majority of what get's posted regarding these subjects is factually wrong or at least deceptive and the suggestions made are generally awful. The problem is simply that players THINK they know how something works or should work but they don't.