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On October 05 2011 09:27 c0ldfusion wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2011 09:13 Excalibur_Z wrote:On October 05 2011 09:01 c0ldfusion wrote:On October 05 2011 08:51 crms wrote:On October 05 2011 08:03 Excalibur_Z wrote:On October 05 2011 07:37 c0ldfusion wrote:On October 05 2011 07:27 Excalibur_Z wrote:On October 05 2011 07:08 c0ldfusion wrote:On October 05 2011 06:16 Excalibur_Z wrote:On October 05 2011 06:09 Ignorant prodigy wrote:I think it may be a good thing to have shorter seasons.. this is how I envision it working.. Since we sort of agree MRR is a moving target, I think the qty of people actively playing the game effects which ranking certain MMR ranges fall into. This would mean the shorter season weeds out the newer players quicker.. making the variance in skill between the rankings a bit less diluted. For instance if Blizzard is trying to maintain certain percentages of its overall populace into different leagues then shorter seasons reduce the qty of inactive players accounting for those percentages. Meaning your ranking will be more accurate to your skill level amongst active players. I created a quick chart to sort of show what I’m saying. Let’s say right now there’s 50,000 people who’ve played their placement matches in S3. Lets also guesstimate Blizzard wishes to maintain 23% of that 50,000 be dedicated to Bronze (12,750 Players in bronze) If S4 comes along and only 30,000 players have played their placement matches, that 23% shows a lower number of people (7,650 in bronze) Meaning the MMR would slide accordingly. My example shows that in S3 a player with 1780 MMR is Platinum, whereas in S4 that MMR has this player in Diamond. Obviously if S4 grows to 50,000 people and the player in the example below never played a game, then he would drop back down in Platinum. ![[image loading]](http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/7968/mmre.jpg) Of course.. this is all guessing on my part.. I just sort of envision it working this way. Nah the MMR boundaries for the leagues are fixed. It's the population that varies, not the league boundaries. MMR isn't a moving target. It's more like this: ![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/5w92j.jpg) Whoa, wait a minute, how would Blizzard maintain the 20/20/20/20/18/2 ratio if MMR boundaries are fixed? The populations aren't enforced. They fluctuate, and sometimes not insignificantly. However, skill always spreads out to cover gaps. I've used this example before, but say there are three players A B C and D, at 1000 1200 1400 and 1600 MMR, respectively. A is 1000 because he loses to the rest. B is at 1200 because he loses to C and D but he still beats A. C is at 1400 because he beats both A and B but loses to D. D is at 1600 because he beats all of them. If C stopped playing: - B would rise because he isn't losing to C anymore. - A would rise slightly because the gap between A and B will widen. A is still beating people below him. - D would fall slightly because as he loses to people above him, he can't sustain his current level because the gap between B and D is wider than the old gap between C and D. The new distribution might be something closer to 1020 for A, 1350 for B, 1580 for D. If C came back, he would come back at 1400, his old MMR. Gradually, as all players play more games, skill will spread out again and go back to the old distribution. Now if you imagine this on a larger scale and with league boundaries, that's going to come with some league fluctuations. Ok gotcha, so the percentages are already "baked in" the MMR. If that's the case though, then aren't they making an assumption about the distribution? Your graph looks like a normal distribution... is that accurate? Intuitively, I would think something like skill in starcraft 2 would fit better in a distribution with a fat tail. I'm a little sketchy on what it is in reality (obviously since the best resource we have is SC2Ranks which is limited because it includes all accounts) but from what I've heard, there is a bump in Diamond because of the skill difference between "hardcore" and "casual" players. However, I don't know if that was only for Season 1 and if prior distributions were used for later seasons. Can you elaborate on this 'bump'? Are you saying there is something artificially placed in Diamond that you must 'get over' regardless or active MMR to differentiate 'hardcore' and 'casual'. Is getting Diamond->Master the hardest promotion? Aside from GM I suppose. Reading what I typed sounds retarded, ugh. Can you just explain what this diamond 'bump' means? I think he meant between diamond and platinum - this would explain be explained them trying to fit a non-symmetric distribution onto a symmetric one. Though keep in mind that Blizzard can make changes to MMR related calculations (points lost and won from matches, boundaries, etc) whenever they want. They don't need a patch for something like that. Chances are they probably have taken some measures to correct for this phenomenon considering they always stood by the 20/20/20/20/18/2 breakdown. Edit: Correction, I don't mean the boundary between plat and diamond. I mean more than the allocated 20% of active population in diamond. Yes, that's right. Blizzard has modified where the boundaries are in the past. Famously there was a "promotion day" that many players noticed in their 2v2/3v3/4v4 arranged teams and in 1v1 Bronze/Silver in the middle of Season 2. This was a result of the boundaries being changed to suit the current active population and return the league distribution closer to the ideal. For example, say that when Master was first introduced, the MMR boundary was set at like 2600 (another imaginary value). For 1v1 that would mean 2% of the population would be expected to get above 2600. For 4v4, the reality was that there was only 1 arranged team that got into Master league at first, and their record was something amazing like 92-0. That meant that given the skill spread in 4v4 arranged, reaching 2600 was exceedingly difficult and didn't properly represent the desired 2% of the population. So, they changed the boundary, maybe to something like 2100 for 4v4 arranged so that closer to 2% of the population could get in. Ahh I remember that, makes sense. So yes -moral of the story- to everyone asking questions about things like bonus pool, league distribution (myself included), we just have to trust that Blizzard is making sure that the ladder population falls roughly into the 20/20/20/20/18/2 breakdown and that more importantly, the only things that tell you anything meaningful about current your skill level are your league, the leagues of your recent opponents (and maybe also the leagues of the other recent opponents of your recent opponents). Those things would probably give you as clear a picture as possible of where you stand relative to the entire population of active players.
