So I've been playing some other competitive games, and also been reading about ranking in general, and I've been wondering why Blizzard can't just display our true MMR in the ladder/profile section.
It could be private if they are concerned about people not playing because they are afraid or w/e. It would be something awesome to have in order to gauge how good someone is on the ladder. I've been playing 'Slightly Favored' opponents and 'Favored' opponents who are in the middle of Platinum league, while I am a 10-20 rank range Diamond player.
It makes sense to me, I understand how MMR and an ELO work, but I feel like I'm not being told the full story when I'm a league above people who are supposedly 'Slightly Favored' against me while they are in lower leagues. FYI - I am winning against most of them, something like 8-3 against favored/slightly favored in the last 24 hours.
I just wish I had some final way of measuring my skill, since obviously Blizzard's ladder system is all screwy. I don't know why they ever moved away from the D- through A+ ranking iCCup had...
It's as close to MMR as you'll get. You can't use it to compare yourself to others, and it doesn't work across promotions/demotions, but otherwise it will (unlike points) quite accurately help you track your progress.
Check this out!! Super cool userscript for the Battle.NET pages.
I never really liked iCCup's system, as 90% of players stayed in D or D+ so it was really hard to gauge how good they were. I think Blizzard's current system isn't too bad, but I guess every ladder system is going to have flaws.
I like the idea as a whole, and it would make everything more convenient and accurate.
I can say that Blizzard will probably never do this though...I mean look at their other Battle.net 2.0 features =\
These are the kinds of ideas we need to be tossing at Blizzard. I'm willing to bet my co-NEU student has looked into this, but I just wanted to throw it out there.
The league system does basically tell the whole story. There's simply a delay in the time a player's league reflects his true skill, as obviously it can't always be instantaneous. In other words, a player will be in his rightful place in equilibrium.
I agree that it would be nice, but for me it is certainly not a priority. I'm sure they had good intentions with it regarding discouraging people from not playing, but it is what it is now. And they have a long list of other fixes to make to bnet 2.0 first. Someday I hope it is the way you say. But until then, *eh*
It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
On June 15 2011 10:55 ClysmiC wrote: I never really liked iCCup's system, as 90% of players stayed in D or D+ so it was really hard to gauge how good they were. I think Blizzard's current system isn't too bad, but I guess every ladder system is going to have flaws.
O_O what? If 90% of the players were stuck in D or D+ then that is their skill ranking. If you could get to B+ you were good, you could not get to B+ by just cheesing or all inning every game which was awesome. I don't even think you could really get past C+ with pure cheese but could be wrong ^^.
I do wish thats how blizzard did it even though it wont' ever happen as it could be frustrating :D.
If they revealed everyone's number you would feel like you were progressing too slowly. When you're separated into divisions, it's easy to go from 50 to 25 or even top 10. When everyone is ranked against everyone, it's much harder to move up that much.
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
On June 15 2011 10:50 Chronald wrote:It makes sense to me, I understand how MMR and an ELO work, but I feel like I'm not being told the full story when I'm a league above people who are supposedly 'Slightly Favored' against me while they are in lower leagues..
Then you don't understand how the SC2 system works. League is fairly meaningless for comparing two players and should not be compared to who is favored or not.
The MMR is not a single number, most people would not have a clue what it means, so they don't show it. This thread is a perfect example of this, SC2 does use a real MMR.
I think the MMR is fine but I really wish they would match us on latency as well. Many times have I had to try and play through opponents that lagged like hell.
Displaying MMR in the future may be more likely than you think.
Blizzard kept it hidden for ages in the WoW Arena System, but just recently a couple of months ago started to display it. After the battle finishes you get to see the MMR of each individual player (on both teams) and the MMR of each team. You also get to see how much MMR was gained or lost for each player and team as a result of the battle.
It hasn't really had any negative impact on the arena system either, so I wouldn't be suprised if Blizzard isn't at least considering displaying it in SC2.
On June 15 2011 11:24 StatX wrote: I think the MMR is fine but I really wish they would match us on latency as well. Many times have I had to try and play through opponents that lagged like hell.
You should look at your own connection. In SC2, you get your own latency, not your opponents. If you get a bad latency, it's your own problem.
I can get a ~10 second (!!!) latency downloading torrents and the opponent would never know. In fact, I often turn torrents on when I'm observing my team's practice games because it makes no difference for them.
On June 15 2011 11:24 StatX wrote: I think the MMR is fine but I really wish they would match us on latency as well. Many times have I had to try and play through opponents that lagged like hell.
You should look at your own connection. In SC2, you get your own latency, not your opponents. If you get a bad latency, it's your own problem.
I can get a ~10 second (!!!) latency downloading torrents and the opponent would never know. In fact, I often turn torrents on when I'm observing my team's practice games because it makes no difference for them.
Firstly, I don't like the iccup ranks as they contain too many at the bottom end. Blizzard's spread out ranks is better.
The reason why the loading page is not accurate for you is because you have too much bonus pool. The favoured / unfavoured compares your points with your opponent's mmr.
I like points over mmr because it forces a player to be active. Someone can't go on a hot streak and camp on that rating till the end of the season.
Lastly, if you want to measure your progress, you can use adjusted points, where it is the points with bonus pool taken out.
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
How could this be exploited though?
The only mechanism for changing MMR is winning/losing. How would this change at all if the number could be seen?
The stats in general on Bnet are lacking. I want to see win/loss, just give me an option to hide it if you are afraid of people pussying out because of it.
I want to see how many zealots I've built throughout my entire SC2 career, how many kills I've gotten. I want to see what unit got the most kills in the game I just played, highlighting hero DT's that get 22 kills.
Halo 3 has a very detailled stats system, tracking number of kills, double kills etc, all accessible online. There is no reason why Blizzard couldn't implement this apart from their own laziness.
no games for 6 weeks, massive bonuspool (6xx) and around 6xx ladderpoints. now u get to play people in grandmaster (bratok for example) and 1500master people. Its like in your time not playing while every other guy improved, the system "thinks" u improved too which is just bad and creates frustration as u get destroyed left and right. Some people may say that the mmr will adjust after a few games which is not the case, even after giving freewins and having horrid losing streaks u will still be matched up against grandmaster / high master.
(this happend to me)
Its like ....if u wanna have casually fun at the game after taking a hiatus from it u ve to buy the game again cause the mmr is causing u to ve no fun....cuz lets be honest, who has fun having a 30game losing streak?
On June 15 2011 10:50 Chronald wrote: I've been playing 'Slightly Favored' opponents and 'Favored' opponents who are in the middle of Platinum league, while I am a 10-20 rank range Diamond player.
It makes sense to me, I understand how MMR and an ELO work, but I feel like I'm not being told the full story when I'm a league above people who are supposedly 'Slightly Favored' against me while they are in lower leagues. FYI - I am winning against most of them, something like 8-3 against favored/slightly favored in the last 24 hours.
You're not alone in this. It only started to happen to me recently so I'm inclined to believe it's less of an MMR thing and more of just a glitch in the ladder matchmaking system. Just throwing that out there.
On June 15 2011 11:24 StatX wrote: I think the MMR is fine but I really wish they would match us on latency as well. Many times have I had to try and play through opponents that lagged like hell.
You should look at your own connection. In SC2, you get your own latency, not your opponents. If you get a bad latency, it's your own problem.
I can get a ~10 second (!!!) latency downloading torrents and the opponent would never know. In fact, I often turn torrents on when I'm observing my team's practice games because it makes no difference for them.
On June 15 2011 11:38 {ToT}ColmA wrote: just an example why the laddersystem is bad:
no games for 6 weeks, massive bonuspool (6xx) and around 6xx ladderpoints. now u get to play people in grandmaster (bratok for example) and 1500master people. Its like in your time not playing while every other guy improved, the system "thinks" u improved too which is just bad and creates frustration as u get destroyed left and right. Some people may say that the mmr will adjust after a few games which is not the case, even after giving freewins and having horrid losing streaks u will still be matched up against grandmaster / high master.
(this happend to me)
Its like ....if u wanna have casually fun at the game after taking a hiatus from it u ve to buy the game again cause the mmr is causing u to ve no fun....cuz lets be honest, who has fun having a 30game losing streak?
I'm in the ~600 points 500+ bonus pool club and nothing THAT drastic has happened to me. Now I'll admit that I have and do play people with over 1k ratings but I've never played anyone top caliber after release. That however has to do with my MMR (winning like 9 in a row) not really my points or bonus pool.
What I don't like about this system is the inflation of points.
On June 15 2011 11:38 {ToT}ColmA wrote: just an example why the laddersystem is bad:
no games for 6 weeks, massive bonuspool (6xx) and around 6xx ladderpoints. now u get to play people in grandmaster (bratok for example) and 1500master people. Its like in your time not playing while every other guy improved, the system "thinks" u improved too which is just bad and creates frustration as u get destroyed left and right. Some people may say that the mmr will adjust after a few games which is not the case, even after giving freewins and having horrid losing streaks u will still be matched up against grandmaster / high master.
(this happend to me)
Its like ....if u wanna have casually fun at the game after taking a hiatus from it u ve to buy the game again cause the mmr is causing u to ve no fun....cuz lets be honest, who has fun having a 30game losing streak?
This is solely your own fault. I don't see how your situation can be helped other than adding a decay to your mmr which I'm totally against.
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
How could this be exploited though?
The only mechanism for changing MMR is winning/losing. How would this change at all if the number could be seen?
The stats in general on Bnet are lacking. I want to see win/loss, just give me an option to hide it if you are afraid of people pussying out because of it.
I want to see how many zealots I've built throughout my entire SC2 career, how many kills I've gotten. I want to see what unit got the most kills in the game I just played, highlighting hero DT's that get 22 kills.
Halo 3 has a very detailled stats system, tracking number of kills, double kills etc, all accessible online. There is no reason why Blizzard couldn't implement this apart from their own laziness.
Obviously I don't know how it could be exploited because I don't know how it works. I just know that is the reasoning behind not showing it.
Why do you need to see win/loss? You see wins, therefore you know your losses to within a small hand full. The ratio is ~50%. 50% = 50% regardless of whether you arrived at that percentage by winning 50 games out of 100 or 500 games out of 1000. Disabusing people of the notion that win/loss has any meaning at all is nothing but a good thing. If it has the side effect of helping casuals stay motivated to keep playing then that's even better.
On June 15 2011 10:55 ClysmiC wrote: I never really liked iCCup's system, as 90% of players stayed in D or D+ so it was really hard to gauge how good they were. I think Blizzard's current system isn't too bad, but I guess every ladder system is going to have flaws.
O_O what? If 90% of the players were stuck in D or D+ then that is their skill ranking. If you could get to B+ you were good, you could not get to B+ by just cheesing or all inning every game which was awesome. I don't even think you could really get past C+ with pure cheese but could be wrong ^^.
I do wish thats how blizzard did it even though it wont' ever happen as it could be frustrating :D.
Nope. That's assuming that each season, everyone who has an account plays enough games to get to their actual ranking. ICCup is so flooded with smurfs that in D, you'll only find someone who is actually of D level <=50% of the time. Even if some good players aren't meaning to smurf, they still have to smash their way through Ds/D+s/C-s/whatever to get back to their actual rank.
I do think that displaying MMR might be beneficial for everyone. In my diamond league, i've played some people who are really bad, and others who played very well. In this case, I would like to see how they actually gauge with me by using some type of comparison, mainly MMR.
On June 15 2011 10:50 Chronald wrote: It could be private if they are concerned about people not playing because they are afraid or w/e. It would be something awesome to have in order to gauge how good someone is on the ladder. I've been playing 'Slightly Favored' opponents and 'Favored' opponents who are in the middle of Platinum league, while I am a 10-20 rank range Diamond player.
It makes sense to me, I understand how MMR and an ELO work, but I feel like I'm not being told the full story when I'm a league above people who are supposedly 'Slightly Favored' against me while they are in lower leagues. FYI - I am winning against most of them, something like 8-3 against favored/slightly favored in the last 24 hours.
The favoured system is based on MMR as well as points. If there's a huge points differential (IE they have 2k points and you have 1k) and they're in plat, then they will appear favoured. The system is also front loaded, if there's two evenly matched players then both can have the "opponent is favoured" message. I've 1-1ed the same person in back-to-back games many times and we both will win +13 points and lose -9 the next.
There's also the chance that those players are amazing but are having an off day. Has anyone else beat that master player a little too easily?
On June 15 2011 11:24 StatX wrote: I think the MMR is fine but I really wish they would match us on latency as well. Many times have I had to try and play through opponents that lagged like hell.
You should look at your own connection. In SC2, you get your own latency, not your opponents. If you get a bad latency, it's your own problem.
I can get a ~10 second (!!!) latency downloading torrents and the opponent would never know. In fact, I often turn torrents on when I'm observing my team's practice games because it makes no difference for them.
Why do you guys care so much about MMR as if it affects or does anything? The system doesn't change because you know and Blizzard doesn't show it because 1. It fluctuates too much, telling you nothing and 2. Their current portrays progression on a ladder, not status.
You guys are seeing the system in another way. Let it go and honestly, stop making a big deal out of nothing.
On June 15 2011 10:55 ClysmiC wrote: I never really liked iCCup's system, as 90% of players stayed in D or D+ so it was really hard to gauge how good they were. I think Blizzard's current system isn't too bad, but I guess every ladder system is going to have flaws.
I kinda liked it, when I got to D+ I was "fuck yes", still my biggest achievement in gaming. Now I am high diamond (low masters for 2 weeks) but points just feel the same.
On topic, blizzard will never release MMR to public.
On June 15 2011 11:26 Teim wrote: Displaying MMR in the future may be more likely than you think.
Blizzard kept it hidden for ages in the WoW Arena System, but just recently a couple of months ago started to display it. After the battle finishes you get to see the MMR of each individual player (on both teams) and the MMR of each team. You also get to see how much MMR was gained or lost for each player and team as a result of the battle.
It hasn't really had any negative impact on the arena system either, so I wouldn't be suprised if Blizzard isn't at least considering displaying it in SC2.
My thoughts exactly!
