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United States12235 Posts
Yesterday, Blizzard put up a Situation Report about the state of the multiplayer ladder.
Before I go further, here are some notes I had after reading that report:
- Decay must have really messed up their activity metric because it's separately tracking a player's real time gaps between games as well as their unspent bonus pool. If they're using apples to redistribute the leagues from season to season, and the apples are still pretty firmly where they should be each time, then you can't have oranges artificially pushing people down and thinking the skill definitions will remain intact. They can't.
- I'll put it another way. Let's say that in Season 6, 28% of the ladder population with bonus pools below 208 have less than 800 MMR. Perfect. Then for Season 7, we'll make 800 MMR the Silver/Gold league boundary. Uh oh, it turns out 80% of players under 1100 MMR have more than a one-month gap between games. Now in terms of Activity A we're fine, 28%, cool, but in terms of Activity B, now 800 MMR contains 60% of the players. They measure completely different things, and that's a problem.
- They mentioned that they're going to change the distribution. Inevitably that's going to have to factor in decayed players. How exactly they're going to do that I don't know. Maybe they could do a breakdown of what percentage of players per league experience decay and introduce that as a coefficient to their existing apportionment metric. It wouldn't be perfect because again, apples and oranges, but the boundaries and internal league percentages are hidden anyway, and there's always some slush involved besides.
- As I guessed, each bracket tracks MMR decay separately. That's actually a big problem because it's much harder to get the same arranged 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 players together than it is to play 1v1 or Random Team. I know a bunch of players who have like 50 4v4 teams, many of them only went through 5 placement matches and that's it. When the same 4 players play again next season, they've decayed to a lower league. They haven't forgotten how to play because they're playing with 49 other team combinations, just not this specific group. They're not rusty, but they're penalized as though they're rusty. Team games probably shouldn't have decay at all: there are fewer team listings than solo players and it's too easy to mess up the distribution.
- Our data shows that the maximum impact of decay is over 310 rating. Though it does cap around this value, that's still the equivalent of losing 20 straight same-skill games. That's more than "a few" in my glossary.
- They said that decay starts at 14 days where it starts at 0 adjustment. That's something I've said as well and it's important for players to understand that. If you take a 15 day break, you're only a game and a half behind (in sports terms). Same with "if you play one game every two weeks, you won't decay" -- very important for players to remember that because people were getting paranoid.
- Their "to address the misconception that the majority of players are being adjusted in this way, the data shows that less than 6% of all StarCraft II games played on Battle.net are affected by this adjustment" is really misleading I think. It's another apples-to-oranges comparison. What we're asking about is how many players are affected, but what they reported is how many games are affected. Furthermore, decay is a problem specifically because people are NOT playing games, which makes it harder to translate how widespread the problem is when your data mentions games played.
I decided to find out for myself how widespread the decay issue is, and check on the public's general investment in the game on a per-league basis. I scraped every page of SC2Ranks' Americas server data yesterday (I'm no programmer so this took basically all day), so I believe this to be pretty accurate. If you want to check my work, and I encourage you to do so, I uploaded a copy of the scraping spreadsheet to Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_ndKBD-7b4oelAyVXZXUDd2YnM/edit?usp=sharing (Google Sheets was giving me errors upon import so I just have the Excel sheet for now).
First, let's look at how many games are played in each league.
I'm actually pretty surprised. I thought Bronze would have the fewest games played, and I didn't expect Silver to have the most. However, let's look at the number of games played per player per league:
This is a little closer to what I expected. On a per-player basis, high-level players play a lot more games. But what about who's still playing now?
Let's look at the activity level across leagues in terms of who's affected by decay right now. Some notes before we move forward:
- SC2Ranks timestamps the Last Game Played as well as Last Time Queried.
- This parse was taken on Dec 18, and I manually filtered out all the Last Game Played entries prior to the start of the season (Nov 11) and after Dec 4, the first possible day of decay for this snapshot.