Yup, definitely. Or if you're in Masters then you can look at points + bonus pool since divisions aren't weighted. And for GM it would probably be better to look at points + bonus pool to compare to other GM players since many times GM players aren't available for other GM players to play, so they end up playing high masters.
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I welcome shorter season. This means different map pools. I didn't find many of the maps in season 3 to be very memorable or noteworthy in my opinion other than Antiga Shipyard.
Xel Naga Caverns needs to disappear as well as Backwater Gulch.
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I think the season was too short. I only got to play about 60 games (School) and still had no idea what the new maps were called and how they were different. Plus, I am so close to being diamond that my MMR will probably try to promote me after the lock 
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I do like the idea of shorter seasons, but i think 4 months would be more ideal
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I'm all for shorter seasons. As an above poster stated that this also means different map pools. Season 3s map pool was...no bueno. 
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I really do hope if they are doing 2 month seasons they change some of the maps every other season, just to keep things a little more fresher!!!!
Think its a great idea having shorter seasons just for the fact that as they ahve alread said the ladders are far more active in the first 8 weeks then slowly tails off!!!
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i feel like 1 month or two tops should be enough for a season, shorter season with maybe some prizes would make this whole ladder thing alot more interesting
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I haven't seen anything about new maps anywhere, will new maps be implemented with the new season? I assume there will be but this is Blizzard we are talking about, and so far I haven't seen any info on new maps for season 4
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as long as they make the ladder lock time shorter, i'm fine with this.
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United States12240 Posts
On October 06 2011 14:14 Mendelfist wrote:Show nested quote +On October 06 2011 09:02 Excalibur_Z wrote:And, yes, if we had an established system and then all Bronze left, it would be 0%. We have ways of dealing with that though, if it's necessary  So Bronze actually wouldn't get repopulated in the hypothetical "what if Bronze quit" scenario, Blizzard would just react to that and adjust MMR boundaries accordingly. Thanks. The only question left for me then is what happens in the unlikely scenario that every single one of the bronzes leave. I understand that if a few of them remain they will force the rest of the population to keep their MMR, but I don't agree that nothing will happen if they all leave. The question is what Blizzard uses for "anchors". There has to be something, otherwise MMR will tend to drift. In other online systems, Go for example, you use well known players as anchors. "X is 9 dan. Period." In this system, what do they use? My idea was that they simply assign the best player to some MMR, and the worst player to some other MMR. In that case bronze will repopulate if empty, but according to your response that won't happen. So how do they do it? Actually, I was just going to hit "Post", when the thought occured to me that you can't use two anchors. That would assign a fixed MMR difference between the best and the worst regardless of their skill difference, and that doesn't work (because "MMR will always be directly proportional to the estimated win %" wouldn't be true). Maybe they only use the best players? But that would cause some problems in the long run, because the skill difference between the best and the worst will constantly increase, and bronze would fill up more and more. Whatever anchor you choose, you would see a redistribution over time as the best continue to be better, but the newcomers still are newbies, and we don't see this.
Well we know that the MMR range is fixed (that is, it has a cap) because some players who have spoken to David Kim have been told this, and that's backed up by the diminishing returns that top Grandmaster players are seeing for each of their wins. Maybe it really is using the old 0-3000 range that WoW did after all. I know the way chess handles this is by modifying the k-factor at certain steps to make earning rating beyond a certain point more difficult, but I'm not sure if the same principle applies to MMR.
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I would love a new saison every two month mainly because of the map pool rotation it would create.
I don't really carre about ranking anyway.
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Blizzard is going too far: 2 months is way too short. Why not reset every 2 weeks with a 1 week lock ? ... come on blizzard.
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I think their point on more activity during the first 8 weeks is valid. I haven't played for over a month, so was in something like 75th place in my division. I played for a few hours the last two nights, quickly cleared my bonus pool and am approaching the top 5 in my division (was 11th last night) which just goes to show how many are inactive right now. If there was consistent ladder play, there's no way I should be able to be inactive that long and then rocket to the top bonus pool or not.
Guess we'll see how it plays out, I'm not concerned with my division placement, I just want to keep improving  .
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United States660 Posts
I will never understand the need for a two week lock between seasons. It's like dead time, where playing ladder games becomes almost pointless as there is nothing to be gained. If I want practice, I'll just grab some of my plat friends and play practice games rather than laddering.
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On October 07 2011 02:18 Brainling wrote:
I will never understand the need for a two week lock between seasons. It's like dead time, where playing ladder games becomes almost pointless as there is nothing to be gained. If I want practice, I'll just grab some of my plat friends and play practice games rather than laddering.
the reason is that it allows players to not fear league/division change. Getting demoted or promoted causes you to lose all your points except bonus pool spent. Thus making it very difficult to place top8/25/etc.
Obviously for you (and others) the reason to ladder is to get into the next league. Others like to try to get as high a rank within their division as possible.
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I just started really playing too
Oh well, my intentional drop to bronze, rise to gold, intentional drop to bronze again and current trip up to gold (soon hopefully) is going well!
Next season I'm not going to game the system. Yay!
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Lock seems too long. But I like having only 2 month seasons. Easier to keep on top of that bonus pool instead of leaving it 'til the last minute. :D
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This season feels really short. I have little more than half the games I played last season..... guess I need to get to work in the next couple weeks.
I'm not really looking forward to the shorter season. I feel like if seasons start occurring too often than they will lose some of their significance, and players may actually start placing less because the turnover rate is too high.
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I haven't even had the time to play that much in S3 =(
Oh well.
Guess S4 I'll try and put some good time into o.o
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EPT