All it does is let players actually be able to gauge how good they are without guessing and stupid bullshit.
Its not the end of the world, but its not something hard either.
Frankly, 'exploiting' your MMR doesn't seem like anything useful except for achievement farming, but that's pretty stupid anyways, and i don't see it ruining the game experience for anyone in particular.
Also, I have a feeling all of the people who are against this have never played in a truly measurable competitive game/sport. Tennis and Chess are two great examples. I played tournament Chess in high school, and you are ranked by ELO. The ranking globally obviously don't mean shit, because I'm not top tier player at all. However! It is something that, even at lower levels of play, helped me find enjoyable, competitive games.
Displaying a player's ELO/MMR/Whatever system it is doesn't take anything away from the player. What it does do is allow the player to accurately gauge their skill against everyone else, like SC2Ranks has tried (and failed IMHO) to do. A simple ELO/MMR ladder would be the best global ranking system around.
And for all of you nay-saying me, what the fuck do you think TeamLiquid uses for TLPD you retard? ELO. That should be enough said. If all players knew their ELO, how could it hurt? Seriously?
If someone can give a compelling reason why ELO should not be displayed, please bold your response so I can read it.
On June 15 2011 11:26 Teim wrote: Displaying MMR in the future may be more likely than you think.
Blizzard kept it hidden for ages in the WoW Arena System, but just recently a couple of months ago started to display it. After the battle finishes you get to see the MMR of each individual player (on both teams) and the MMR of each team. You also get to see how much MMR was gained or lost for each player and team as a result of the battle.
It hasn't really had any negative impact on the arena system either, so I wouldn't be suprised if Blizzard isn't at least considering displaying it in SC2.
I doubt Blizzard will ever post ELO because casuals will be upset seeing their ELO drop with inactivity, in addition to losses. Especially the people who like that losses are now hidden on profiles.
With the current points system inactivity will still lower your division rank, but you never lose points due to inactivity.
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
How could this be exploited though?
The only mechanism for changing MMR is winning/losing. How would this change at all if the number could be seen?
The stats in general on Bnet are lacking. I want to see win/loss, just give me an option to hide it if you are afraid of people pussying out because of it.
I want to see how many zealots I've built throughout my entire SC2 career, how many kills I've gotten. I want to see what unit got the most kills in the game I just played, highlighting hero DT's that get 22 kills.
Halo 3 has a very detailled stats system, tracking number of kills, double kills etc, all accessible online. There is no reason why Blizzard couldn't implement this apart from their own laziness.
Obviously I don't know how it could be exploited because I don't know how it works. I just know that is the reasoning behind not showing it.
Why do you need to see win/loss? You see wins, therefore you know your losses to within a small hand full. The ratio is ~50%. 50% = 50% regardless of whether you arrived at that percentage by winning 50 games out of 100 or 500 games out of 1000. Disabusing people of the notion that win/loss has any meaning at all is nothing but a good thing. If it has the side effect of helping casuals stay motivated to keep playing then that's even better.
So you are just following the party line RE potential exploitation of the MMR system. Fact is, knowledge of the number wouldn't give anyone any more capability to change it, beyond winning games. That is a fact.
I want to see win/loss because it is a stat I want to see. It's a common statistic used throughout every form of competition known to man.
It is important to note that there is a difference between win/loss meaning a player is good or not, and that win/loss has no meaning at all. The difference is subtle, and no doubt lost on many people.
There is absolutely no reason NOT to give a player as many stats as possible, IF there is the option to hide these if someone wishes. In fact I'd argue that the lack of a win/loss turns off more gamers than the lack of it encourages newbies.
An alternative to displaying the MMR openly may be to give a proxy measure to encourage people. I think we can all agree that the leagues are quite broad measures of skill (eg low diamond to high diamond). So it could be possible to tell a player by way of a stat or in the post match screen whether their opponent is high/low/medium diamond, and therein whether they are close to demotion/promotion.
just to go back to the op, there isn't anything screwy about the mmr system, while it same seem confusing on the surface there are HIGHLY detailed explainions of how it works if you serach tl
the 'screwy' part is the non-intuitive behavior based on on the hidden mmr. You can't take someone's league as the be all end all of there skill level relative to you, and until you've enough games your op will always be shown as favored as system is getting your points closer to your mmr
edit - to add, I agree I would like to see my mmr, I also think win loses should be shown, we'll get there eventually.
If you are bad now you will never be good if you don't just play alot and apply your mind to find out what you are doing wrong in every aspect of the game and how to change it to what you should be doing. That being said nobody but noobs give a damn about the ladder ranking and system...being in grandmasters on NA server atleast means close to nothing so everything else is just whatever. Just try to get better.
If you are not in masters you are bad and need to work on so many things to improve why even think of this silly stuff. You can't take one ladder game you play with a random person as a measure of skill anyways especially on such low levels were people make many mistakes and don't play regularly so they have inconsistent performances. If you want to know how good you are find out what you should be doing when you play then compare it to what you actually do. You should know if you are playing well or not and if you are improving your mechanics .
The MMR is hidden. Your ladder rating means nothing unless you're in grandmaster and even then there is evidence to suggest that a player with lower MMR in GM can be higher on the ladder rating in grandmaster due to the way the bonus pool works.
examples: I'm 1400 masters and I play vs GM players and 1000+ masters players, but my girlfriend plays against high diamond to high masters and she's 850 masters. The day she got promoted to diamond she was playing vs masters players which meant her ELO was at a level of masters, but there was no room in a league for her so it didn't put her into one right away.
Essentially ladder has no meaning which is fine with me. It follows blizzards model of having 100% useless ladders in every game they make. It's a small price to pay, however, seeing as blizzard makes the best games in the business.
I wouldn't mind the MMR being displayed, but I can't really complain about the current ladder system.
I love the current system. It matches you against someone with comparable skill right away and brainlessly. If you tried to smurf, you'd only be doing it for a while since your MMR would skyrocket if you were really good. Also, would you guys want to go back to SC1 and scroll through "[D]+ (Map)" in games until you find opponents? That alone can take almost as long as games themselves.
On June 15 2011 14:11 Crumbs wrote: Global chess players know their ELO rating, why can't starcraft players?
Have a look into this online more. I believe (or recall from reading about this) that the chess community had the same issues with people deliberately choosing their opponents in order to abuse the ELO rankings and artificially increase theirs. I believe this is exactly what Blizzard have cited as a reason for keeping them hidden
On June 15 2011 14:11 Crumbs wrote: Global chess players know their ELO rating, why can't starcraft players?
Have a look into this online more. I believe (or recall from reading about this) that the chess community had the same issues with people deliberately choosing their opponents in order to abuse the ELO rankings and artificially increase theirs. I believe this is exactly what Blizzard have cited as a reason for keeping them hidden
But you can't deliberately choose your opponents on ladder, you might be able to snipe someone, but even then that still requires luck.
Personally I wish there was a slow gradual MMR decay for inactivity, this serves 2 purposes. First is that people who don't belong in that league cannot stay in there forever just by playing one placement game (e.g. for a while over a third of the master league players in SEA server had like less than 5 games played).
Secondly, for people who've taken a break from playing, a master league player who's taken say two months off, does he really deserve/want to play against other high caliber opponents? Just because he was good two months ago doesn't mean much - he could be in for an unnecessarily long brutal MMR adjustment period (ie losing streak before finding his appropriate level again, which of course is very frustrating).
On June 15 2011 10:55 ClysmiC wrote: I never really liked iCCup's system, as 90% of players stayed in D or D+ so it was really hard to gauge how good they were. I think Blizzard's current system isn't too bad, but I guess every ladder system is going to have flaws.
O_O what? If 90% of the players were stuck in D or D+ then that is their skill ranking. If you could get to B+ you were good, you could not get to B+ by just cheesing or all inning every game which was awesome. I don't even think you could really get past C+ with pure cheese but could be wrong ^^.
I do wish thats how blizzard did it even though it wont' ever happen as it could be frustrating :D.
Octzerg! Ling all-ins straight to A- (?).
More to the point, I'm not overly concerned about knowing my exact MMR. It would be nice, sure, bit meh.
I always thought it was because they didn't want people figuring out the system and exploiting it. In World of Warcraft I know that they had a lot of problems with people cheating the arena system. I guess they don't hide it now though? Not sure about that, haven't played in 2 years... Back when I played I remember it worked where you had a visible rating and a hidden MMR rating so it was almost the same as how sc2 works
so as show win/lost in diamond, share replay on bnet, real chat channel, watch replay together, stop the limit reach kept showing, able to see others profile on bnet without lag, multiple region access with one client, tournament feature, clan tag feature, multiple name changing and hide BO on bnet.
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
How could this be exploited though?
The only mechanism for changing MMR is winning/losing. How would this change at all if the number could be seen?
The stats in general on Bnet are lacking. I want to see win/loss, just give me an option to hide it if you are afraid of people pussying out because of it.
I want to see how many zealots I've built throughout my entire SC2 career, how many kills I've gotten. I want to see what unit got the most kills in the game I just played, highlighting hero DT's that get 22 kills.
Halo 3 has a very detailled stats system, tracking number of kills, double kills etc, all accessible online. There is no reason why Blizzard couldn't implement this apart from their own laziness.
Obviously I don't know how it could be exploited because I don't know how it works. I just know that is the reasoning behind not showing it.
Why do you need to see win/loss? You see wins, therefore you know your losses to within a small hand full. The ratio is ~50%. 50% = 50% regardless of whether you arrived at that percentage by winning 50 games out of 100 or 500 games out of 1000. Disabusing people of the notion that win/loss has any meaning at all is nothing but a good thing. If it has the side effect of helping casuals stay motivated to keep playing then that's even better.
Your win/loss is not necessarily 50%. The system tries to get you close to 50%, but it doesnt always do this. I am in diamond and I usually am closer to 60%... I just dont play enough for it to rank me up. At the end of Season 1 I was at a roughly 65% win/loss rate after like 80 games or something.
It sounds good initially but if you think about it, there's already people who exploit the hidden one. I thin if we actually knew our real MMR then it would be even worse. It would be out of control. I know the current system is needlessly complicated, but it is that way for a reason. I think the way they have it now is good enough.
The only way to do it 'properly' is the way that ICCup does it. That is to say have everything very open and transparent. Any and all abnormalities and disagreements were looked into case by case by the ICCup staff with replay support, etc. The problem is the size of SC2 and the amount of players playing it means that this is just logistically impossible. It's a shame, but that's the way it is.
I doubt they will ever show MMR and, although it bugs me as a player, I would do the same thing they are doing if I was in their position.
There are behavioural reasons to hide MMR. If we want to encourage more people to player more, then hiding MMR is a good idea. Blizzard demonstrated that they were willing to apply behavioural science when they hid win/loss ratios.
On June 15 2011 14:11 Crumbs wrote: Global chess players know their ELO rating, why can't starcraft players?
Have a look into this online more. I believe (or recall from reading about this) that the chess community had the same issues with people deliberately choosing their opponents in order to abuse the ELO rankings and artificially increase theirs. I believe this is exactly what Blizzard have cited as a reason for keeping them hidden
But you can't deliberately choose your opponents on ladder, you might be able to snipe someone, but even then that still requires luck.
you can leave a game on the loading screen if you know the other person have a lower ELO than you (which give minimal points on win and reduce maximal points on lose)
wonder why people think mmr shows there true skill, in reality they just want to see the hidden stat. mmr is supposed to find you opponents at your skill level, so everytime something unusual happens that is outside the ladder (you make 100 training custom games), your mmr will go wild.
So the ladder is searching equally powerfull opponents for us and it works as long as we play constantly ladder and nothing else. Sounds to me it does what it was supposed to. And elo is a way better measurement of your skill level then the mmr. Maybe remove the bonus pool, because we don't want to get rewarded for not playing, if it cuts into some rankings.
I guess people like iccup because you could be proud of yourself if you reached c- tehehe and now because everyone talks the other down in sc2 ladder, everyone thinks master means you are like a d+ , so they feel like they get not enough pats on the head for being awesome.
On June 15 2011 15:33 FeyFey wrote: wonder why people think mmr shows there true skill, in reality they just want to see the hidden stat. mmr is supposed to find you opponents at your skill level, so everytime something unusual happens that is outside the ladder (you make 100 training custom games), your mmr will go wild.
So the ladder is searching equally powerfull opponents for us and it works as long as we play constantly ladder and nothing else. Sounds to me it does what it was supposed to. And elo is a way better measurement of your skill level then the mmr. Maybe remove the bonus pool, because we don't want to get rewarded for not playing, if it cuts into some rankings.
I guess people like iccup because you could be proud of yourself if you reached c- tehehe and now because everyone talks the other down in sc2 ladder, everyone thinks master means you are like a d+ , so they feel like they get not enough pats on the head for being awesome.
Your MMR isnt adjusted by non-ladder games. So if you play 100 training custom games and improve dramatically, you will have to play a lot of ladder games to allow your MMR to catch up. Also, the MMR is essentially a tweaked ELO... and the bonus pool has no effect on MMR.
People see they are a 2000 point diamond league player, but that has little to no actual meaning. Different divisions in a league will have different "real" point values. If you are in a horrible division, then you actually have an artificially inflated point value by up to nearly 400 points when compared to a top class division. There is no way to know which class your division is either.
I want to see my ELO/MMR because I want to know how well I rate. I want to more easily see that I am actually improving and not just going with the crowd thanks to all of the various adjustments that occur. Getting a higher rank doesnt mean I improved, it just means I played ladder games.
On June 15 2011 10:50 Chronald wrote: Thoughts? Comments? Flames? All are welcome.
The display of the MMR would lead to a "maximize MMR" metagame. This is not what Blizzard wants.
A MMR metagame also could lead to practice in custom games and to ladder only when you feel ready. The ladder game search would have a smaller playerpool because too many guys are worried about their MMR.
Lets say you had a good streak and your MMR peaked. You could get afraid to lose it and stay away from laddering (either playing customs or not playing at all.)
