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On January 11 2014 03:18 Thieving Magpie wrote:
If you maintain the rate of improvement at the same rate as the population, but the lower ranked players leave the game, then more people who are "higher skilled" gets dropped down to the lower leagues because they are now the bottom of the bell curve.
Not automatically. Only if Blizzard decides to change the league thresholds. The matchmaking system estimates the relative skill differences between all players. This is directly reflected in MMR differences. There is no room to shuffle people around between leagues just because there are too few in some place. The system does not try to preserve a bell curve.
Variants of this issue comes up again and again. People think that there are "spots" in the leagues, and if people leave a league the system will move people from other leagues to fill up these spots. It will not.
bronze simply means the bottom X percent of Y population.
No. It most certainly does not.
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On January 11 2014 06:25 Mendelfist wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2014 03:18 Thieving Magpie wrote:
If you maintain the rate of improvement at the same rate as the population, but the lower ranked players leave the game, then more people who are "higher skilled" gets dropped down to the lower leagues because they are now the bottom of the bell curve. Not automatically. Only if Blizzard decides to change the league thresholds. The matchmaking system estimates the relative skill differences between all players. This is directly reflected in MMR differences. There is no room to shuffle people around between leagues just because there are too few in some place. The system does not try to preserve a bell curve. Variants of this issue comes up again and again. People think that there are "spots" in the leagues, and if people leave a league the system will move people from other leagues to fill up these spots. It will not. No. It most certainly does not.
Your right that there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for creating percentiles in league distribution but he's right that Blizzard is TRYING to create specific percentile groupings by league, which is why they are changing the mmr offsets
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On January 11 2014 08:54 tili wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2014 06:25 Mendelfist wrote:On January 11 2014 03:18 Thieving Magpie wrote:
If you maintain the rate of improvement at the same rate as the population, but the lower ranked players leave the game, then more people who are "higher skilled" gets dropped down to the lower leagues because they are now the bottom of the bell curve. Not automatically. Only if Blizzard decides to change the league thresholds. The matchmaking system estimates the relative skill differences between all players. This is directly reflected in MMR differences. There is no room to shuffle people around between leagues just because there are too few in some place. The system does not try to preserve a bell curve. Variants of this issue comes up again and again. People think that there are "spots" in the leagues, and if people leave a league the system will move people from other leagues to fill up these spots. It will not. bronze simply means the bottom X percent of Y population. No. It most certainly does not. Your right that there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for creating percentiles in league distribution but he's right that Blizzard is TRYING to create specific percentile groupings by league, which is why they are changing the mmr offsets
Blizzard has not changed static league offsets / thresholds since start of June. And if they only change offsets / thresholds when V.2.1 is published, it does not fix the main problem that due to decay & its indirect effects (+ other lesser causes), wildly different skilled players are sharing similar MMR, which leads to 'bad' matchmaking results even if the matchmaker itself is technically functioning ok.
I visually checked MMR tool user profiles for this season regarding possible offset changes (not enough data for offset calculations for many leagues yet) and there seemed to be no changes. I also checked last season's data regarding possibility that Blizzard would have changed the max decay to be worth of "few losses". They had not. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=20565355
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On January 11 2014 06:25 Mendelfist wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2014 03:18 Thieving Magpie wrote:
If you maintain the rate of improvement at the same rate as the population, but the lower ranked players leave the game, then more people who are "higher skilled" gets dropped down to the lower leagues because they are now the bottom of the bell curve. Not automatically. Only if Blizzard decides to change the league thresholds. The matchmaking system estimates the relative skill differences between all players. This is directly reflected in MMR differences. There is no room to shuffle people around between leagues just because there are too few in some place. The system does not try to preserve a bell curve. Variants of this issue comes up again and again. People think that there are "spots" in the leagues, and if people leave a league the system will move people from other leagues to fill up these spots. It will not. No. It most certainly does not.
What are you talking about? The leagues are just percent of player base, Blizzard even has several posts about this when they were about to change it. Even if the ladder were only filled with extremely skilled progamer-level players, some % would still be bronze.
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United States12269 Posts
On January 11 2014 12:04 Zheryn wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2014 06:25 Mendelfist wrote:On January 11 2014 03:18 Thieving Magpie wrote:
If you maintain the rate of improvement at the same rate as the population, but the lower ranked players leave the game, then more people who are "higher skilled" gets dropped down to the lower leagues because they are now the bottom of the bell curve. Not automatically. Only if Blizzard decides to change the league thresholds. The matchmaking system estimates the relative skill differences between all players. This is directly reflected in MMR differences. There is no room to shuffle people around between leagues just because there are too few in some place. The system does not try to preserve a bell curve. Variants of this issue comes up again and again. People think that there are "spots" in the leagues, and if people leave a league the system will move people from other leagues to fill up these spots. It will not. bronze simply means the bottom X percent of Y population. No. It most certainly does not. What are you talking about? The leagues are just percent of player base, Blizzard even has several posts about this when they were about to change it. Even if the ladder were only filled with extremely skilled progamer-level players, some % would still be bronze.
