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Ladder Deflation and MMR Decay - Page 3

Forum Index > SC2 General
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hzflank
Profile Joined August 2011
United Kingdom2991 Posts
September 23 2013 11:39 GMT
#41
From my personal experience playing after HotS launch...

High masters after 2 months, did not play for perhaps 4 months, ended up being matched against gold league on first game back (plat on second game).
Thieving Magpie
Profile Blog Joined December 2012
United States6752 Posts
September 23 2013 12:45 GMT
#42
This post makes me feel so normal

But it also makes me more willing to ladder again.
Hark, what baseball through yonder window breaks?
Slydie
Profile Joined August 2013
1977 Posts
September 23 2013 13:00 GMT
#43
MMR should strive to have players a 50% chance of winning, not feeding the egos of players coming back from a break. Just offrace to drop your unranked MMR and you have the same experience, but at least with boosting some lower MMRs on the way there.

Expecting to win half of your games is already not that much, and facing an opponent you can have no hopes of beating at the same MMR is just wrong imo. Time to tune the system, Blizzard!
Buff the siegetank
Mintograde
Profile Joined August 2010
United States25 Posts
September 23 2013 13:14 GMT
#44
Regardless of whether inactivity-based decay is "good" or "bad," it would be nice if inactivity was determined based on all four of a player's characters on the four regions. I switch between the servers frequently for variety, but neglected my NA account for a few weeks - I was placed in a lower league in the new season despite playing continuously on other accounts.

If the presumption is that taking a break results in a noticeable drop in skill, it would make sense to fully check that the player has in fact taken a break across all regions; doing otherwise is strictly "bad" and leads to frustration at best, or a demeaning of the ranking system at worst.
althaz
Profile Joined May 2010
Australia1001 Posts
September 23 2013 13:15 GMT
#45
This decay is AWESOME. I decayed so far I was playing vs Bronze and silver players. I've won like 40 games in a row, lol (still only playing plats, haha) .
The first rule we don't talk about race conditions. of race conditions is
PaztheLobster
Profile Joined September 2013
Philippines25 Posts
September 23 2013 13:27 GMT
#46
I can only imagine this being extremely demotivating to lower league players wanting to climb the ladder. We are supposed to be drawing people in not scaring them away and MMR decay this drastic isn't helping.
Number 1 Stephano Fan
winthrop
Profile Blog Joined December 2010
Hong Kong956 Posts
September 23 2013 13:34 GMT
#47
i know that if you dont play for 2 seasons
you need to play 5 placment matches again.
don't apply to team rank games.
Incredible Miracle
LeLfe
Profile Joined February 2011
France3160 Posts
September 23 2013 13:50 GMT
#48
I haven't 1v1 for nearly 4months, Copper league, I'm on my way
Writer for Red bull (Fr) and Iron Squid (En/Fr) @ClemLeLfe on twitter
Nimix
Profile Joined October 2011
France1809 Posts
September 23 2013 14:19 GMT
#49
I find it pretty annoying.. MMR drops fast enough if your skill level has really dropped after inactivity, while grinding back points when you're say close to master is long if you're near 50% winrate and you don't play often..
I played a bit of 2V2 in the early days of HOTS to get to masters. I got to masters, and then only played placement each season.. Now I'm gold wtf. I mean I don't care, but it's not nice for the poor gold buddies that I've to play against if I want to play a bit of 2V2 again.
On the other hand, my NA account dropped from high diamond to plat, and as there are a lot of offracing masters/high masters at the hours I play (I'm from EU so when I play on NA there are often only EU and SEA players), it's hard to get it back up. Without MMR decay you wouldn't have offracing accounts placed in plat and below. It has to be annoying to lower level players as well, playing smurfs all the time and getting destroyed without knowing if they could have helped it or not.