On June 15 2011 16:10 TheRabidDeer wrote: I want to see my ELO/MMR because I want to know how well I rate. I want to more easily see that I am actually improving and not just going with the crowd thanks to all of the various adjustments that occur. Getting a higher rank doesnt mean I improved, it just means I played ladder games.
Those are just points. How good are xxxx points? If you want to measure yourself, you could play in one of the many cups and see who you can beat. If you can constantly beat some names, then you know you are somewhat good. Otherwise you just have some numbers.
On June 15 2011 16:10 TheRabidDeer wrote: I want to see my ELO/MMR because I want to know how well I rate. I want to more easily see that I am actually improving and not just going with the crowd thanks to all of the various adjustments that occur. Getting a higher rank doesnt mean I improved, it just means I played ladder games.
Those are just points. How good are xxxx points? If you want to measure yourself, you could play in one of the many cups and see who you can beat. If you can constantly beat some names, then you know you are somewhat good. Otherwise you just have some numbers.
I cant play in cups because I am pretty much always at work when they happen. In addition, the skill gap between us wouldnt tell me much other than "hey, that guy crushed me... i am not as good as him". Meanwhile, the MMR can directly tell me an estimate on how good I am. MMR is not points, points are just points and are visible and useless.
To the people comparing WoW to SC, there are some difference between WoW and SC, largely because on WoW you have no leagues, just ratings
When your MMR on WoW is 1800, it means you'll hit 1800 in real ratings once you play out the required amount of games. The reason why your real rating is often not your MMR is because the system requires you to play a certain amount of games before you can attain the real rating (because on WoW, get higher real rating=get better gear)
Whereas On starcraft, you're placed directly into a league based on your MMR, so your league placement and your MMR won't be that different - at least not as different as it might be in WoW (there, you could have 3000 MMR, but your team rating will always start on 0. So if you had 3000 MMR but started a new team, you would have NO IDEA how good you were without them showing the MMR)
Plus if they gave you a raw number (your MMR is 1200), they would also have to provide some kind of conversion table (Your MMR of 1200 is equivalent to a 1800 point platinum, after all bonus pool has been played out), which is maybe kind of a hassle, and doesn't really tell you as much as MMR on WoW might tell you (ok then how much more rating do I need to get to diamond?)
Just my take on the situation - I would like to see the MMR, but I wouldn't be too fussed if I couldn't.
On June 15 2011 16:10 TheRabidDeer wrote: I want to see my ELO/MMR because I want to know how well I rate. I want to more easily see that I am actually improving and not just going with the crowd thanks to all of the various adjustments that occur. Getting a higher rank doesnt mean I improved, it just means I played ladder games.
Those are just points. How good are xxxx points? If you want to measure yourself, you could play in one of the many cups and see who you can beat. If you can constantly beat some names, then you know you are somewhat good. Otherwise you just have some numbers.
I cant play in cups because I am pretty much always at work when they happen. In addition, the skill gap between us wouldnt tell me much other than "hey, that guy crushed me... i am not as good as him". Meanwhile, the MMR can directly tell me an estimate on how good I am. MMR is not points, points are just points and are visible and useless.
If you have no time to participate in cups, you likely have no competitive level. In this case, you could just measure the scrubness. (No offense intended, I play in Silver league.)
Lets say you are "1000 MMR" good. What does it mean? What makes the difference between 1000 and 1015 MMR? The number itself means nothing as MMR is measured versus other players. If anyone but you gets better, your MMR gets lower even if you keep 100% of your skill level.
You can roughly guess how good you are. Look at the level of your opponents (regardless if you win or lose.) I myself play almost any time versus Silver, so I am a silverplayer with no hope of promotion to gold, but no fear of demotion either. Silver means the bottom 20-40% of active players. Since I very seldom play bronze or gold, I estimate myself in the middle of silver, roughly at the skill level of the bottom 30% of active players. With random player assignments in the ladder I should lose about 70% and win about 30% of the games.
You too can see if you make progress, meaning if you get better than the average skill increase – when you play versus higher league players more often.
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
How could this be exploited though?
The only mechanism for changing MMR is winning/losing. How would this change at all if the number could be seen?
The stats in general on Bnet are lacking. I want to see win/loss, just give me an option to hide it if you are afraid of people pussying out because of it.
I want to see how many zealots I've built throughout my entire SC2 career, how many kills I've gotten. I want to see what unit got the most kills in the game I just played, highlighting hero DT's that get 22 kills.
Halo 3 has a very detailled stats system, tracking number of kills, double kills etc, all accessible online. There is no reason why Blizzard couldn't implement this apart from their own laziness.
Obviously I don't know how it could be exploited because I don't know how it works. I just know that is the reasoning behind not showing it.
Why do you need to see win/loss? You see wins, therefore you know your losses to within a small hand full. The ratio is ~50%. 50% = 50% regardless of whether you arrived at that percentage by winning 50 games out of 100 or 500 games out of 1000. Disabusing people of the notion that win/loss has any meaning at all is nothing but a good thing. If it has the side effect of helping casuals stay motivated to keep playing then that's even better.
Your win/loss is not necessarily 50%. The system tries to get you close to 50%, but it doesnt always do this. I am in diamond and I usually am closer to 60%... I just dont play enough for it to rank me up. At the end of Season 1 I was at a roughly 65% win/loss rate after like 80 games or something.
The system does not try to bring you down to 50%, it tries to give you 50/50 chance of winning your next game. For example: if a player with 30 wins/10 losses plays 200 games with perfect matchmaking, he will end up with 130/110, i.e. if you had a win rate above 50% win rate before the system approximated your skill level properly, you will remain with a win rate above 50%.
I think it's fine as it is. IF you didn't have Bonuspool (which is the biggest difference) all the inactive players could stay on top. It reflects the fact that who doesn't play will probably get worse over the time, and it rewards activity. More people being more active stimulates the ladders and you're more likely to find an equal match.
On June 15 2011 16:50 lololol wrote: The system does not try to bring you down to 50%, it tries to give you 50/50 chance of winning your next game. For example: if a player with 30 wins/10 losses plays 200 games with perfect matchmaking, he will end up with 130/110, i.e. if you had a win rate above 50% win rate before the system approximated your skill level properly, you will remain with a win rate above 50%.
This is technically true, but it is very likely that you still will get random noise. In the end, the ratio will be close to 50%. The absolute difference will likely get higher, but the ratio is relative and will likely get closer to 50%. After a certain amount of games there is no way to tell if the deviation is caused by an initial bias during MMR stabilization or caused by noise. So any initial bias gets irrelevant over time. No one needs to worry about a positive or negative bias during MMR stabilization.
On June 15 2011 16:10 TheRabidDeer wrote: I want to see my ELO/MMR because I want to know how well I rate. I want to more easily see that I am actually improving and not just going with the crowd thanks to all of the various adjustments that occur. Getting a higher rank doesnt mean I improved, it just means I played ladder games.
Those are just points. How good are xxxx points? If you want to measure yourself, you could play in one of the many cups and see who you can beat. If you can constantly beat some names, then you know you are somewhat good. Otherwise you just have some numbers.
I cant play in cups because I am pretty much always at work when they happen. In addition, the skill gap between us wouldnt tell me much other than "hey, that guy crushed me... i am not as good as him". Meanwhile, the MMR can directly tell me an estimate on how good I am. MMR is not points, points are just points and are visible and useless.
If you have no time to participate in cups, you likely have no competitive level. In this case, you could just measure the scrubness. (No offense intended, I play in Silver league.)
Lets say you are "1000 MMR" good. What does it mean? What makes the difference between 1000 and 1015 MMR? It means nothing as MMR is measures versus other players. If anyone but you gets better, your MMR gets lower even if you keep 100% of your skill level.
You can roughly guess how good you are. Look at the level of your opponents (regardless if you win or lose.) I myself play almost any time versus Silver, so I am a silverplayer with no hope of promotion to gold, but no fear of demotion either. Silver means the bottom 20-40% of active players. Since I very seldom play bronze or gold, I estimate myself in the middle of silver, roughly at the skill level of the bottom 30% of active players. With random player assignments in the ladder I should lose about 70% and win about 30% of the games.
You too can see if you make progress, meaning if you get better than the average skill increase – when you play versus higher league players more often.
MMR (or ELO) peaks for every player. It doesnt continuously rise. If the top in the world are a 2k MMR and I am at 1450, it gives me a rough idea, and it is also a much better standard of comparison. Like I said earlier, I usually have a 60-65% winrate, and I dont play very often... so I dont actually know what my real skill level is. The levels of my opponents also varies greatly, some are extremely high diamond, some are masters and others still are lower diamond. Some with lots of bonus points some with none. Most are equal favor, but some are them favored. Then you throw in the whole divisions thing where certain divisions are better than others by a certain margin and it becomes impossible to figure out your real rating.
Also, just because I dont have time to participate in cups doesnt mean I have no competitive level. It just means I dont have time to participate in cups.
I always play against people higher than me, but that doesnt indicate that I am improving... it just indicates that I am catching up in points and games played. Your MMR is a constant number with gradual increases/decreases. Blizzard uses the MMR because it is a constant number that accurately reflects skill. If there were other ways using the points/league to assign you an opponent they would not have even bothered to come up with a MMR.
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
How could this be exploited though?
The only mechanism for changing MMR is winning/losing. How would this change at all if the number could be seen?
The stats in general on Bnet are lacking. I want to see win/loss, just give me an option to hide it if you are afraid of people pussying out because of it.
I want to see how many zealots I've built throughout my entire SC2 career, how many kills I've gotten. I want to see what unit got the most kills in the game I just played, highlighting hero DT's that get 22 kills.
Halo 3 has a very detailled stats system, tracking number of kills, double kills etc, all accessible online. There is no reason why Blizzard couldn't implement this apart from their own laziness.
Obviously I don't know how it could be exploited because I don't know how it works. I just know that is the reasoning behind not showing it.
Why do you need to see win/loss? You see wins, therefore you know your losses to within a small hand full. The ratio is ~50%. 50% = 50% regardless of whether you arrived at that percentage by winning 50 games out of 100 or 500 games out of 1000. Disabusing people of the notion that win/loss has any meaning at all is nothing but a good thing. If it has the side effect of helping casuals stay motivated to keep playing then that's even better.
Your win/loss is not necessarily 50%. The system tries to get you close to 50%, but it doesnt always do this. I am in diamond and I usually am closer to 60%... I just dont play enough for it to rank me up. At the end of Season 1 I was at a roughly 65% win/loss rate after like 80 games or something.
The system does not try to bring you down to 50%, it tries to give you 50/50 chance of winning your next game. For example: if a player with 30 wins/10 losses plays 200 games with perfect matchmaking, he will end up with 130/110, i.e. if you had a win rate above 50% win rate before the system approximated your skill level properly, you will remain with a win rate above 50%.
What you describe is a system trying to bring you down to 50%. Once you play enough games, you should be at 50%. Problem being, that may not happen for a very long time, which means you dont know your win/loss. If I go on a 50 game winning streak then go on a big losing streak with a few wins scattered in there is no way to know your win/loss without using a program to tell you. Yes, this is an exaggerated example, but it can happen... especially if you train outside of ladder games. If I start out as bronze, go 15-40 then train and win a bunch until the MMR figures out what I should be again (lets say it ends up being 80-60 and in silver now) then I train again and improve dramatically and end up being 170-100 in platinum. The system is trying to keep up, but it cant because of outside influences. So you never end up knowing your win/loss.
On June 15 2011 16:10 TheRabidDeer wrote: I want to see my ELO/MMR because I want to know how well I rate. I want to more easily see that I am actually improving and not just going with the crowd thanks to all of the various adjustments that occur. Getting a higher rank doesnt mean I improved, it just means I played ladder games.
Those are just points. How good are xxxx points? If you want to measure yourself, you could play in one of the many cups and see who you can beat. If you can constantly beat some names, then you know you are somewhat good. Otherwise you just have some numbers.
I cant play in cups because I am pretty much always at work when they happen. In addition, the skill gap between us wouldnt tell me much other than "hey, that guy crushed me... i am not as good as him". Meanwhile, the MMR can directly tell me an estimate on how good I am. MMR is not points, points are just points and are visible and useless.
If you have no time to participate in cups, you likely have no competitive level. In this case, you could just measure the scrubness. (No offense intended, I play in Silver league.)
Lets say you are "1000 MMR" good. What does it mean? What makes the difference between 1000 and 1015 MMR? It means nothing as MMR is measures versus other players. If anyone but you gets better, your MMR gets lower even if you keep 100% of your skill level.
You can roughly guess how good you are. Look at the level of your opponents (regardless if you win or lose.) I myself play almost any time versus Silver, so I am a silverplayer with no hope of promotion to gold, but no fear of demotion either. Silver means the bottom 20-40% of active players. Since I very seldom play bronze or gold, I estimate myself in the middle of silver, roughly at the skill level of the bottom 30% of active players. With random player assignments in the ladder I should lose about 70% and win about 30% of the games.
You too can see if you make progress, meaning if you get better than the average skill increase – when you play versus higher league players more often.
MMR (or ELO) peaks for every player. It doesnt continuously rise. If the top in the world are a 2k MMR and I am at 1450, it gives me a rough idea, and it is also a much better standard of comparison. Like I said earlier, I usually have a 60-65% winrate, and I dont play very often... so I dont actually know what my real skill level is.
In this case, MMR will not help since it has not yet stabilized to get you about 50% win ratio. When the MMR stabilized, you can estimate your level with looking at the level of your opponents. In the current state, MMR (or Elo, btw it is Elo, not ELO) does not reflect your skill, so there is no need to see this number. The solution to your issue is not to display the (in this state very inaccurate) MMR but to play more often.
On June 15 2011 10:55 ClysmiC wrote: I never really liked iCCup's system, as 90% of players stayed in D or D+ so it was really hard to gauge how good they were. I think Blizzard's current system isn't too bad, but I guess every ladder system is going to have flaws.
This might be crass, but the truth is that most people suck. The fact that SC2 has a bunch of different leagues hides this a little bit more, but it's something that most people on any BW private server come to terms with. Perhaps a fallacy would be to think that all those people who aren't good want false goals presented at them all the time. After all, people played BW games all the time not because of where they were on any ladder, just because the game was sick fun.