They're not. What they do is look at the distribution every season in terms of who has less than X bonus pool remaining. After that filter is applied, they record which MMR values represent the target percentiles. If the top 2% of players are above 2035.645 rating, that's what the breakpoint will be next season. It will stay at 2035.645 for the whole season unless they notice a dramatic shift where they need to intervene. As you can probably imagine, the players above 2035.645 probably won't remain the top 2%, that may shift to 1% or 3% or 5% and that's okay.
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On January 11 2014 12:04 Zheryn wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2014 06:25 Mendelfist wrote:On January 11 2014 03:18 Thieving Magpie wrote:
If you maintain the rate of improvement at the same rate as the population, but the lower ranked players leave the game, then more people who are "higher skilled" gets dropped down to the lower leagues because they are now the bottom of the bell curve. Not automatically. Only if Blizzard decides to change the league thresholds. The matchmaking system estimates the relative skill differences between all players. This is directly reflected in MMR differences. There is no room to shuffle people around between leagues just because there are too few in some place. The system does not try to preserve a bell curve. Variants of this issue comes up again and again. People think that there are "spots" in the leagues, and if people leave a league the system will move people from other leagues to fill up these spots. It will not. bronze simply means the bottom X percent of Y population. No. It most certainly does not. What are you talking about? The leagues are just percent of player base, Blizzard even has several posts about this when they were about to change it. Even if the ladder were only filled with extremely skilled progamer-level players, some % would still be bronze.
Nope. The distribution percents are only target values that Blizzard tries to reach via changing static league offsets / thresholds (which they have not changed since start of June). Consider situation where A) all bronze MMR range players would be removed from the ladder, B) MMR decay would be removed, C) no new players would enter the ladder / no MMR resets, D) ranked players would play only against ranked opponents and E) there would be no league offset/threshold changes. In that situation there would be no players in bronze range at first. Of course as time goes by some of the silver range players would drop to bronze range by normally losing games.
Edit: And while proof reading Excalibur_Z had already answered 
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That being said, there has to be some mechanism to keep the MMR scale from floating around. It's especially obvious now when MMR is clearly not zero sum due to decay. With no anchor anywhere this would lead to indefinite deflation. My theory, which I don't have much support for, is that the anchor is at the top of the ladder, perhaps implemented as the MMR cap which we know exists. That would mean that if the top players suddenly quit, those spots would indeed fill up again, and pull the rest of the ladder with it. This is just speculation though.
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On January 11 2014 16:41 Mendelfist wrote:
That being said, there has to be some mechanism to keep the MMR scale from floating around. It's especially obvious now when MMR is clearly not zero sum due to decay. With no anchor anywhere this would lead to indefinite deflation. My theory, which I don't have much support for, is that the anchor is at the top of the ladder, perhaps implemented as the MMR cap which we know exists. That would mean that if the top players suddenly quit, those spots would indeed fill up again, and pull the rest of the ladder with it. This is just speculation though.
I would expect that there are some limitations regarding MMR decay in bronze range that it would not push players to 'negative' range directly (I have not seen (nor specifically searched for) accounts recorded by MMR tool facing decay in bronze range. Of course it may be because there are not that many bronze range tool users & they usually don't play that much & if you drop to very bottom of bronze your opponents are capped -> thus no 'good games', which means no reliably calculated MMR for that player before he rises higher).
Also I still have not reached any top caps regarding individual players, but then again I don't have records for the very top for couple of seasons. E.g. For last season (S16) highest value that some MMR tool user had recorded for his opponent on EU was around 2550. This opponent had finished around top 20 GM regarding ladder points. During S14 there were recorded MMR peaks at around 3000 on EU server (a notorious maphacker had used the tool for short period during August and had risen to the very top of EU ladder. He had also boosted his account by playing against his own other account during silent hours. His highest opponent value was around 2750 which is still used by the MMR tool as top value for EU). Regarding matchmaking Josh Menke (Blizzard's previous matchmaking specialist) mentioned few years back that extreme ratings are clipped from matchmaking (capped value used for matchmaking instead) (here is the mentioned video and recap from it, but since that video there has been changes to the system).
There is also this matchmaking bug that has been there for ages (probably existed already before HotS. I don't remember when I heard about it first time). It causes that very top MMR range of GMs sometimes (rare) face very bottom MMR range bronzes. For example when EU GM was opened this season I was monitoring when the first MMR tool users would be promoted. While waiting I also looked at the Blizzard's GM list on Battle.net web pages as it started filling and noticed that Stardust had played one match just after he had been promoted from which he got 1 point. Such low points usually indicate that the MMR difference is extreme, especially as Stardust had just been promoted. Thus I checked who his opponent was via SC2 client and indeed it was a bronze player like I had suspected. I wonder what causes this bug as they seem not to fix it. Could be e.g. some overflow bug in some matchmaking algorithm.
