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On June 05 2012 08:17 Excalibur_Z wrote:
I agree. If that goes into the live version, it will make it virtually impossible to collect data. League badges alone are already confusing enough for players because they must be viewed within a certain context. Typically what happens is something like this:
1. Player posts a forum thread asking "I'm only SILVER and I'm being matched against DIAMONDS what the heck is going on??"
2. I investigate by looking up the player's match history to determine whether: a) the guy is talking about team games and is confusing a player's Best Team with the Actual Team he was matched against, or b) he is close to promotion or the other player is close to demotion.
3. I post the adjusted points for all opponents in the player's match history and the associated point gains/losses so the player has a better idea of why he was matched against that player in the first place, and I also include the opponents' opponents if that information is statistically interesting or otherwise relevant.
4. The player is thankful to receive the information and/or rails against Blizzard for the confusion.
If that change goes live, I won't be able to provide step 3 anymore, and maybe not even step 2. People do understand when you tell them "you've got 1000 adjusted points and that Diamond you fought was -200, and before that game you played against a 100 point Platinum and a 400 point Gold, so the Diamond wasn't as much of an anomaly as you might have expected" because it puts things in context. Without that additional layer of research, things become much cloudier.
I think there is still a way to find out the players mmr. But this way would need me to read way more out of the sc2 client than i already do and would produce way less accurate results. ( working with only the player data = opponent dmmr)
And to be honest i dont think i would do this. Its a fight i can not win.
In the long wrong they will hide more and more information until only the league icon is left.
And i start to ask myself if its worth it to put so much work into a game that moves so far away from what i enjoy.
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It's hopefully a bug, I already reported it as a bug in the forums for arcade beta.
I found that just unbelievable. Will we lose sc2ranks? There won't be any reason for us to even have a division, they could just give us a league badge and then give us a star if we are active enough!!
The worst problem is that you can't even get people to protest enough, however that will have an impact in the game in the future, as people get bored of being league X with a star for 1 year, they won't just be happy with that forever >.>
As I said, hopefully it's a bug and will get fixed soon (before it hits live regions).
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I don't believe Blizzard will go on with this. It will hurt their franchise too much and they still have at the very least 2 expansion packs to profit from, not to mention the benefits of having SC2 as a large esport game.
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I think Blizzard mentioned they were planning on implementing in HOTS a non-ladder mmr matchmaking system for people who were afraid of knowing their ranking. I am hoping that means they will actually give us real statistics for people in the ladder matchups. Unfortunately that might mean all the great work you have done might be for nothing anyways.
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Oh I couldn't be happier than if Blizzard starts showing MMR in game. That's the reason we're working on this so much. I'd prefer if they would've shown it from the get go, but late is better than never.
Sadly I don't think they will ever show it. It's a decision they made while developing SC2 and nothing changed in this regard between then and now.
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Excalibur has had the most cogent explanation for blizzard's byzantine system I've heard to this date (and that includes out of blizzard people themselves), but I have to overwhelmingly agree with Not_That... MMR and the standard deviation should be displayed, or at least some closer approximation. The obfuscation around points and leagues is ridiculous. And placement after 5 games makes no sense.
Another thing I've noticed recently, is that I think the sigma measure is much more relevant in Blizzard's system than it is in TrueSkill. I've tried to implement my own TrueSkill, but I don't think I'm doing it correctly, but I've been amazed how new accounts tned to be matched against other new accounts, both in placements and in early games. That effect diminishes as games get played, but Blizzard has obviously tweaked their implementation. That's part of what makes modeling the bnet ladder so difficult.
I'm in the same boat with skeldark, i've thrown up my hands on this issue more than once. I think there is still value in modeling the bnet system, but the ladder match making is the biggest blackbox of all.
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United States12235 Posts
On June 07 2012 11:33 celeryman wrote:
Excalibur has had the most cogent explanation for blizzard's byzantine system I've heard to this date (and that includes out of blizzard people themselves), but I have to overwhelmingly agree with Not_That... MMR and the standard deviation should be displayed, or at least some closer approximation. The obfuscation around points and leagues is ridiculous. And placement after 5 games makes no sense.