And as this guy says, he can't gauge so well how good he is. I don't know.
when it first came out in wow we called it "hidden ghost rating" or "scary ghost rating"
i didnt like it then and i dont really like it now but i suppose some people dont like the idea of facing someone much better than them, and the hidden ghost rating alleviates that
i personally always improved from getting completely outplayed by someone way beyond my level so it bugs me
On June 15 2011 16:10 TheRabidDeer wrote: I want to see my ELO/MMR because I want to know how well I rate. I want to more easily see that I am actually improving and not just going with the crowd thanks to all of the various adjustments that occur. Getting a higher rank doesnt mean I improved, it just means I played ladder games.
Those are just points. How good are xxxx points? If you want to measure yourself, you could play in one of the many cups and see who you can beat. If you can constantly beat some names, then you know you are somewhat good. Otherwise you just have some numbers.
I cant play in cups because I am pretty much always at work when they happen. In addition, the skill gap between us wouldnt tell me much other than "hey, that guy crushed me... i am not as good as him". Meanwhile, the MMR can directly tell me an estimate on how good I am. MMR is not points, points are just points and are visible and useless.
If you have no time to participate in cups, you likely have no competitive level. In this case, you could just measure the scrubness. (No offense intended, I play in Silver league.)
Lets say you are "1000 MMR" good. What does it mean? What makes the difference between 1000 and 1015 MMR? It means nothing as MMR is measures versus other players. If anyone but you gets better, your MMR gets lower even if you keep 100% of your skill level.
You can roughly guess how good you are. Look at the level of your opponents (regardless if you win or lose.) I myself play almost any time versus Silver, so I am a silverplayer with no hope of promotion to gold, but no fear of demotion either. Silver means the bottom 20-40% of active players. Since I very seldom play bronze or gold, I estimate myself in the middle of silver, roughly at the skill level of the bottom 30% of active players. With random player assignments in the ladder I should lose about 70% and win about 30% of the games.
You too can see if you make progress, meaning if you get better than the average skill increase – when you play versus higher league players more often.
MMR (or ELO) peaks for every player. It doesnt continuously rise. If the top in the world are a 2k MMR and I am at 1450, it gives me a rough idea, and it is also a much better standard of comparison. Like I said earlier, I usually have a 60-65% winrate, and I dont play very often... so I dont actually know what my real skill level is.
In this case, MMR will not help since it has not yet stabilized to get you about 50% win ratio. When the MMR stabilized, you can estimate your level with looking at the level of your opponents. In the current state, MMR (or Elo, btw it is Elo, not ELO) does not reflect your skill, so there is no need to see this number. The solution to your issue is not to display the (in this state very inaccurate) MMR but to play more often.
My MMR should be relatively accurate by now as I have played a lot of games, its obviously not perfect but it should tell me what I am close to. I get nothing from looking at who I am playing against because of reasons I have already stated in other posts (division differences, player bonus points, their MMR still tweaking, matchup performance [ie pvz or pvt or pvp] and various other things). Meanwhile I can look at my MMR and see where I actually am right at this moment and can see it move up/down as I play.
I hear you. As for me, I'm getting matched vs only Masters players, with a 3:1 winrate vs them in the last week (about 30 games) and still no promotion
On June 15 2011 17:29 Probe1 wrote: I don't mind MMR being hidden. I don't even mind being stuck at 1st for a solid week and not receiving a promotion despite having a solid win rate.
I just play. I am not my league, nor am I my MMR. I am my skill level whether it is custom or ladder.
Last night I played a few games, I'm around Rank 12 in Plat, I beat 4 low diamonds in a row, the last two being even, I then go up against a Silver player who is slightly favoured. The silver players has 3k wins and almost 2k points. Dunno how this happens... also earlier today, a friend of mine in Bronze versed a guy in Diamond who was 'slightly favoured'.
On June 15 2011 17:40 Sedz wrote: I really don't like this system
Last night I played a few games, I'm around Rank 12 in Plat, I beat 4 low diamonds in a row, the last two being even, I then go up against a Silver player who is slightly favoured. The silver players has 3k wins and almost 2k points. Dunno how this happens... also earlier today, a friend of mine in Bronze versed a guy in Diamond who was 'slightly favoured'.
The Diamonds were probably on the way to being relegated, the Silver player probably hadnt lost a game to 'stabalize' in a division.
Edit* Just realised I used probably twice, this is what happens when you use the system Blizzard has, they will have had a similar MMR to you though. I personally like the Bliz system, if you use your bonus pool you have a reasonable knowledge of where you are at.
Portrait farmers tank their rating to get busted down to Bronze/Silver opponents Sedz. Or maybe they just reached their personal cap and couldn't get better. I don't know everyones story but for the most of the time, if this happens it is a person trying to farm the 1000 wins portrait.
On June 15 2011 17:21 L3g3nd_ wrote: theres no question that the iccup system is by far the best.
How do you come to this conclusion? Overall I consider the current SC2 ladder system much better than the ICCup system, because ICCup was just good for some competition-oriented players while the SC2 ladder suits the needs of the majority of players.
On June 15 2011 11:19 oxxo wrote: Blizzard's system is more than fine. MMR fluctuates too much. Your ladder ranking eventually reflects your MMR pretty closely. What's the problem?
Ladder ranking doesn't reflect your MMR at all actually. With multiple skill "tiers" in each league, one player may be vastly superior to another at the exact same rank, especially in Diamond.
I agree with blizzard removing the win/loss ratio since the entire ladder system pushes every player towards 1:1, and I do see some logic in hiding MMR. It's just sad that it's impossible to tell how good a player is by looking at their rank unless they are masters+.
On June 15 2011 11:19 oxxo wrote: Blizzard's system is more than fine. MMR fluctuates too much. Your ladder ranking eventually reflects your MMR pretty closely. What's the problem?
Ladder ranking doesn't reflect your MMR at all actually. With multiple skill "tiers" in each league, one player may be vastly superior to another at the exact same rank, especially in Diamond.
I agree with blizzard removing the win/loss ratio since the entire ladder system pushes every player towards 1:1, and I do see some logic in hiding MMR. It's just sad that it's impossible to tell how good a player is by looking at their rank unless they are masters+.
that's because those players are inconsistent. it's not because those players are good or bad. It's because they're good and bad
When laddering I get the feeling that there isn't 1 single number for MMR.
It feels to me that the races I play against most rotates, so that blizzard can work out my MMR against each race. The ladder points just shows an average of this. This being, so that if I'm fricken awesome versus Protoss and Terran, I don't get stomped by Zergs that are better than my TvZ.
It makes sense that they would implement that, seeing as they like to encourage people to play, plus it'd make sense for playing 8 terrans one day, then 6 zergs the next, then a bunch of protoss, and then 3 randoms in a row.
Just a theory until its confirmed mind.. ;D.
On June 15 2011 17:26 FenneK wrote: I hear you. As for me, I'm getting matched vs only Masters players, with a 3:1 winrate vs them in the last week (about 30 games) and still no promotion
I just got an NA account, I have 60 games played, around 50 of those played against masters (1 GM) and I haven't been promoted above platinum.
Pretty sure I just need to wait for my MMR to catch up though ^_^.
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
How could this be exploited though?
The only mechanism for changing MMR is winning/losing. How would this change at all if the number could be seen?
The stats in general on Bnet are lacking. I want to see win/loss, just give me an option to hide it if you are afraid of people pussying out because of it.
I want to see how many zealots I've built throughout my entire SC2 career, how many kills I've gotten. I want to see what unit got the most kills in the game I just played, highlighting hero DT's that get 22 kills.
Halo 3 has a very detailled stats system, tracking number of kills, double kills etc, all accessible online. There is no reason why Blizzard couldn't implement this apart from their own laziness.
Obviously I don't know how it could be exploited because I don't know how it works. I just know that is the reasoning behind not showing it.
Why do you need to see win/loss? You see wins, therefore you know your losses to within a small hand full. The ratio is ~50%. 50% = 50% regardless of whether you arrived at that percentage by winning 50 games out of 100 or 500 games out of 1000. Disabusing people of the notion that win/loss has any meaning at all is nothing but a good thing. If it has the side effect of helping casuals stay motivated to keep playing then that's even better.
So you are just following the party line RE potential exploitation of the MMR system. Fact is, knowledge of the number wouldn't give anyone any more capability to change it, beyond winning games. That is a fact.
I want to see win/loss because it is a stat I want to see. It's a common statistic used throughout every form of competition known to man.
It is important to note that there is a difference between win/loss meaning a player is good or not, and that win/loss has no meaning at all. The difference is subtle, and no doubt lost on many people.
There is absolutely no reason NOT to give a player as many stats as possible, IF there is the option to hide these if someone wishes. In fact I'd argue that the lack of a win/loss turns off more gamers than the lack of it encourages newbies.
I'm not following the party line, I'm following Blizzard's line as that's the reason they've given. I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that Blizzard knows more about how their system works than you do. The fact that you can't see how it could be exploited doesn't mean that exploitation isn't possible. Things are not facts simply because you declare them to be facts.
"But I wannnnnaaaaaaa see it"... For the third time: for all intents and purposes, you CAN see it. You see your wins. Your losses are equal to your wins. Your win/loss is <your wins>/<your wins +/- a few>.
You can argue anything you want. You can't prove things without evidence, of which you have none. The only people I've seen who are turned off by not being able to see their win/loss are people like you who refuse to understand that there's no reason to care what it is.
O_O what? If 90% of the players were stuck in D or D+ then that is their skill ranking. If you could get to B+ you were good, you could not get to B+ by just cheesing or all inning every game which was awesome. I don't even think you could really get past C+ with pure cheese but could be wrong ^^.
New-to-the-scene-player, meet Octzerg. That guy ONLY played all-ins and cheeses. Most of his wins were due to his AMAZING muta micro. Managed to get to A- on iCCup. He gave so much to the community. Endless replays of him vs. IdrA - and not the extremely gm IdrA Starcraft 2 fans of today call "BM!!!!!!!!111111". It all came to a Grand Finale in TSL 2, where the eStro-Progamer IdrA, who has spent two years learning TvZ from the very best of the best, was finally able to play an extremely close 2-1 series. Oh yeah, IdrAs TvZ was always special (like in SpecialEd). Anyone remember the F91 games?
On June 15 2011 19:32 Arcanewinds wrote: I just got an NA account, I have 60 games played, around 50 of those played against masters (1 GM) and I haven't been promoted above platinum.
Pretty sure I just need to wait for my MMR to catch up though ^_^.
You also need the MMR to stabilize. At the beginning you can gain or lose large amounts of MMR points. Once you get closer to your true MMR rating, you can get into a new league. It is even possible to get a promotion after a lost game.
On June 15 2011 19:32 Arcanewinds wrote: When laddering I get the feeling that there isn't 1 single number for MMR.
It feels to me that the races I play against most rotates, so that blizzard can work out my MMR against each race. The ladder points just shows an average of this. This being, so that if I'm fricken awesome versus Protoss and Terran, I don't get stomped by Zergs that are better than my TvZ.
It makes sense that they would implement that, seeing as they like to encourage people to play, plus it'd make sense for playing 8 terrans one day, then 6 zergs the next, then a bunch of protoss, and then 3 randoms in a row.
Just a theory until its confirmed mind.. ;D.
Yea, I think so. Earlier on, I was facing an avalanche of Zergs and some Terrans. Then now suddenly all full-on Protosses and Randoms.
I bet my MMR is extremely confusing as I've been winning something like 75% TvT, 50% TvZ, and 25% TvP.
It's kinda funny how I can beat a Masters level Terran one day, and lose to a silver Random (Toss) the next... > <
On June 15 2011 20:47 Slyce wrote: I would say that assuming players have 0 bonus pool.
Ladder ranking is a pretty close indication to skill really.
No it is not due to invisible league tiers. For master and grand master however the ranking (after subtracting spent bonus pool) should be quite close once you played enough games.
On June 15 2011 17:40 Sedz wrote: I really don't like this system
Last night I played a few games, I'm around Rank 12 in Plat, I beat 4 low diamonds in a row, the last two being even, I then go up against a Silver player who is slightly favoured. The silver players has 3k wins and almost 2k points. Dunno how this happens... also earlier today, a friend of mine in Bronze versed a guy in Diamond who was 'slightly favoured'.
so what your trying to say is. while you were busy taking detailed notes of exactly who you beat and who you dont, you couldnt be bothered to look through the massive thread telling you how the match making system worked
On June 15 2011 21:10 shaman6ix wrote: what does ELO mean?
The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor.
i am top 3 platinum playing top 20 diamond people for ever now and winning a bunch losing some always says "even teams" and im not getting promoted at all i do not understand this system ^^
On June 15 2011 21:14 Latty wrote: yeah i dont get it either @ op
i am top 3 platinum playing top 20 diamond people for ever now and winning a bunch losing some always says "even teams" and im not getting promoted at all i do not understand this system ^^
Top-X in a league means little. You most likely are an active player with bonus pool (nearly) spent while most other players have a large unused bonus pool. Frequently using up bonus pool often gets you a high division ranking as most players are not that active.
The "top-20" diamond players could be from the bottom diamond tier. That means there are not much better than top-platinum players. If you lose to other platinum players still too often, you are not yet eligible for promotion.
I dont define people just by their ranks, I am a master player myself but I just see the ladder as a way to improve mechanics and stay sharp in the current metagame. I mean, if you really want to show your true skill you play tournaments and see how it goes, even if Im not GM I can still give GM players a run for they money. I think that we all shouldnt be too focused on our MMR, sure there is people that does, and have super high mmr. Like IdrA on NA ladder and perhaps Happy on EU?
Anyway, sure that MMR would be really great if it was shown but like many people have told here it could easily be abused. Play the game on ladder for fun and mechanics, if you want to play serious go play custom games or tournament play. Sorry for my post being irrelevant!
I'm sure it's been mentioned in this thread before, but the answer to not having your true MMR available is purely for retaining players.