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United States12269 Posts
Regarding that overflow issue, I wonder if it's tied to long queue times. If there's really nobody within your normal search range and it has to expand further and further and there's nowhere higher for it to go maybe it loops back around to the bottom of Bronze and finds someone?
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As a person who just got back into playing a couple of games a day, what is going on with the ladder system? I'm currently in Gold, used to be a upper-mid Diamond player. As it currently stands, I'm mainly facing an opponent who I beat very easily(usually a multi-season gold/plat finisher), this occurs around 50% of the time when I ladder. Or I'm facing someone who completely annihilates me(usually multi-season Master finisher), this occurs 20% of the time. And the last 30% of my games are against what I would consider an equal opponent. All of these people are in Gold by the way. My question is, why am I facing, in Gold league, ex-multi-season Master players who are also ranked in Gold and why am I constantly playing people who are below my skill level?
For example, this morning I played a couple of ladder games. One was against a former 10 times Master league finisher Protoss who completely annihilated me and another was against a Terran who had no clue what was going on. Why am I getting such variance in the skill level of my opponents? Ladder is no fun when I'm not facing opponents who are at similar skill level of my own.
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On January 11 2014 12:39 korona wrote:
Of course as time goes by some of the silver range players would drop to bronze range by normally losing games.
Edit: I just realized that Mendelfist just posted saying essentially exactly what I did, that the scale would float around to fill up parts of the MMR scale where players get lost. Never mind.
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On January 11 2014 16:41 Mendelfist wrote:
With no anchor anywhere this would lead to indefinite deflation.
Is there reason to believe this isn't happening? Or reason to believe it is for that matter?
My experience being limited is anecdotal but it would be consistent with indefinite deflation. Both my 1v1 and 4v4 leagues have dropped certainly due to deflation periods. Having then become aware of the deflation due to the marvellous efforts of you chaps I've been making sure to play at least one game in each bracket each week. Despite reasonably winning streaks my 1v1 hasn't lead to a promotion. My 4v4 has a small positive win ratio but start of 2014 I received yet another demotion.
This experience would seem to be consistent with the average player base dropping over time, enough to demote my 4v4 and prevent any significant rise in 1v1. Presumably different brackets may deflate at different rates, AT teams for example may play much less frequently, but still regularly, contributing to higher deflation for team brackets.
I know its possible my performance isn't as good as the win-loss suggests, since it also matters who I win and lose against, and also my proximity to promotion boundaries is not known so even a reasonable improvement may not lead to promotion, or alternately a small lowering might lead to demotion. Hence my question, are you guys aware of any evidence for or against indefinite deflation?
Furthermore, if it were the case that since HotS the ladder has been experiencing indefinite deflation of some sort that would seem to be an extremely damaging fact. Along with the wide range of skill with same MMR, it would suggest to me that the ladder is FAR from fit for purpose and I struggle to understand why Blizzard would not take strong corrective action as soon as they realised what was happening (aka 6 months ago). As things are now nothing sort of a removal of MMR deflation and a complete forced reset of every players MMR would seem to be an adequate solution.
Since Blizz don't seem to be concerned, or apparently feel any sense of urgency on this matter, and that they have chosen to play down the problems, there would not seem to be any reason to believe they will remove MMR deflation any time soon. What worries me is this could well be the decline of SC we are seeing. Players will become frustrated and quit and LotV sales will suffer. If it doesn't sell very well and if tournament views do not rise I'm not sure Blizz will see the point of working on a SC3. A year or two after LotV release we could be looking at only a fraction of the players remaining and a matchmaking system that may as well be random.
I'd love to be optimistic and say "hey, they are working on it and will fix it and all will be great again" but their handling of things makes this a hard to believe, not to mention the fact that we're only in this position at all because of a decision they took, and you really have to wonder about the risk analysis/testing they did (or apparently failed to do) as a part of that.
For a start we could really use some actual response about how 2.1 will address the issue specifically and what the eta is on it. Announcements about adding features like IMBA league (while welcome) are unhelpful given the presence of an issue of vastly greater priority. Who even manages Blizz's PR? They have to be the most incompetent employee ever! When your customers are clamouring about an issue, real or perceived, to ignore it, then give obviously misleading statements playing down the problem, then say nothing for ages, then release many statements about unrelated and low priority improvements... well, its near enough the exact opposite of how they should have played this. What the hell is wrong with them? Being straight with the community is a million times better for them than either fobbing them off and doing nothing, or going on radio silence for months on end. I see only two possibilities: a) they are really really dumb, or b) they don't care.