Another thing I've noticed recently, is that I think the sigma measure is much more relevant in Blizzard's system than it is in TrueSkill. I've tried to implement my own TrueSkill, but I don't think I'm doing it correctly, but I've been amazed how new accounts tned to be matched against other new accounts, both in placements and in early games. That effect diminishes as games get played, but Blizzard has obviously tweaked their implementation. That's part of what makes modeling the bnet ladder so difficult.
I'm in the same boat with skeldark, i've thrown up my hands on this issue more than once. I think there is still value in modeling the bnet system, but the ladder match making is the biggest blackbox of all.
What you mentioned (new accounts vs new accounts) is something we've noticed as well, but it just doesn't make sense. If I'm a ladder designer, I want new players to be placed as accurately as I can so they don't just get frustrated and quit. After all, I have only 5 games to figure out where a new player should go. The fact that new players tend to play against other new players is weird because absolutely nothing is known about either player, so it's actually one complete unknown playing against another complete unknown, so what kind of information can you get from that?
As it turns out, it may not matter. If you pit a "kinda new" player against a "kinda new" player and the first player loses, then you'd maybe match him against a "kinda Silver-ish" player and see what happened. Remember the uncertainty values and K-values during placement are huge, so after 5 games, you should have a "good enough" representation of a player's skill. If you overestimated and placed a player in a division that was too good for them, "minimum MMR" would kick in and the player would still be able to earn points up to a certain extent, even though his MMR would steadily be falling until he was inevitably demoted. As long as the player is earning points and interested in continuing to play, that's good enough because the proper skill definition will eventually be determined. If you underestimated and the player was placed in a division weaker than his actual skill, no big deal there either because he'll earn even more points and probably get promoted after a time, which is also a positive result.
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Has anyone been tracking their mmr from game to game? Mine seems to fluctuate incredibly wild distances, win or loss. This doesn't make any sense to me, and it's really hard to track progress. Maybe I'm doing this wrong, but by my math, some games I'm in the 18th-19th or even as low as the 16th tier, and other times I'm in the masters tier/the one below that. I've been promoted and demoted to and from masters 3-4 times since it's release. The account I'm playing on has ~5200 league games played. Surely blizzard's system can't still be this confused about where I belong, after that many games?
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Are you using the MMR calculator plugin for sc2gears or are you referring to some manual calculation? What do you mean by 18th-19th tier and a tier below master? Can you give an example what you mean by wild fluctuations? Are you on SEA server?
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I just skimmed the thread, so it's entirely possible, and I've been doing calculations by hand. I'm on NA server. Let me double check my calculations with what your plugin has, give me a couple of minutes.
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Okay yeah I misread something, I understand now, thanks xD
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I want to thank Insane for getting this data and for his huge help.
Click picture for full version.
![[image loading]](http://s14.postimage.org/bdk5bte9d/astraflame.png)
The blue line is adjusted points. The red line is MMR approximation. Bars are opponents DMMR in relation to Insane's offset color coded by opponent's league. Light red bars are opponent whose league is missing (the high red bar near the left is someone still in his 5 placement matches).
For some games it's impossible to determine opponent DMMR due to Insane's adj points to opponent DMMR relation being capped. These opponents have pink bars extending below them to demonstrate the DMMR may lie anywhere from minus infinity to the top of the bar.
A reminder: adj pts can go below 0 to a minimum of minus the total bonus pool the player has used. In this graph Insane's adj pts start from -8.
If we take his Master opponents starting from the last Diamond opponent he played and average (their DMMR minus Insane's DMMR) we get 1462.7, which should be close to the Master offset minus Insane's offset. We're still trying to determine whether Insane is highest tier in Bronze or second highest.
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Ok guys, I have a feeling that we have the cap at a number and additionally we have the "zero" at another number.