Blizzard's point system may not be an accurate measure of skill, but the purpose is to keep the masses playing to climb up in their division. People that browse this forum may be smart enough to realize this, but in reality the masses will think their points are a correlation of their skill, and they will continue to play if they can bring it up.
If our true MMR was displayed, the casual person is going to be disappointed once they hit their ceiling. You can already see this problem with tons of people complaining that they are not getting promoted to the higher leagues.
On June 15 2011 14:11 Crumbs wrote: Global chess players know their ELO rating, why can't starcraft players?
Have a look into this online more. I believe (or recall from reading about this) that the chess community had the same issues with people deliberately choosing their opponents in order to abuse the ELO rankings and artificially increase theirs. I believe this is exactly what Blizzard have cited as a reason for keeping them hidden
Not really true. As an avid chess player for a couple of decades, I have never read about this being a particular issue.
One issue they have had in recent years is that ELO is universal but you can play within a closed system. e.g. Chinese players only play in China against Chinese players, so their rating is effectively just an internal rating, even though it's a universal system. This could lead to a 2600 Chinese GM losing to a regular 2600 GM quite handily because his points have been internally inflated.
It's actually much harder on battlenet to get a higher rating than you deserve (other than flagrant cheating). ELO systems work the most accurately when you are playing people around your standard - and this is exactly what battlenet enforces. However, when you look cross server, you can see a similar pattern to my chess example above; in fact fortuitously I even chose the same country:
The global top GM list is dominated by China at the top, but they aren't so much better than everyone else. A classic case of different closed systems being compared on the same ranking list.
TLDR; battlenet's method of matching you up against equal skilled opponents is actually beneficial for ELO accuracy and is very hard to manipulate *upwards*.
While it is hard to manipulate upwards, it still makes you (or many guys) to have concerns about the Elo (or MMR) value. This will likely result in less ladder play, not more ladder play.
I don't want to have the vast majority of players to be between D- and C, but I also don't want to have a system where I am arbitrarily ranked against 100 other random players.
Showing our MMr is good, but this is flawed in itself. The fact everyone starts off with an MMR. Some people haven't played enough to get that fixed properly. This is useless information to see in my opinion of the casual guy who ladders once a month. Also your MMr doesn't really move much after a certain point, so it becomes redundant imo. Unless I get a huge burst of skill, most of my play time will be on the same MMR, and seeing if a person is higher/lower with our actual MMR is no more relevant than seeing favored/slightly favored.
I'd like to see players who are inactive stagnate, rather than build up bonus points. To me that is the worst part, the inflation that occurs. I'd rather have players drop out of Masters every time they go inactive for a few weeks. You aren't in the top 2% of active players if you aren't playing. So when I player a guy who is in Masters, but only has five games played is not inaccurately represented in the top 2%.
I dunno, small rant on my part about the points you brought up. The ladder system is flawed, but many are.
The thing is, for the people who are uninterested, they don't have to care, much like in the sub 1000's in Chess.
However, for the people who DO care, or who DO want to know their true skill level, an Elo or MMR is essential.
Tennis uses these same scales when ranking their players, it is the standard for the majority of 1v1, and sometimes even team competitions.
Frankly, I understand why people don't want Blizzard to show their MMR to everyone, but what if it was private? Like only you could see/share your own MMR/Elo with people if you wanted to. Is there ANY potential harm in that?
Also, for the portrait farmers and supposed 'exploiters' of MMR, this again only affects players who either don't care about competition, or are going to find a way to exploit the game either way. Even this hidden system is exploited, that is why its even a topic in the first place. I doubt it would seriously affect the amount, or severity of the exploitation going on.
On June 15 2011 23:09 [F_]aths wrote: Again, it is Elo, not ELO.
While it is hard to manipulate upwards, it still makes you (or many guys) to have concerns about the Elo (or MMR) value. This will likely result in less ladder play, not more ladder play.
I would guess they hide it because Blizzard's MMR algorithm is not simple Elo (it has been said to be something akin to TrueSkill) but probably more complicated. There definitely isn't just one "ranking" value, at the very least it is ranking estimation and confidence values. The vast majority of players just wouldn't care enough to learn about what those numbers actually mean and would be confused which Blizzard tries to avoid.
On June 15 2011 23:31 Chronald wrote: Frankly, I understand why people don't want Blizzard to show their MMR to everyone, but what if it was private? Like only you could see/share your own MMR/Elo with people if you wanted to. Is there ANY potential harm in that?
Yes. You would be asked about your MMR by other players. You would be laught at if the value is smaller than expected or accused of lying if it is higher than expected.
Many guys would see an ever-increasing MMR as progress. If they had a winning streak, they could fear that their MMR declines if they play more. They could stop playing ladder to practice with custom games.
What does MMR prove? "I have 1250 which is higher than your 1200 rating, so I am better and we don't even need to play to confirm." Wrong! Skill is intransitive, it is possible that player A beats player B on a regular basis while B wins more matches versus player C who in turn has a good chance to beat player A.
In any case, the current exact MMR value should never concern anyone. The best way to reach it, is to hide it from you. Ladder is practice and therefore needs no serious skill ranking. (However the top leagues do provide a more or less accurate ranking.)
would be kinda nifty to have, but after a certain amount of games, you can tell by a players position on tha ladder. before that, chances are they are just a smurf/new account, so who cares?
Elo/MMR isn't used to say "We don't need to play because I'm better", what it is used for is to know who is within your skill range. It is a way to globally compare your skill to other players. It isn't a definite measure, obviously, but it is a great way to approximate how good someone is.
It's as close to MMR as you'll get. You can't use it to compare yourself to others, and it doesn't work across promotions/demotions, but otherwise it will (unlike points) quite accurately help you track your progress.
It's as close to MMR as you'll get. You can't use it to compare yourself to others, and it doesn't work across promotions/demotions, but otherwise it will (unlike points) quite accurately help you track your progress.
This is super sweet!!
Thanks so much for posting this!
I see what you mean about it not working across all leagues/promotions/demotions etc. But I definitely think that this is the best way to track progress and improvement I've found (besides replay analyses through SC2Gears obviously).
If it is that much of a big deal to you, why don't you get a pen and a piece of paper and tally your wins and losses. Blizzard most likely implemented their system in order to hide losses to prevent players from being discouraged or too competitive. I dare to make the analogy to Call of Duty but this seems like the right instance to with its KDR (Kill-Death Ratio) ranking. Players would focus on just improving their KDR, whereas in Starcraft 2 players would just focus on winning rather than learning from their losses and trying to improve.
It's as close to MMR as you'll get. You can't use it to compare yourself to others, and it doesn't work across promotions/demotions, but otherwise it will (unlike points) quite accurately help you track your progress.
This is super sweet!!
Thanks so much for posting this!
I see what you mean about it not working across all leagues/promotions/demotions etc. But I definitely think that this is the best way to track progress and improvement I've found (besides replay analyses through SC2Gears obviously).
Send the author a PM and thank him. Maybe that encouragement will get him to fix the bugs I posted in his thread. :-) I don't even know if he has read it yet. He is not very acitve it seems.
On June 15 2011 11:00 Gnax wrote: They don't show it because they don't want hackers to figure out exactly how their system works.
what happens if hackers find out?
Hackers gonna hack. What do you think?
elaborate
I'm not a hacker bro. If me, let alone blizzard, knew how their system can be abused, they wouldn't have to worry about it.
EXPLAIN HOW IT WILL BE ABUSED
ffs, enough with your one-liners, answer the question asked instead of TRYING to be funny with "clever", sarcastic comments for once...
I can't explain. I have no idea. Sorry to make you dissappointed.
That's because it won't be a problem.
There is very little benefit to having a high MMR (the GM league and specialized tournaments with prize pools are really the only ones and being invite only they can do basic background checks for hacks and abuse). The real benefit of having a viewable MMR is that as players we can actually see where we stand and if we are progressing.
I have the same issue right now, I have (I believe) been improving and am now playing against a lot of 1000+ Masters players (while being around 1000 Diamond myself). On the other hand I rarely ever meet the 700-900 Masters, I seem to have skipped over them which to me means there is actually a weird overlap in MMRs from high Diamond to mid Masters (which makes perfect sense mind you given the slower promotion system).
There is really no downside to seeing the MMR and pasting in a seemingly arbitrary set of ranks and leagues over it is just plain stupid because it has the problems of any rating system (bullying, people bragging stupidly and stroking their ego) without actually having the advantages (being able to track personal progress, organize tournaments or events by rating, even check matchups and progress in matchups if they set up the interface properly).
On June 15 2011 11:00 Gnax wrote: They don't show it because they don't want hackers to figure out exactly how their system works.
what happens if hackers find out?
Hackers gonna hack. What do you think?
elaborate
I'm not a hacker bro. If me, let alone blizzard, knew how their system can be abused, they wouldn't have to worry about it.
EXPLAIN HOW IT WILL BE ABUSED
ffs, enough with your one-liners, answer the question asked instead of TRYING to be funny with "clever", sarcastic comments for once...
I can't explain. I have no idea. Sorry to make you dissappointed.
That's because it won't be a problem.
There is very little benefit to having a high MMR (the GM league and specialized tournaments with prize pools are really the only ones and being invite only they can do basic background checks for hacks and abuse). The real benefit of having a viewable MMR is that as players we can actually see where we stand and if we are progressing.
I have the same issue right now, I have (I believe) been improving and am now playing against a lot of 1000+ Masters players (while being around 1000 Diamond myself). On the other hand I rarely ever meet the 700-900 Masters, I seem to have skipped over them which to me means there is actually a weird overlap in MMRs from high Diamond to mid Masters (which makes perfect sense mind you given the slower promotion system).
There is really no downside to seeing the MMR and pasting in a seemingly arbitrary set of ranks and leagues over it is just plain stupid because it has the problems of any rating system (bullying, people bragging stupidly and stroking their ego) without actually having the advantages (being able to track personal progress, organize tournaments or events by rating, even check matchups and progress in matchups if they set up the interface properly).
Very well said, and very true as well.
I just don't understand people who don't want to see this information. It literally makes no sense to me, and to hear the community be like "wah wah exploits" "wah wah who cares" makes me sad. I remember when the only focus of the SC community was to become the best, to become better in every way. Now it just seems like the majority of players want to stroke their own inflated e-Peens using data that means absolutely nothing.
On June 15 2011 11:00 Gnax wrote: They don't show it because they don't want hackers to figure out exactly how their system works.
what happens if hackers find out?
Hackers gonna hack. What do you think?
elaborate
I'm not a hacker bro. If me, let alone blizzard, knew how their system can be abused, they wouldn't have to worry about it.
EXPLAIN HOW IT WILL BE ABUSED
ffs, enough with your one-liners, answer the question asked instead of TRYING to be funny with "clever", sarcastic comments for once...
I can't explain. I have no idea. Sorry to make you dissappointed.
what a pathetic argument. that's like saying "remove all apples from supermarkets, terrorists will be able to bypass our defenses and kill people if we leave apples there"
"but how will apples affect terrorists?"
"hell if i know, if i did know we could prevent it, but since we cant we have to remove them"
...
2 things change mmr
winning and losing
neither of those are exploitable any further than normally winning or losing is
If I read the patch notes correctly, they're taking out MMR from the wow arena display as well. (Before, you can see MMR at the end of wow arena matches.) Absolutely asinine.
On June 15 2011 10:50 Chronald wrote: So I've been playing some other competitive games, and also been reading about ranking in general, and I've been wondering why Blizzard can't just display our true MMR in the ladder/profile section.
Because then people like me would exploit the ladder system by reverse engineering how everything affects my mmr. It's for security reasons.
On June 25 2011 05:08 windsupernova wrote: Wait, doesn´t your true MMR(in Masters at least) is Points minus Bonus Pool
Points minus Bonus Pool is just your real ladder rating. Theoretically if you everyone had a very very high game count and everyone was in the same league rating would be indicative of MMR.
Note I say indicative because if you are on a win or loss streak this is no longer the case (as MMR fluctuates much faster than rating and in fact increases exponentially with consecutive wins/losses as opposed to rating which is relatively linear).
Now you have issues where some players aren't stabilized. This is my case with 150+ games won simply because I am still learning (I still win 70% of my games and get matched against higher and higher players). Now I am ~1300 Diamond, playing against sometimes 1300-1400 masters, sometimes 1200 Diamond, sometimes 1500 Diamond and I have no idea what my MMR would be.
This has several causes mind you. One is that the leagues have a big MMR overlap (getting promoted can take a very long time and the mechanics of it are not fully understood). Another is that with MMR fluctuating a player who varies between 1300 and 1500 (arbitrary scale) can end up against someone who varies between 1100 and 1300 if the one is on a losing streak and the other is on a winning streak. As a consequence even with MMR, checking recent match history or average MMR over the last week would make sense (I remember the AoE 3 ladder the important stat was the usual average ELO, not the spike value).
On top of that when the leagues are first forming (beginning of season) the spots in masters league are open. If someone like me just doesn't play for a month at the beginning of the season the spots are taken and generally much harder to get.
All this to say that Masters vs diamond (and actually GM too if a player wasn't as active or successful at the start of season) makes very little sense. Having a global ladder with MMR will give a better idea of progression (if for example I was at the 3.45% mark and then practiced and got to the top 2.89% that would be significant progression). The comparison could be done either on current MMR or average MMR over the last week. Obviously people could spike high and stop playing to stay high but there would be no benefit to them and odds are there wouldn't be enough people doing that to have any real effect on the ladder. MMR could also start to degrade over time (accounting for a lack of practice, it would actually be nice to get a couple easy games after not playing for a month).
On June 15 2011 10:50 Chronald wrote: So I've been playing some other competitive games, and also been reading about ranking in general, and I've been wondering why Blizzard can't just display our true MMR in the ladder/profile section.
Because then people like me would exploit the ladder system by reverse engineering how everything affects my mmr. It's for security reasons.
And even supposing you found a foolproof way of getting a high MMR how would this benefit you in any way?
You could pay a pro to play on your account to get a high MMR right now ... and then you would lose a lot with no benefit whatsoever.