I've written enough...
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The ladder is so weird right now. I'm at about an 80% win-rate in Silver right now, with roughly 70% games being crushing victories against genuine silver players. The other 30% are very close games (usually losses) against former Master league players. That's a huge proportion of matches, and I feel bad for lower-league players who get shoved down the ladder because every third game they have a horribly imbalanced and unfair game. It's incredibly demotivating.
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I just won my placement match, and got into bronze, rank 100.
I have no problem with this. Since I am old, being a father, there is much more on earth for me to accomplish than getting >gold, like writing my own book, being nice to my wife more often and more patient with my kids, or brewing beer on my own etc. etc.
Yet since I am curious plus a crackpot scientist, here is my question.
If I lost this, would I have
a) + Show Spoiler +been banned by Blizzard for lifetime for being too bad for everything, even Hearthstone?
or
b) + Show Spoiler +caused a badness hole that ripped into the Reality structure of the universe, erasing the anomaly that is known as Artosis curse?
or
c) + Show Spoiler +being demoted into a new league, called "Shithole league, just for retard assholes like papalion, yes you, papalion"?
Awaiting answers. I am bent like a toy bow, as we Germans say if we want to express highest suspense.
Important: If I am getting banned/warned for this not really serious post: Let me know before! Maybe I can open a (you read the next word with apollo's voice in mind) massive apology thread, salted with slightest criticism, because I want to change my name to quixotic, which is in use by a guy who posted only once years ago, Hitler vs. Jaedong. He found it "pretty hilarious". As a person whose ancestors suffered under this tyrant (Hitler, not Jaedong), I do not see the fun in it. This last clause is meant seriously.
So, maybe I can redirect the honorary mod's ban intent to that quixotic guy, and take his name? Whatever, my fate is at your hands.
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double post, because I am so agog with expectation, sry. Agog would be a cool name either, wouldn't it?
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On January 15 2014 10:39 papalion wrote:I just won my placement match, and got into bronze, rank 100. I have no problem with this. Since I am old, being a father, there is much more on earth for me to accomplish than getting >gold, like writing my own book, being nice to my wife more often and more patient with my kids, or brewing beer on my own etc. etc. Yet since I am curious plus a crackpot scientist, here is my question. If I lost this, would I have a) + Show Spoiler +been banned by Blizzard for lifetime for being too bad for everything, even Hearthstone? or b) + Show Spoiler +caused a badness hole that ripped into the Reality structure of the universe, erasing the anomaly that is known as Artosis curse? or c) + Show Spoiler +being demoted into a new league, called "Shithole league, just for retard assholes like papalion, yes you, papalion"? Awaiting answers. I am bent like a toy bow, as we Germans say if we want to express highest suspense. Important: If I am getting banned/warned for this not really serious post: Let me know before! Maybe I can open a (you read the next word with apollo's voice in mind) massive apology thread, salted with slightest criticism, because I want to change my name to quixotic, which is in use by a guy who posted only once years ago, Hitler vs. Jaedong. He found it "pretty hilarious". As a person whose ancestors suffered under this tyrant (Hitler, not Jaedong), I do not see the fun in it. This last clause is meant seriously. So, maybe I can redirect the honorary mod's ban intent to that quixotic guy, and take his name? Whatever, my fate is at your hands.
Bronze 100?
D) Flash himself would descend from the heavens (proleague) and bestow upon you the skill to ignore your family and progress to Silver league, to save us from the intensity of your badness.
Just kidding, who the fuck cares how good or bad you are, just have fun playing
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How many people exactly have become completely frusturated with ladder and/or have stopped playing this game because of the messed up ladder system?
I am in the top 5% of ladder, and that appearently is the one part that isn't affected as much as everything lower than us top masters so I am just curious how bad it has gotten
Poll: Have you gotten frusturated of blizzard mmr system?Yes, and I play the game less than before the mmr changes (13) 41% yes, but I still play the game as much as I did before (10) 31% yes, and I switched to a different game because of it (7) 22% no (2) 6% 32 total votes Your vote: Have you gotten frusturated of blizzard mmr system? (Vote): yes, but I still play the game as much as I did before
(Vote): yes, and I switched to a different game because of it
(Vote): no
(Vote): Yes, and I play the game less than before the mmr changes
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I was diamond at the start of school. By winter break I was silver. I feel even if I was going to lose my first few games back, I would prefer to play good players, because I would be able to gain my skills back quicker.
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used to be plat in wol, won 4 out of 5 placements, got placed in silver.
Don't really understand this.
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I'm usually active for part of a season then miss some weeks, 5 weeks between this season and last season. It seems with this kind of break i end up going about 20-2 until i start getting evenly matched again.
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EPT