Something like, the cap is 73+ and the zero is at 150+/-.
What does that mean? That means that an active platinum player in a tier S (t2) division with 210 adjusted points tends to be just barelly under the diamond F line, because he actually has only 60 "points" in the tier S plat and the offset to the diamond F is like 65 or something. If he is active, this number should be pretty close to his moving average.
I can't prove it for you right now, but I have a strong feeling about it.
That also means that a diamond S (t6) player with 300 AP equals a master with 0, but that doesn't mean the offset is 300, nor 300-73, because the "zero" for bellow master is actually a number close to 150, maybe 150 indeed, so the offset to tier S and master is 150, not 300 (nor 227).
That's why I wanted to know and stalk a diamond tier S player. Such a player will play against maters from time to time and we could know for sure if this is true or not. I doubt it isn't true and I think the number 150 is a close number for that.
I recommend you guys to think about this possibility seriously, I am pretty positive it is true!
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United States12235 Posts
I'm not sure what you're saying. Let's take Diamond league and, because the final offsets haven't been discovered yet, I'll use 50 in my example and 88 as the minimum MMR value.
Let's say the lowest skill tier of Diamond covers MMR range 1000-1050. That means that its "zero" point is 1000 because the offset is 1000. However, "minimum MMR" dictates that any opponent who is below 1088 will award points as though they were 1088. This causes points for anyone in the 1000-1088 range to drift toward 88 points over time. This will cause some point overlap because if you suddenly took away all of the offsets, you still wouldn't get the exact MMRs of players below 1088.
Now let's say the second-lowest tier covers MMR range 1050-1100. The "zero" point here is 1050 because displayed points can't go below 0. Due to "minimum MMR", any opponent who is below 1138 MMR will award points as though they were 1138, causing points to drift upward toward 88 points for this tier.
This "soft point floor" is set such that a player who is actually stable and whose MMR remains within the range of his assigned division tier will earn enough points to make it feel like he's actually in the next tier. Basically we can think of it like a pool where 88 is the water's surface and 0 is the floor, because even if you touch the floor, buoyancy will push you back up toward the surface.
The confusing part for me is how division tier offsets factor into this. In the examples given, the second-lowest tier would have a -50 point offset from the lowest tier. However, minimum MMR ensures that 88 is the "soft floor" for both tiers, effectively masking the offsets entirely. Maybe this is only a concern at the low end, though.
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On June 16 2012 03:36 Excalibur_Z wrote:
I'm not sure what you're saying. Let's take Diamond league and, because the final offsets haven't been discovered yet, I'll use 50 in my example and 88 as the minimum MMR value.
Let's say the lowest skill tier of Diamond covers MMR range 1000-1050. That means that its "zero" point is 1000 because the offset is 1000. However, "minimum MMR" dictates that any opponent who is below 1088 will award points as though they were 1088. This causes points for anyone in the 1000-1088 range to drift toward 88 points over time. This will cause some point overlap because if you suddenly took away all of the offsets, you still wouldn't get the exact MMRs of players below 1088.
Now let's say the second-lowest tier covers MMR range 1050-1100. The "zero" point here is 1050 because displayed points can't go below 0. Due to "minimum MMR", any opponent who is below 1138 MMR will award points as though they were 1138, causing points to drift upward toward 88 points for this tier.
This "soft point floor" is set such that a player who is actually stable and whose MMR remains within the range of his assigned division tier will earn enough points to make it feel like he's actually in the next tier. Basically we can think of it like a pool where 88 is the water's surface and 0 is the floor, because even if you touch the floor, buoyancy will push you back up toward the surface.
The confusing part for me is how division tier offsets factor into this. In the examples given, the second-lowest tier would have a -50 point offset from the lowest tier. However, minimum MMR ensures that 88 is the "soft floor" for both tiers, effectively masking the offsets entirely. Maybe this is only a concern at the low end, though.
That is the question, how exatcly does this works, we still don't know.
Now, my hipothesys:
Let's say we have Platinum Tier S division.