The only monetary benefit is if you can get high enough to enter Blizzard's tournament based on ladder ranking but even then you need to be able to beat the players in the tournament to actually gain anything (and again, you could just pay off a pro to do that now).
The fact is the only way to increase MMR is to win and at some point, unless you are hacking the game itself, knowing how the MMR system works doesn't allow you to get very high without beating a bunch of good players.
I just want to know my MU win ratio. ZvT vs ZvZ vs ZvP. In BW I remember having like a 38% ZvZ ratio, 58% ZvT, and like 67% ZvP. Which was weird, because I always felt lost in ZvP and knew exactly what to do in ZvT (it was merely the execution that was lacking).
Now I feel like I have around a 30% win ZvP, 50% ZvZ, and 65%+ ZvT, but I'll never know... unless I download that replay app thingy... which I should do tbh :o
I find it amusing you're actively pursuing a way to quantify how EXACTLY good you are, which is something not even the MMR can do.
Tell you what, I guarantee you that if you ever hit masters league... or just played around 50 to 100 solo games in total (so not very much) throughout your sc2 career, you will stop giving a damn about your MMR.
On a final note: I think if MMR was visible, we'll just see a whole ton of atrociously obnoxious people who'll go around saying, "Ohhh I'm 300 diamond, but my MMR says 800 masters. I'm just too lazy to play my games out to get there lolololol."
Sorry for bumping an old thread but I didn't want to make a new thread on a previously discussed topic.
So, clearly there is a problem with the ladder. Let me explain. Currently I am ranked somewhere in the 20's in my diamond division. What is my next goal? My next goal is to get top 8. Why is this a problem? Because I am facing rank 20-40 masters players. I compared my opponents to those of the top 5 players in my division. They are all facing high diamond opponents.
Please spare me the whole "dude don't worry you're close to being promoted to masters." Currently, I am just trying to catch up to these other players. Why must I face opponents that would wreck the people atop my division, just to catch up to them? MMR is your true ranking, IMO scrap the entire ladder because it just caters to people that mass games. I always have a few hundred points in my bonus pool because I just don't have that much time to play.
On July 23 2011 16:39 CellTech wrote: Sorry for bumping an old thread but I didn't want to make a new thread on a previously discussed topic.
So, clearly there is a problem with the ladder. Let me explain. Currently I am ranked somewhere in the 20's in my diamond division. What is my next goal? My next goal is to get top 8. Why is this a problem? Because I am facing rank 20-40 masters players. I compared my opponents to those of the top 5 players in my division. They are all facing high diamond opponents.
Please spare me the whole "dude don't worry you're close to being promoted to masters." Currently, I am just trying to catch up to these other players. Why must I face opponents that would wreck the people atop my division, just to catch up to them? MMR is your true ranking, IMO scrap the entire ladder because it just caters to people that mass games. I always have a few hundred points in my bonus pool because I just don't have that much time to play.
Show me the MMR!
If u play against higher opponent u get more points if u win, Or u lose lesse points if u lose. Like in the start of s2 when I won a game i get like 30 points (no bonus pool) And when i lost a game I lost around 2 - 6 points.
On July 23 2011 16:39 CellTech wrote: Sorry for bumping an old thread but I didn't want to make a new thread on a previously discussed topic.
So, clearly there is a problem with the ladder. Let me explain. Currently I am ranked somewhere in the 20's in my diamond division. What is my next goal? My next goal is to get top 8. Why is this a problem? Because I am facing rank 20-40 masters players. I compared my opponents to those of the top 5 players in my division. They are all facing high diamond opponents.
Please spare me the whole "dude don't worry you're close to being promoted to masters." Currently, I am just trying to catch up to these other players. Why must I face opponents that would wreck the people atop my division, just to catch up to them? MMR is your true ranking, IMO scrap the entire ladder because it just caters to people that mass games. I always have a few hundred points in my bonus pool because I just don't have that much time to play.
Show me the MMR!
If u play against higher opponent u get more points if u win, Or u lose lesse points if u lose. Like in the start of s2 when I won a game i get like 30 points (no bonus pool) And when i lost a game I lost around 2 - 6 points.
everyone who is stuck at the borderline diamond/master MMR (yes, including me) knows this is untrue. it is very, very difficult to beat the active rank 50 up master players. exponentially difficult, in fact, as a casual player with worse mechanics.
you might get 50% more points for beating them, but there is also a 90% higher chance that you'll lose
On June 15 2011 11:10 shockaslim wrote: It makes too much sense so Blizzard doesn't want to do it.
Seriously though. There are too many useless stats in this game and not enough useful ones. Can't see your losses unless you are in Masters, can't see how close you are to a promotion or demotion, and the after game breakdown could be a bit more detailed.
In Halo, you can at least gauge your leveling, and your skill did have a high correlation with what rank you were. But in this game they don't allow it.
Your losses are roughly equal to your wins. You're close to a promotion when you beat a lot of people in higher leagues than you. You're close to a demotion when you lose to people in leagues lower than you.
You can't see your real MMR because if people knew exactly how it worked, they'd exploit it.
exactly what he said.
Tell me how MMR can be exploited if it's shown? It can't.
It is always better to win, and always worse to lose, and displaying MMR will not change this,
They should include a visible MMR, so then people who are trying to switch races can know when to start farming with their main race to prevent from being demoted.
On July 23 2011 16:39 CellTech wrote: So, clearly there is a problem with the ladder. Let me explain. Currently I am ranked somewhere in the 20's in my diamond division. What is my next goal? My next goal is to get top 8. Why is this a problem? Because I am facing rank 20-40 masters players. I compared my opponents to those of the top 5 players in my division. They are all facing high diamond opponents.
Is your remaining bonus pool 0? If not, spend it. Then you should catch up. If it is 0, what you are saying is impossible, and you most likely havent checked the match history of yourself or the top 8 carefully enough. If everyone in the top of the division has spent his bonus pool the top should be ordered roughly according to MMR.
i have greasemonkey, but when i click on the install link (http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/103651.user.js) it leads me to the source code instead of installing, how to fix that? used greasemonkey before and never had trouble but now :/
On July 23 2011 16:39 CellTech wrote: So, clearly there is a problem with the ladder. Let me explain. Currently I am ranked somewhere in the 20's in my diamond division. What is my next goal? My next goal is to get top 8. Why is this a problem? Because I am facing rank 20-40 masters players. I compared my opponents to those of the top 5 players in my division. They are all facing high diamond opponents.
Is your remaining bonus pool 0? If not, spend it. Then you should catch up. If it is 0, what you are saying is impossible, and you most likely havent checked the match history of yourself or the top 8 carefully enough. If everyone in the top of the division has spent his bonus pool the top should be ordered roughly according to MMR.
why should you have to play hundreds of games to know where you stand? why should bonus pool be related to skill rating? it wasn't like that in chess.
On July 23 2011 16:39 CellTech wrote: So, clearly there is a problem with the ladder. Let me explain. Currently I am ranked somewhere in the 20's in my diamond division. What is my next goal? My next goal is to get top 8. Why is this a problem? Because I am facing rank 20-40 masters players. I compared my opponents to those of the top 5 players in my division. They are all facing high diamond opponents.
Is your remaining bonus pool 0? If not, spend it. Then you should catch up. If it is 0, what you are saying is impossible, and you most likely havent checked the match history of yourself or the top 8 carefully enough. If everyone in the top of the division has spent his bonus pool the top should be ordered roughly according to MMR.
why should you have to play hundreds of games to know where you stand? why should bonus pool be related to skill rating? it wasn't like that in chess.
I'm not trying to defend the system. I agree that it sucks. I'm just trying to explain to him the situation.
On July 23 2011 18:32 Art_of_Kill wrote: i have greasemonkey, but when i click on the install link (http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/103651.user.js) it leads me to the source code instead of installing, how to fix that? used greasemonkey before and never had trouble but now :/
Are you sure you have greasemonkey installed? I also don't think the script is working at the moment. It doesn't take the league lock (stop of bonus pool growth) into account.
On July 23 2011 18:32 Art_of_Kill wrote: i have greasemonkey, but when i click on the install link (http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/103651.user.js) it leads me to the source code instead of installing, how to fix that? used greasemonkey before and never had trouble but now :/
Are you sure you have greasemonkey installed? I also don't think the script is working at the moment. It doesn't take the league lock (stop of bonus pool growth) into account.
just deinstalled and isntalled again, still leads me to the scource and not the download i use greasemonkey since like 2 years and never any trouble, why now o_______O
I guess you can create a new script from within greasemonkey and then just copy and paste the code. But I can't help you much, because I haven't done it myself.
Here are the bug fixes needed to make the script work again:
Right before this line BP.bonus4 = BP.bonus3;
add these three lines: BP.bonus1 = 1272; BP.bonus2 = 848; BP.bonus3 = 424;
These are the current bonus pools for 1v1, 2vs2 AT and 3vs3 AT. The numbers are for the EU region. If you want the calculation to be exact for your region you have to replace them, but it's not critical.
This code: if (bonus_matches == null) { return; } var bonus = bonus_matches[1].trim(); BP.bonusLeft = parseInt(bonus);
must be replaced with this code:
if (bonus_matches == null) { BP.bonusLeft = 0; } else { var bonus = bonus_matches[1].trim(); BP.bonusLeft = parseInt(bonus); }
Then the script should work as long as the ladder lock lasts. When season 3 starts it must be updated again.
On July 23 2011 16:39 CellTech wrote: So, clearly there is a problem with the ladder. Let me explain. Currently I am ranked somewhere in the 20's in my diamond division. What is my next goal? My next goal is to get top 8. Why is this a problem? Because I am facing rank 20-40 masters players. I compared my opponents to those of the top 5 players in my division. They are all facing high diamond opponents.
Is your remaining bonus pool 0? If not, spend it. Then you should catch up. If it is 0, what you are saying is impossible, and you most likely havent checked the match history of yourself or the top 8 carefully enough. If everyone in the top of the division has spent his bonus pool the top should be ordered roughly according to MMR.
As I stated I've always been a few hundred points above 0. Here's the problem, if I want to "spend" it, aka play mass games, I'm being paired up against mid to high (50-25) Masters players. It is saying Team's Even, but the truth is I'm getting stomped. I've played around 30 games and I literally haven't moved in my ranking.
If I am ranked ~25 in my diamond division, (forget about MMR for a second) why do I have to beat exponentially better players to climb above players around my level. Flawed no?
What your MMR boils down to is an ACTUAL ranking, that pairs you up with other players in some +/- range of your ranking. Why is this hidden from us?
If Masters are the top 2%: 98th percentile and Diamond are the top 20% minus 2% from Masters: 80th to 97.9th percentile, I would like the game to show me where in the 80% - 97.9% range I fall into.
On July 23 2011 19:07 CellTech wrote:If I am ranked ~25 in my diamond division, (forget about MMR for a second) why do I have to beat exponentially better players to climb above players around my level. Flawed no?
Sorry, I missed the part where you stated that you have bonus pool remaining. Yes, I agree that it's flawed.
The real problem is that the ladder is not for showing your skill, it is for getting you play more. If you want to have a high ladder ranking, you have to play more games than most of the other players.
To have a constant bonuspool of 0, you have to win one game a day (don't tell me this is random).
Blizzard does not want to show you how good you are; they want you to play much. The MMR just exists to let you play vs opponents of your level.
Why would you want to play against lower skilled players when current MMR system allows you to play against higher skilled ones? If you get roflstomped, then you just need to get better, no?
On July 23 2011 19:45 Anfi wrote: Why would you want to play against lower skilled players when current MMR system allows you to play against higher skilled ones? If you get roflstomped, then you just need to get better, no?
That's not my point. My point is that MMR and the ladder don't work quite as well together as they should.
honestly? just play. If you are facing people in lower levels then you, it's probably because the system doesn't feel like you belong where you are and it's testing you. The more games you win the more your mmr will rise and allow you that promotion. Just play more games, the more you play the better the system works.
I can honestly say I hate the system, so much so that I can hardly find the motivation to play a game that I love.
1) I can't see my losses 2) I can't easily see what rank the people are I am winning/losing against. 3) The sheer number of sub-leagues within a league makes it impossible to gauge your skill against them. Meaning that a very active diamond division might be a very tough climb to #1, while someone else may get an inactive one and be inactive with half the skill. 4) The whole slightly favored garbage has never once given me an accurate picture on my opponent. I have gone against slightly favored opponents and steamrolled them, then turned around and gotten plowed by someone who I was favored against.
In short, I get utterly no useful feedback on my actual skill and ranking and I get no useful info on my opponents and my match history against them. I am glad playing in a vacuum works well for most here, but to me it is just a purely frustrating experience.
ya. bnet pretty much turned me away from sc2 (were gameplay reasons too but ye..). the ladder is plain stupid , all kinds of social features (clan,replays,gateway selection etc) are missing and if i wanna play some ums maps i have a better chance launching up the wc3 client.
i played alot .like 1k games in beta and another 2-3k after release but now i havent even logged in since weeks and havent played a ladder game for months.
makes me abit sad since its freakin sc2, but i hope hots gives bnet the features it shouldve had from the beginning and makes the gameplay less dull
On July 23 2011 19:23 CellTech wrote: Even if Blizzard worked something like this into your [private] Profile it would be awesome
Would show you roughly where you were in terms of promotion
something like that would be awesome, just need to add GM all the way on the right...
though i wish they would fix GM so it requires skill to stay in GM and not just activity. Nothing is more frustrating in this ladder system, than constantly beating GM's and waiting for that promotion that never comes, its such a terrible competitive ladder.
I hate this whole system of having a "hidden mmr" and a "visible rank".
So we've got hidden MMR which is -The most accurate statistic to show how good you are as a player
And you visible rank which is -A less accurate statistic to show how good you are as a player
Just get it over with and show us our damn MMR, since that is actually what tells us how good we are.
Does blizzard have any idea how frustrating it is to be a diamond player, being matched against masters players, being favored against them, winning 60% of the time against them, yet I am in diamond and they are in masters? It's just not fair.
I hate how there are diamond players who are actually considered better than masters players by blizzards OWN MATCHMAKING SYSTEM. And yet their visible rating is lower than those masters players! It's just silly. It's almost like blizzard thinks people are scared to see how good/bad they actually are.