I really don't see the need for it. If people want to play when they come back from a pause they might lose anyway, and get to appropriate opponents fast enough. When I started playing the game on a friend's plat account back in the day, I dropped to bronze in no time. On the other hand having to play lots of games to get your smurfs/offrace accounts back to where they were is pretty terrible.
DusTerr
Profile Blog Joined January 2011
2520 Posts
September 23 2013 14:39 GMT
#50
On September 23 2013 23:19 Nimix wrote:
I find it pretty annoying.. MMR drops fast enough if your skill level has really dropped after inactivity, while grinding back points when you're say close to master is long if you're near 50% winrate and you don't play often..
I played a bit of 2V2 in the early days of HOTS to get to masters. I got to masters, and then only played placement each season.. Now I'm gold wtf. I mean I don't care, but it's not nice for the poor gold buddies that I've to play against if I want to play a bit of 2V2 again.
On the other hand, my NA account dropped from high diamond to plat, and as there are a lot of offracing masters/high masters at the hours I play (I'm from EU so when I play on NA there are often only EU and SEA players), it's hard to get it back up. Without MMR decay you wouldn't have offracing accounts placed in plat and below. It has to be annoying to lower level players as well, playing smurfs all the time and getting destroyed without knowing if they could have helped it or not.

I really don't see the need for it. If people want to play when they come back from a pause they might lose anyway, and get to appropriate opponents fast enough. When I started playing the game on a friend's plat account back in the day, I dropped to bronze in no time. On the other hand having to play lots of games to get your smurfs/offrace accounts back to where they were is pretty terrible.


I think the point is that people are more likely to come back if they don't have to face huge losing streaks.

AlTthere will always be people playing at levels lower than their real skill so the MMR decay doesn't really change that (especially now with unranked play).
Nerevar
Profile Joined January 2013
547 Posts
September 23 2013 15:00 GMT
#51
I used to be in platinum. I didn't play at all over the summer for the duration of about one season. When I did my placement match again, I got put into silver, where I've been performing mediocre against other silvers and golds.
FLORIDACOMPACT
Profile Joined May 2013
Germany108 Posts
September 23 2013 15:00 GMT
#52
People in the lower leagues (silver/gold/plat) already complaining in the blizzard forums about playing vs prior dimaonds/masters. I don't think this decay is a good thing.
Firestorm
Profile Blog Joined January 2013
Canada341 Posts
September 23 2013 15:02 GMT
#53
On September 24 2013 00:00 FLORIDACOMPACT wrote:
People in the lower leagues (silver/gold/plat) already complaining in the blizzard forums about playing vs prior dimaonds/masters. I don't think this decay is a good thing.


I recently lost 12 straight ladder games, most of them against former plat/diamond players in silver league.
"Revenge is sweet... Revenge is a dish best served cold... Revenge is... Ice Cream!"
Salient
Profile Joined August 2011
United States876 Posts
September 23 2013 15:11 GMT
#54
This is terrible. Casual Gold and Plat players will lose motivation and quit after getting demolished by demoted inactive Diamond and Master players. It is similar to mass smurfing. This not good considering that we already have a problem retaining casuals!
Plansix
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States60190 Posts
September 23 2013 15:15 GMT
#55
On September 24 2013 00:11 Salient wrote:
This is terrible. Casual Gold and Plat players will lose motivation and quit after getting demolished by demoted inactive Diamond and Master players. It is similar to mass smurfing. This not good considering that we already have a problem retaining casuals!

I doubt it will be that bad. We are reviving some anecdotal evidence of people being slammed by diamond players who's MMR has decayed, but its nothing more than that. MMR corrects pretty quickly, so they shouldn't be matched against someone that low for too long. The same thing happened when all of our MMRs were reset during HotS and I was getting my ass kicked by high masters players.
I have the Honor to be your Obedient Servant, P.6
TL+ Member
FLORIDACOMPACT
Profile Joined May 2013
Germany108 Posts
September 23 2013 15:16 GMT
#56
On September 24 2013 00:11 Salient wrote:
This is terrible. Casual Gold and Plat players will lose motivation and quit after getting demolished by demoted inactive Diamond and Master players. It is similar to mass smurfing. This not good considering that we already have a problem retaining casuals!


^ This.

User was warned for this post
klup
Profile Joined May 2013
France612 Posts
September 23 2013 15:23 GMT
#57
To share my experience on the subject...

