Match Making Changes in Ladder Season 7 - Page 12

On April 09 2012 16:01 K3Nyy wrote:
It doesn't really matter but I rather they remove the slightly favored/favored thing out in my opinion. It serves nothing but getting people nervous. I'll imagine next season a lot of people will ladder less because they're afraid to be matched constantly with people lower than them.

On April 09 2012 16:28 ricecake wrote:
I think this is a very, very good change.

You learn more from playing somebody better than you, than playing somebody who is the same skill as you. For example I am mid-diamond and recently played a couple of marine-tank vs marine-tank battles (it was late, so I got matched with the same guy 3 times :D). They was close, but only because each game we consistently made mistakes and threw away our marine forces.

If he had been significantly higher skill than me (i.e., a bigger skill gap than the current matchmaking system affords) I would have learned and improved much more than I did through those games, even if I got crushed.

This seems like a win-win. One player gets an almost-guaranteed win, the other gets a good learning experience.

On April 09 2012 16:46 akalarry wrote:
this is blizzard's way of saying that there are less players and they are trying to keep the waiting time down

On April 07 2012 02:18 Zombo Joe wrote:
Pretty sure they are doing this because there are always less and less players on the ladder and they need to match people up quicker.

On April 09 2012 16:15 Eifersuchtig wrote:
I don't feel this is a good change for the following reasons.

Extremes on the ladder:
-High GM will have even higher win rates.
-Bronze players will get defeated one-sidedly more often.

Ladder goals:
-Players that want to gain X points will have to deal with straight up losing a % of their games during a ladder session.
=This could be [theoretically] avoided by giving even more disproportionate amounts of points for wins/losses (+24/-3)
-Streaks can be convincingly cut short


Entertainment:
-Players often are able to easily beat significantly lower skilled opponents. Having very easy games occasionally isn't appealing or entertaining in the long run.
-Losses can be so crushing that they become demoralizing
-Potentially lower quality games*.
-Potentially more high aggression strategies from the lower ranked player, due to the pre-match Favored status information.

*I personally find (I am rank ~1 to 4 masters) that when I play a rank 8-10 master player, the game is incredibly easy. If I want, and as I often do in ladder games, I could cut it very short. Games with very different skill levels will be counter productive, insofar as the games will be of lower quality. That first "pressure" push, might make you straight up win. ZvZs might not get out of the ling/bane phase. PvPs can end incredibly quickly. Differences in macro-ability can make extended games unfeasible. These skill level differentials don't just exist between separate leagues, but also subsets of diamond and masters divisions. If the skill gap of searchable players is widened from (guessing) 400 point difference with +/- 200 pts to 800 pt difference occasionally, the resulting games will have this problem. To me, it's not good.

On April 09 2012 18:39 lunden0608 wrote:


Do you have numbers that support this claim? just curious

On April 10 2012 02:17 Pokebunny wrote:
Really good for lower league players, really shitty for GMs, many of whom already have 60% winrates because they match up against bad players too much.

On April 10 2012 02:19 SovSov wrote:

Read my post above, it doesn't change anything for the extreme top and extreme bottom players. Everyone in between is affected equally.

On April 10 2012 02:26 Pokebunny wrote:

No, it does. GMs are already playing people below them, now they'll play people even farther below them. They'll still get the same amount of points, but it just makes for more shitty practice and higher winrates.

The MMR cap will still be in place. It just means we'll play vs a higher range of MMR opponents, which means people even lower below us than we were already playing. We'll be favored and more heavily favored even more frequently than we already were. Our range of opponents can't be extended more upwards (because there's nothing above top GM) so it will only be extended downwards (playing more mid/high master players.