At the very least, we should be able to see our MMR somewhere else. I don't care if you make it a little difficult to find it, just give us the option to view it. That way bronze/silver etc players who are scared of how bad they really are won't know about it.
knowing your mmr doesnt make u a better player. i play to get better so i could care less what my mmr is as long as im playing people as good or better than me.
On July 24 2011 00:37 skunk_works wrote: knowing your mmr doesnt make u a better player. i play to get better so i could care less what my mmr is as long as im playing people as good or better than me.
It helps in Terms of "Did I perform well today? - Oh yes I have!"
On July 23 2011 19:23 CellTech wrote: Even if Blizzard worked something like this into your [private] Profile it would be awesome
Would show you roughly where you were in terms of promotion
haha. I actually suggested this exact thing a few months ago. This was mine:
Immediately after creating the mock-up though, I thought about how that wasn't going to be very exact due to the division tier system in place. If you were going from Plat to Diamond, for example, it would have to show slotted tiers. When you do well enough to become eligible for Diamond but not well enough to exceed the boundaries, you have to fit into one of those slots. So, someone could get promoted by having their slider at 20%, another person 40%, so it still doesn't address the core visibility issue and things remain just as confusing. It's not quite as big a deal going from Diamond to Master or even Bronze to Silver, or Silver to Gold, or Gold to Platinum, but it does cloud things.
Thats the other problem I have with this system, you never know what you need to do in order to get promoted.
In Iccup, or virtually any other sort of ladder/ranking system, you could sit there and say "If I win my next 2 games, I'm going to get promoted". Theres no such feature in SC2's ladder system. If you beat that masters player, will you get promoted? Who knows? Not the players! Blizzard knows though!
If blizzards system cannot display some sort of tangible goal for a player in order for them to get promoted, that's just a bad ladder system.
On July 24 2011 00:26 thepeonwhocould wrote: I hate this whole system of having a "hidden mmr" and a "visible rank".
So we've got hidden MMR which is -The most accurate statistic to show how good you are as a player
And you visible rank which is -A less accurate statistic to show how good you are as a player
Just get it over with and show us our damn MMR, since that is actually what tells us how good we are.
Does blizzard have any idea how frustrating it is to be a diamond player, being matched against masters players, being favored against them, winning 60% of the time against them, yet I am in diamond and they are in masters? It's just not fair.
I hate how there are diamond players who are actually considered better than masters players by blizzards OWN MATCHMAKING SYSTEM. And yet their visible rating is lower than those masters players! It's just silly. It's almost like blizzard thinks people are scared to see how good/bad they actually are.
At the very least, we should be able to see our MMR somewhere else. I don't care if you make it a little difficult to find it, just give us the option to view it. That way bronze/silver etc players who are scared of how bad they really are won't know about it.
90% of you all are such a whiny bunch. You know nothing about the system and just make wild assumptions based on biased hate of other BNet features.
MMR is NOT an accurate measure of skill. If you saw it, you'd just turn around and post about how MMR is so useless because it changes so drastically (and probably something along the lines of "Blizzard sucks, I rule!"). Basically, MMR is so filled with noise that it is actually terrible in ranking people into exact spots. Because of this volatility and noise, however, it can place you against proper opponents quickly without having to worry if you're actually ranked in the exact correct position. Match Making Rating spells out entirely what it is and does.
On July 23 2011 19:23 CellTech wrote: Even if Blizzard worked something like this into your [private] Profile it would be awesome
Would show you roughly where you were in terms of promotion
haha. I actually suggested this exact thing a few months ago. This was mine:
Immediately after creating the mock-up though, I thought about how that wasn't going to be very exact due to the division tier system in place. If you were going from Plat to Diamond, for example, it would have to show slotted tiers. When you do well enough to become eligible for Diamond but not well enough to exceed the boundaries, you have to fit into one of those slots. So, someone could get promoted by having their slider at 20%, another person 40%, so it still doesn't address the core visibility issue and things remain just as confusing. It's not quite as big a deal going from Diamond to Master or even Bronze to Silver, or Silver to Gold, or Gold to Platinum, but it does cloud things.
The only way I could see this working is if they showed some sort of highlighed slots instead of a slider, or if it only refreshed once a day. But then, it tells us what we already know; we're low/mid/high bronze/silver/gold/plat/dia/masters. Then we'd also have another PR nightmare of "my bar says I'm mid gold but I haven't been promoted after playing 50 games!" When they've really only played ~5, but that privileged information makes them feel entitled to faster results.
On July 24 2011 00:26 thepeonwhocould wrote: I hate this whole system of having a "hidden mmr" and a "visible rank".
So we've got hidden MMR which is -The most accurate statistic to show how good you are as a player
And you visible rank which is -A less accurate statistic to show how good you are as a player
Just get it over with and show us our damn MMR, since that is actually what tells us how good we are.
Does blizzard have any idea how frustrating it is to be a diamond player, being matched against masters players, being favored against them, winning 60% of the time against them, yet I am in diamond and they are in masters? It's just not fair.
I hate how there are diamond players who are actually considered better than masters players by blizzards OWN MATCHMAKING SYSTEM. And yet their visible rating is lower than those masters players! It's just silly. It's almost like blizzard thinks people are scared to see how good/bad they actually are.
At the very least, we should be able to see our MMR somewhere else. I don't care if you make it a little difficult to find it, just give us the option to view it. That way bronze/silver etc players who are scared of how bad they really are won't know about it.
90% of you all are such a whiny bunch. You know nothing about the system and just make wild assumptions based on biased hate of other BNet features.
MMR is NOT an accurate measure of skill. If you saw it, you'd just turn around and post about how MMR is so useless because it changes so drastically (and probably something along the lines of "Blizzard sucks, I rule!"). Basically, MMR is so filled with noise that it is actually terrible in ranking people into exact spots. Because of this volatility and noise, however, it can place you against proper opponents quickly without having to worry if you're actually ranked in the exact correct position. Match Making Rating spells out entirely what it is and does.
Sorry but this is just false when you look at Street Fighter or ICCUP rankings.
When I am a lower ranked player, I know I am going to have to try a lot harder to get my win. Likewise I can relax a bit when I'm vsing lower ranked players. On ICCUP there is a very noticeable gap between C- and C+ even, its much bigger than the difference between top masters and diamond.
Favored vs UnFavored doesn't mean anything.
There will be times I will have an extremely easy time vs higher league players, and yet be playing toe to toe against lower league players.
Seeing Masters players smurf GM's is so ridiculous.
They have a hidden mmr and its hidden because it would look really weird. This because of how fast it would change. Say you are 1550 and your hidden mmr is 1550. After 5 losses you play people of lower skill. So you would be 1500 but playing people 1300. It would be a large jump and it would look weird
MMR is based on an ELO system that produces international Chess ratings, which means that at the beginning your MMR WILL fluctuate wildly but the more games you play the more stable it will become. Chess rating has been around for ~ 60 years and its accepted internationally. It really motivates competitive play because its such a reliable reflection of skill. In chess I know that if I attain a rating of 2000 everyone will respect that because ratings are very reliable predictors of relative strength. Whereas on Bnet if I attain top 5 in diamond people won't be impressed because top 5 in diamond can mean so many things. It could mean you are on par with a lot of high ranked gold players! ahhh!
To all the people who are trying to defend Blizzard here: we aren't hating on Blizzard or anything like that. But it does seem like a good majority of the community would like to have an accurate indicator of skill instead of this ambigious system. It IS possible to do. The majority DO want it. So we are voicing our opinions about it. What's so wrong with that huh?
However if we want to get anywhere with our wish we need to be more organized. We need to start a petition and in a well mannered and constructive way try to dialogue with Blizz about having them either show the hidden ratign system as is, or create a new one where you can get a real and accurate sense of where you stand in the grand scheme of things. I would do it but I have allergies and I'm too damn lazy
On July 24 2011 03:54 Denizen[9] wrote: They have a hidden mmr and its hidden because it would look really weird. This because of how fast it would change. Say you are 1550 and your hidden mmr is 1550. After 5 losses you play people of lower skill. So you would be 1500 but playing people 1300. It would be a large jump and it would look weird
You are just making things up. If MMR was so disconnected from your points as you say, a 5 loss streak would make you became favored in every match, because points are awarded by comparing your points to your opponents MMR. That just doesn't happen. This means that MMR doesn't move much faster than your points do.
mmr is hidden because blizz doesnt want hackers to know how it works
MMR is effective because guess what, the good players are playing good players, and the sucks are playing sucks.
you complaining that you are struggling against plats but easily beating masters?? well guess what, you are playing against the plats that are improving and you are playing against the few masters that got there originally based on luck placing but they will drop out soon
i dont see how people here are saying the MMR system need to be improved. why? how exactly can it be improved??? what exactly is wrong with it???
are you mad that your playing people that are way better than you?? well you must be improving so the system makes you fight better people since your mmr is getting higher
are you mad that your playing people that suck compared to you?? well its probably because you lost 5 games recently and your mmr is going under. if you want to not play people who suck, then win 15 games in a row and you will be facing super good people fast. and if you lose one of those 15 games i guess your not as good as you thought you were
if you are diamond win 15 games in a row, you will be placed against top grandmasters pretty soon.
if you are grandmasters and lose 30 games in a row chances are you will be placed against bronzies if it keeps up
what are people complaining about when it comes to mmr? i just dont see the point of any of your arguments
i personally dont care about leagues at all. i just care about my skill. if i have a bronze account but im super skilled and fighting and beating grandmasters every game, then i would be happy, because all i care about is skill and if i become super good then i can win tournaments. i dont care about if im bronze or not
On July 24 2011 00:26 thepeonwhocould wrote: I hate this whole system of having a "hidden mmr" and a "visible rank".
So we've got hidden MMR which is -The most accurate statistic to show how good you are as a player
And you visible rank which is -A less accurate statistic to show how good you are as a player
Just get it over with and show us our damn MMR, since that is actually what tells us how good we are.
Does blizzard have any idea how frustrating it is to be a diamond player, being matched against masters players, being favored against them, winning 60% of the time against them, yet I am in diamond and they are in masters? It's just not fair.
I hate how there are diamond players who are actually considered better than masters players by blizzards OWN MATCHMAKING SYSTEM. And yet their visible rating is lower than those masters players! It's just silly. It's almost like blizzard thinks people are scared to see how good/bad they actually are.
At the very least, we should be able to see our MMR somewhere else. I don't care if you make it a little difficult to find it, just give us the option to view it. That way bronze/silver etc players who are scared of how bad they really are won't know about it.
90% of you all are such a whiny bunch. You know nothing about the system and just make wild assumptions based on biased hate of other BNet features.
MMR is NOT an accurate measure of skill. If you saw it, you'd just turn around and post about how MMR is so useless because it changes so drastically (and probably something along the lines of "Blizzard sucks, I rule!"). Basically, MMR is so filled with noise that it is actually terrible in ranking people into exact spots. Because of this volatility and noise, however, it can place you against proper opponents quickly without having to worry if you're actually ranked in the exact correct position. Match Making Rating spells out entirely what it is and does.
Sorry but this is just false when you look at Street Fighter or ICCUP rankings.
When I am a lower ranked player, I know I am going to have to try a lot harder to get my win. Likewise I can relax a bit when I'm vsing lower ranked players. On ICCUP there is a very noticeable gap between C- and C+ even, its much bigger than the difference between top masters and diamond.
Favored vs UnFavored doesn't mean anything.
There will be times I will have an extremely easy time vs higher league players, and yet be playing toe to toe against lower league players.
Seeing Masters players smurf GM's is so ridiculous.
Doesn't this exactly prove the guy's point? He's saying the MMR is very volatile and full of noise.
So I posted it an even more pointless spot then here...why? Because I could mostly. Do I think my suggestion is perfect? no...but it would be a hell of a lot better then the stupid ass system we have now of "guess your rank".
People are worrying too much over their ranks. You already get to know which league you are in, but now you want to know your MMR? Blizzard removed the losses column from leagues below masters for a reason, and MMR is even more specific than this. Half of the time, the favored and opponent favored system doesn't even work. I've had games where it first said opponent was favored, then when I won it said I was favored and recieved very few points. MMR might be useful for the very top leagues, but even then, its just a number. People have beaten favored and slightly favored MMR's all the time, MMR is not important at all.
On July 24 2011 02:03 thepeonwhocould wrote: Thats the other problem I have with this system, you never know what you need to do in order to get promoted. + Show Spoiler +
sure you do, you just never know how close you are
In Iccup, or virtually any other sort of ladder/ranking system, you could sit there and say "If I win my next 2 games, I'm going to get promoted". Theres no such feature in SC2's ladder system. If you beat that masters player, will you get promoted? Who knows? Not the players! Blizzard knows though!
If blizzards system cannot display some sort of tangible goal for a player in order for them to get promoted, that's just a bad ladder system.
want an "advancement" system. They want grind "levels" to get to the top. They don't care who they are matched against as long as the system rewards them accurately for performance (+/- big points for beating a higher ranked opponent or losing to a lower ranked one, small point changes for playing similarly ranked opponents).
Other people want a system that lets them play against similarly skilled players where they have a good (~50) chance to win. IMO b.net 2.0 does this pretty well (once a player has played ~10 matches at a consistent level).
Maybe they could add more leagues so you have a better idea of how well (or poorly) you're doing. Or have an indicator if you're being matched up against better or worse opponents (of course, that would only really have any use in 10-15 game increments and you can probably make assumptions if you've had a long streak of wins or losses).
On July 24 2011 05:43 freetgy wrote: The reasoning is pretty simple Blizzard want to keep his playerbase.
For this people want to have the feel "improving" to keep adicted to the game, this is done by Blizzard with seemingly increasing (skill) points.
That the whole reason that bonus pool exists.
this can't be pointed out too much.
the whole ladder system is designed to make and keep the players playing, not to show them how good they are. they want to make us believe we are all heroes if we ladder enough.