It covers mmr from 950-1000. After 1000, you are effectivelly diamond F, less than 950 though, platinum A or worst.
Let's say the cap is 50. Every player has 50 "dmmr" in a plat tier s, they can't go lower, however, a player with 100 "dmmr" on plat rank S is actually a player with 900 MMR, because the "zero" is 150, not 0, not even 50, it's 150. Players with 150 DMMR, they have 950 MMR. Players with 100 DMMR have 900 and players with 50DMMR are capped, so, bad data.
Let's say I am a diamond player in an unknown division and I want to know my MMR. For some reason I know I only face platinum tier S and I see that my DMMR at plat S is 200! Then the question is, what is 200 in the MMR table? Well, 200 is 200 - 150 (the zero) + the offset, so 950 + (200-150) = 1000. I am at 1000 MMR, I am at diamond tier still, but only when I have 200 DMMR+ from plat S.
I am pretty sure this is the case because of my data, I was a plat tier S last season with 200-220 dmmr in my division. How come that wasn't enough for diamond? The answer is that 220 DMMR is something like "40-60" DMMR, it didn't cross into the diamond mmr just yet, not because the offset from plat S to diamond F is that big, but because the zero is 150, the offset is right, the "zero" is the problem that we didn't figured out it!
Also, I have a friend that was low master last season, he was pretty active and I knew he would barelly be demoted to diamond this season, I even told him so. In the end, he is indeed at a diamond division, with almost 100% chances of being in a tier S Diamond division. I am trying to stalk the players there and it seems obvious to me that "0" isn't the real zero. Right now I bet it is 150, but they aren't playing much, he already is using the plugin though, so I hope to have enough data at the end to the season to have a more solid number about the true "0". Hope he plays enough ^^
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Wow it's so amazing to me people are figuring all this stuff out, alot of props to all of you!
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United States12235 Posts
It covers mmr from 950-1000. After 1000, you are effectivelly diamond F, less than 950 though, platinum A or worst.
Let's say the cap is 50. Every player has 50 "dmmr" in a plat tier s, they can't go lower, however, a player with 100 "dmmr" on plat rank S is actually a player with 900 MMR, because the "zero" is 150, not 0, not even 50, it's 150. Players with 150 DMMR, they have 950 MMR. Players with 100 DMMR have 900 and players with 50DMMR are capped, so, bad data.
This is the part I don't understand. I'm not seeing the connection. If the soft point floor is 50 in a division spanning MMR 950-1000, then the amount of points for a given player will be 50, which will appear to equate to 1000 MMR. However, we know that to be an illusion. The player with 100 points would appear to equate to 1050 MMR, I don't know where you're getting 900 from.
I do see what you're trying to say though, which is that there is a particular mean which exists for points to hover around. That should be 73 (or 88) though.
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I think I will have an answer with data in less than 1 month, wait and see 
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When you say "zero", do you mean minimum average MMR required for a promotion? If so, a t6 ("rank s") diamond player with 300 adj pts would be about even to a master player with 171 adj pts (300 - (master offset - t6 diamond offset)).
Our offsets are fairly accurate we think. The average MMR required for a promotion we are less clear about. We know it's around 70+ ish by looking at the DMMR of low master and diamond opponents of master players and seeing the diamond players up to DMMR of around that in master league, and above 70+ ish it's generally master players. Whether or not it's the same for other leagues we aren't sure.
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Ok, I was wrong.
I have 2 tier S diamond divisions to stalk, so several players.
I failed in the math with the F function before, so I focused on the 11-13 points win/lost to make it simple.
Zero is "0", simple as that. And the offset seem to still be 150 btw.
Which makes me sad, how couldn't I get into diamond with 200 AP at plat tier S division in neither account =3
Btw, where are the terrans? I was eager to try the new 6 queens strategy with them =(
Oh, ZvP all day, at least I am closer and closer to get my mass roach before 12 minutes <3
So, yeah, zero is "0". Sorry for the confusion =/
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EPT