I'm former master player that don't want to play ranked as often as i was. The main reason behind this is that i like macro game so I enjoy more unranked where I can leave games with boring cheese (often done by ranked diamond) .

The result of this is that my ranked account is slowly falling. Now i just farm my ranked to just maintain a diamond level basically farming people 1/2 or 1 league under me.

I feel that unranked is one of the reason the system is so messed up. But it's very enjoyable to play without pressure and enjoy good macro games without worrying about boring cheese.

Another consequence of Unranked is the splitting of your games between 2 MMR making those 2 MMR very unaccurate compared to the unique one before. Basically the algorithm that calculate MMR is much more performant if you play tons of games. Since your games are splitted in two MMR those are less accurate.

Add that the leaving if I'm bored phenomenon of unranked + the matchmaking of unranked vs ranked and you obtain a completely messed up MMR in both ranked and unranked.

And to add more to it : the ladder population decreasing so much a lot of people are demoted anyway.

So many reasons to not trust this system anymore.
tenklavir
Profile Joined November 2010
Slovakia116 Posts
Last Edited: 2013-09-23 15:29:57
September 23 2013 15:23 GMT
#58
On September 24 2013 00:11 Salient wrote:
This is terrible. Casual Gold and Plat players will lose motivation and quit after getting demolished by demoted inactive Diamond and Master players. It is similar to mass smurfing. This not good considering that we already have a problem retaining casuals!

I agree. After taking ~8 week break, I went from mid-Diamond to Gold. No game was even close. I don't mean to speak for my opponents but I doubt it was any fun for them, and I get no enjoyment out of it either (actually I just feel bad). Hopefully this is just a beta implementation of the decay system and after Blizz collects enough data to make a determination on how far to drop someone given a certain period of inactivity, they will tweak it.

I doubt it will be that bad. We are reviving some anecdotal evidence of people being slammed by diamond players who's MMR has decayed, but its nothing more than that. MMR corrects pretty quickly, so they shouldn't be matched against someone that low for too long. The same thing happened when all of our MMRs were reset during HotS and I was getting my ass kicked by high masters players.

I dunno, I went 27-3 to get back to diamond, and the losses came from people in the same boat (former Diamond/Masters coming back). I think my first 3-5 games were against Gold, probably 15-20 against Plat, and the rest Diamond. It doesn't seem to recover quickly enough where I'm playing more than even two games in Gold and 10 in Plat. I mean no disrespect to those players! I just didn't think it was fun for either me or my opponent.
bLah.
Profile Joined July 2009
Croatia497 Posts
September 23 2013 15:24 GMT
#59
On September 24 2013 00:16 FLORIDACOMPACT wrote:
Show nested quote +
On September 24 2013 00:11 Salient wrote:
This is terrible. Casual Gold and Plat players will lose motivation and quit after getting demolished by demoted inactive Diamond and Master players. It is similar to mass smurfing. This not good considering that we already have a problem retaining casuals!


^ This.

User was warned for this post


Not really. In reality if you skip like 2 months you'll go from low master to mid-high diamond mmr (speaking from experience), so it's pretty ok, not that many players have 3-4 months without playing sc so that they would drop to plat
Plansix
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
United States60190 Posts
September 23 2013 15:26 GMT
#60
On September 24 2013 00:24 bLah. wrote:
Show nested quote +
On September 24 2013 00:16 FLORIDACOMPACT wrote:
On September 24 2013 00:11 Salient wrote:
This is terrible. Casual Gold and Plat players will lose motivation and quit after getting demolished by demoted inactive Diamond and Master players. It is similar to mass smurfing. This not good considering that we already have a problem retaining casuals!


^ This.

User was warned for this post


Not really. In reality if you skip like 2 months you'll go from low master to mid-high diamond mmr (speaking from experience), so it's pretty ok, not that many players have 3-4 months without playing sc so that they would drop to plat

If you take three months off from most things, you will be worse off. its not really that big of a deal, since you will be able work back up. Unless you are one of those people who simply can't deal with your ladder rank dropping and at that point you might be playing SC2 for weird reasons.
I have the Honor to be your Obedient Servant, P.6
TL+ Member
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