On July 24 2011 05:04 roymarthyup wrote: mmr is hidden because blizz doesnt want hackers to know how it works
MMR is effective because guess what, the good players are playing good players, and the sucks are playing sucks.
you complaining that you are struggling against plats but easily beating masters?? well guess what, you are playing against the plats that are improving and you are playing against the few masters that got there originally based on luck placing but they will drop out soon
i dont see how people here are saying the MMR system need to be improved. why? how exactly can it be improved??? what exactly is wrong with it???
are you mad that your playing people that are way better than you?? well you must be improving so the system makes you fight better people since your mmr is getting higher
are you mad that your playing people that suck compared to you?? well its probably because you lost 5 games recently and your mmr is going under. if you want to not play people who suck, then win 15 games in a row and you will be facing super good people fast. and if you lose one of those 15 games i guess your not as good as you thought you were
if you are diamond win 15 games in a row, you will be placed against top grandmasters pretty soon.
if you are grandmasters and lose 30 games in a row chances are you will be placed against bronzies if it keeps up
what are people complaining about when it comes to mmr? i just dont see the point of any of your arguments
i personally dont care about leagues at all. i just care about my skill. if i have a bronze account but im super skilled and fighting and beating grandmasters every game, then i would be happy, because all i care about is skill and if i become super good then i can win tournaments. i dont care about if im bronze or not
WTF? They dont want to know how it works?! Everyone already knows how it "works" we just want to be able to see it... And so what if they knew how it works what exactly would they do about it...?
What is the problem with a "noisy" "fluctuating" MMR in relation to ladder ranking? Isn't that how a true ladder should work? If someone 5 "steps" below you defeats you, he moves ahead of you? This comes back to my opening point on page 8. I am beating players that are leaps and bounds ahead of me in terms of ranking, just to climb "1 step" on this ladder, to climb past a person that is a lot worse than ME (based on his match history he is facing worse opponents than I)
(We've already come to the conclusion Blizzard cares about scared-phags, so inflates "points").
well i guess people would probably hate to see the MMR but rather want something nicely pit excluding all leagues. So they could see a that bronce guy has way more points then even those gold people.
But i guess they would be unhappy with the MMR, that drops around 25% just because you lost 5 times in a row ^.^. And of course someone will stop playing after a super lucky 10 wins in a row, because their points increased by 50%.
Maybe its just me, but after loosing 5 games in a row, i play opponents suddenly i cannot lose against ... , maybe the bnet can't place me still after 500 games ^^; . But that made me belief the mmr jumps like crazy, well might only be a coincidence.
Don't really think its because of the evil hackers and more because it would upset alot of people hehe (especially the once that are so desperate to see it, sorry ^^; )
I've always thought that a reasonable compromise would be to only show players their season-ending MMR at the end of each season. That way players can have a reasonable milestone of how they're progressing across seasons, and there's no chance of people "exploiting" MMR. Thoughts?
On July 24 2011 06:32 CellTech wrote: What is the problem with a "noisy" "fluctuating" MMR in relation to ladder ranking? Isn't that how a true ladder should work? If someone 5 "steps" below you defeats you, he moves ahead of you? This comes back to my opening point on page 8. I am beating players that are leaps and bounds ahead of me in terms of ranking, just to climb "1 step" on this ladder, to climb past a person that is a lot worse than ME (based on his match history he is facing worse opponents than I)
(We've already come to the conclusion Blizzard cares about scared-phags, so inflates "points").
Except "5 steps" in this case could mean 5000 or 10000. The point system provides a level of stability that MMR doesn't. Most would be pretty mad if they lost 10 games and suddenly their MMR seemed close to the threshold of the league below them. It doesn't demote them any time soon because it requires a degree of certainty to do so, but simply knowing that after a bad day, it LOOKS like you'll be demoted can be paralyzing. Similarly, when people shoot their MMR above the next tier, but there isn't enough certainty to be promoted yet, that's likely to be equally frustrating. Right now, the obfuscation at least keeps people guessing if they're REALLY at the point of promotion, or just shy of it.
In your case, work harder. Elo systems are much more difficult to climb than Blizzard ladder, but you can't even seem to work hard enough at that. Chances are, those people at the top have, and still are, playing more games than you. You can't expect to get to the top with a half-assed attitude about how you're "better than others" by default.
Ahhh.. as if the MMR God's answered me. I clicked 'Find Match' and who else does it put me against but the guy atop my division (I am rank 26th at this point, he is ranked 1st) I proceed to slaughter him.
My conclusion:
I am better than him, the ladder "says" he is a lot better than me.
On July 24 2011 14:09 CellTech wrote: Ahhh.. as if the MMR God's answered me. I clicked 'Find Match' and who else does it put me against but the guy atop my division (I am rank 26th at this point, he is ranked 1st) I proceed to slaughter him.
My conclusion:
I am better than him, the ladder "says" he is a lot better than me.
This is the problem.
wtf how dumb are you? Just because you 'slaughter' him doesn't mean he is worse then you rofl.
There are a ton of factors that could of help in your win:
He was trying a new build He was play his off-race He was drunk
That is 3 of the millions of reasons why you could have beat him, winning vs rank 1 and saying you're better is just ridiculous especially if you've both won the same amount of games.
On July 24 2011 14:09 CellTech wrote: Ahhh.. as if the MMR God's answered me. I clicked 'Find Match' and who else does it put me against but the guy atop my division (I am rank 26th at this point, he is ranked 1st) I proceed to slaughter him.
My conclusion:
I am better than him, the ladder "says" he is a lot better than me.
This is the problem.
Its not reasonable to claim that you are better just based off of 1 game..
Anyone can play a terrible game from time to time and get slaughtered in the process looking completely outmatched. It just means you were the better player that game, definitely not an overall indication of anything.
We don't have MMR because SC2, despite its developed competitive scene, is geared towards its largest demographic: casual players. Points increase over time, whereas MMR eventually comes to rest in a range that reflects your relative skill. Increase over time produces a more positive response than stagnation, and this positive response makes us think positively of SC2. You can guess why Blizzard wants that.
On July 24 2011 14:09 CellTech wrote: Ahhh.. as if the MMR God's answered me. I clicked 'Find Match' and who else does it put me against but the guy atop my division (I am rank 26th at this point, he is ranked 1st) I proceed to slaughter him.
My conclusion:
I am better than him, the ladder "says" he is a lot better than me.
This is the problem.
Have to agree with the above poster, you played him 1 time, there is no way to tell if you are better than him, and it's pretty arrogant to believe so.
Although I would personally love to see an actual MMR, I agree with the above poster. "Better", is such an vague term. While it is possible that you are the truly superior player, there are too many factors that are included in deciding who the better player is from 1 game or even 100 games between two individual players. All that would prove is that you are better in that specific match up.
Personally, I dislike a general MMR for SC. I have like a 70%+ win rate in ZvP, but only a 40% win rate in ZvZ (though its improving now that I have played zerg a bit more), and sometimes I end up with a lot of ZvZ's which lowers my MMR even though my ZvT and ZvP are quite good.
On June 15 2011 10:55 ClysmiC wrote: I never really liked iCCup's system, as 90% of players stayed in D or D+ so it was really hard to gauge how good they were. I think Blizzard's current system isn't too bad, but I guess every ladder system is going to have flaws.
O_O what? If 90% of the players were stuck in D or D+ then that is their skill ranking. If you could get to B+ you were good, you could not get to B+ by just cheesing or all inning every game which was awesome. I don't even think you could really get past C+ with pure cheese but could be wrong ^^.
I do wish thats how blizzard did it even though it wont' ever happen as it could be frustrating :D.
no alot player was frustrated playing vs noobs so never really did and so there was often players on D C who could be easy B B+ and you got crushed like SHITT and it was so -_- frustrating
blizzards system is 1million times better
ps: you could pass even B+ with cheesing ... there was a korean guy even 5pool in 70% of the games on A- and A and won alot of games ... (see in Kr replaypack from 2010 and some others if u not believe)
On July 24 2011 14:45 pyaar wrote: We don't have MMR because SC2, despite its developed competitive scene, is geared towards its largest demographic: casual players. Points increase over time, whereas MMR eventually comes to rest in a range that reflects your relative skill. Increase over time produces a more positive response than stagnation, and this positive response makes us think positively of SC2. You can guess why Blizzard wants that.
I don't think Blizzard was that psychological when deciding to implement bonus pool. As I see it, its simply a way to help speed up the process of catching up to points reflecting your MMR as well as encourage continual participation. If you don't play, people pass you up by default. It also serves as a way to keep track of activity for GM.
As for MMR, it's never at rest. MMR constantly changes with each match and continues to attempt to place you against players your level, even if your level may be lower or higher a certain day. The fluctuations are actually quite wild. If you've spent your bonus pool, players at your level yield/take 12 points per win/loss. Any time you gain or lose points more or less than 12, that indicates your MMR has shifted, shows signs of uncertainty, or couldn't find you a match your level. When it gets into ±3 or more points away consistently, that means your MMR has essentially shifted faster than your points can keep up. If you've played 100s of ladder games, I can almost guarantee this situation has happened to you on a good or bad day.
On July 24 2011 14:45 pyaar wrote: We don't have MMR because SC2, despite its developed competitive scene, is geared towards its largest demographic: casual players. Points increase over time, whereas MMR eventually comes to rest in a range that reflects your relative skill. Increase over time produces a more positive response than stagnation, and this positive response makes us think positively of SC2. You can guess why Blizzard wants that.
I don't think Blizzard was that psychological when deciding to implement bonus pool. As I see it, its simply a way to help speed up the process of catching up to points reflecting your MMR as well as encourage continual participation. If you don't play, people pass you up by default. It also serves as a way to keep track of activity for GM.
As for MMR, it's never at rest. MMR constantly changes with each match and continues to attempt to place you against players your level, even if your level may be lower or higher a certain day. The fluctuations are actually quite wild. If you've spent your bonus pool, players at your level yield/take 12 points per win/loss. Any time you gain or lose points more or less than 12, that indicates your MMR has shifted, shows signs of uncertainty, or couldn't find you a match your level. When it gets into ±3 or more points away consistently, that means your MMR has essentially shifted faster than your points can keep up. If you've played 100s of ladder games, I can almost guarantee this situation has happened to you on a good or bad day.
Of course then you have to add in "slightly favored" and stuff to it too.
Honestly I find the points system to be a little confusing, just having a single number for your skill ranking would be so much better and easier to understand.
Then we wouldn't have to have the MASSIVE post that is the "Understanding Blizzards ladder system"
Seriously, if you need an epic post to decipher (and it's not even fully understood even then) your rating system, there is something MONUMENTALLY wrong with it.
On July 24 2011 14:09 CellTech wrote: Ahhh.. as if the MMR God's answered me. I clicked 'Find Match' and who else does it put me against but the guy atop my division (I am rank 26th at this point, he is ranked 1st) I proceed to slaughter him.
My conclusion:
I am better than him, the ladder "says" he is a lot better than me.
On July 24 2011 14:09 CellTech wrote: Ahhh.. as if the MMR God's answered me. I clicked 'Find Match' and who else does it put me against but the guy atop my division (I am rank 26th at this point, he is ranked 1st) I proceed to slaughter him.
My conclusion:
I am better than him, the ladder "says" he is a lot better than me.
This is the problem.
No, you are completely incorrect. Being higher within a division (ie 100 players) just means you have got more points - which could come from using more of the bonus pool, or from more wins. However, his wins could have come vs far worse opponents that you. Therefore, it is entirely possible that the last player in a division could be better than the first.
(This is complicated slightly by division tiers, but not in a major way)
On July 24 2011 14:09 CellTech wrote: Ahhh.. as if the MMR God's answered me. I clicked 'Find Match' and who else does it put me against but the guy atop my division (I am rank 26th at this point, he is ranked 1st) I proceed to slaughter him.
My conclusion:
I am better than him, the ladder "says" he is a lot better than me.
This is the problem.
Why arent you nr1 in your division then?
Ladder rank has more to do with games played than skill level quite often.
On July 24 2011 14:09 CellTech wrote: Ahhh.. as if the MMR God's answered me. I clicked 'Find Match' and who else does it put me against but the guy atop my division (I am rank 26th at this point, he is ranked 1st) I proceed to slaughter him.
My conclusion:
I am better than him, the ladder "says" he is a lot better than me.
This is the problem.
Why arent you nr1 in your division then?
Ladder rank has more to do with games played than skill level quite often.
I agree, to an extent. I think you've got to be either skilled, or have a large bonus pool, to get to high ranks on the ladder in your division. However, I hardly ever ladder unless I feel very happy with my game-plans for all three match-ups. This means I spend a lot of time practicing BOs against practice partners, and sometimes in YABOT.
This means that the ranking system doesn't accurately represent my 'skill' compared to those higher in my division, as I simply haven't given it a chance by not playing enough games.
On July 24 2011 14:09 CellTech wrote: Ahhh.. as if the MMR God's answered me. I clicked 'Find Match' and who else does it put me against but the guy atop my division (I am rank 26th at this point, he is ranked 1st) I proceed to slaughter him.
My conclusion:
I am better than him, the ladder "says" he is a lot better than me.
This is the problem.
Why arent you nr1 in your division then?
Ladder rank has more to do with games played than skill level quite often.
There are major threads describing how the ladder works. If you get placed vs someone higher than you, it could very well mean that he lost 2 matches in a row and you had won 2 matches in a row prior to that. It doesn't mean you're better than him.
Blizzard has often described MMR as a "buffer", so you wont lose 1000 points for having a bad day. Instead you'll lose 100, and get placed against lower opponents so you have a chance of getting back.
One problem with numbers that change in "non obvious ways" is that a lot of people will misinterpret them. You get these "my friend says his iq is 110, how can someone have more than 100% iq? I'm happy with my 85%!" type misunderstandings. So instead of giving people that like to complain but don't understand how it works a reason to produce negative propaganda, you just try to make it look simpler than it actually is. A lot of people would just be confused by sitting in a huge MMR ranking where they jump hundreds of ranks for every win/loss and all this "ladder fear" nonsense would be even more prevalent.
EPT
![[image loading]](http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73/Mounir/ranking.gif)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/xa7UZ.jpg)