- I also filtered out any Last Time Queried data points older than Dec 4.
- Some of the fields (very few) had obviously incorrect data, like Jan 1970, so those were also manually filtered out. That's going to make the parse pretty conservative.
Now, obviously, Grandmaster is going to have zero decaying players because if they're inactive, their bonus pool increases above the ejection threshold and they get kicked.
Here it is in percentage form. This chart contains the percentage of players per league who are currently experiencing decay.
Now, what this data is not able to disprove is Blizzard's "6% of games played were affected by decay" because I can't check on historical inactivity periods. That is, I can see "Player A last played 3 weeks ago", but I can't see "and then his last game before that was 6 weeks ago." Still, I expected Bronze and Silver to have many more currently-decaying players. The distribution of inactive players seems to be fairly steady across the leagues.
Keep in mind that so-called "serial decayers" exist, and those would be the players who play their one placement, decay, then next season play their one placement, decay again, and so on. Since decay has been in for months now, a good number of these "serial decayers" probably exist in Bronze, but let's take a look at this season's data:
5-and-a-half weeks have passed since the start of the season, meaning anyone with 2 games or less played who has no games played in the last 2 weeks must have decayed to some degree.
I hope this has provided some insight into what the current ladder actually looks like. I welcome your questions and feedback.
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Hm, serial decay could also be 3-10 games played one day, and then not again for the rest of the season, no?
I am also incredibly surprised by silver being the largest - this must be because of an unusually high percentage of people in silver - it is supposed to be 20%, and gold 32%, but obviously this cannot be the case, as Silver is likely not more active than Gold per player.
thanks Excalibur Z!!
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I'm most surprised how active the lower ladder is, that's the most interesting piece of data in my opinion.
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Have you halved the games played since two players would count for one and not two "games" being played?
Interesting numbers non the less.
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Higher skill = more imba = less fun from play.
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United States12235 Posts
On December 20 2013 08:12 tili wrote:
Hm, serial decay could also be 3-10 games played one day, and then not again for the rest of the season, no?
I am also incredibly surprised by silver being the largest - this must be because of an unusually high percentage of people in silver - it is supposed to be 20%, and gold 32%, but obviously this cannot be the case, as Silver is likely not more active than Gold per player.
thanks Excalibur Z!!
That's right. I suppose I could have expanded the serial decay range to 2 games since those players are guaranteed to decay (5 weeks have passed since the start of the season, so you would need a minimum of 3 games, 1 per 2 weeks, in order to avoid decay). I'll do that now and edit it in.
I also just noticed that when I was doing the 1-game chart, I had accidentally disabled the Last Game Played filter, so some of those 1-game players were within the last couple of weeks, meaning they haven't decayed. Fixing that, too.
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United States12235 Posts
On December 20 2013 10:41 Tobblish wrote:
Have you halved the games played since two players would count for one and not two "games" being played?
Interesting numbers non the less.
I haven't, but that's a very interesting point. In any event, the percentages remain intact. I wonder if Blizzard records individual game instances (they probably do, I don't think they're working backward like I am).
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Thanks for the work Excalibur as always, I hope this might lead to a follow up response from blizzard but I think we'd need the sort of response from the community that we had a few weeks ago.
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How does a house fire account for my league placement decay?
...Seriously I cannot post without saying excellent and interesting thread sir!
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I don't believe a word Blizz have said on this. I was diamond 1v1 in HotS (and MMR still going UP according to SC2Gears), I worked VERY hard to get there and was pleased with this result. I then was unable to play for about 3 months. Played my 1 placement game and placed into .... silver. I typically crush everyone I play in 1v1 which is no fun and no challenge (so I'm probably losing skill as time goes on and I don't face a hard opponent). In addition I'm really sick of people raging on me for being a "silver noob". Its no use saying "I'm actually diamond but the MMR decay put me in silver" because all this does is lead to "BWAAHAHHAHA you silver NOOB HAHAHAHA". As a result I've blocked all communication from those not on my friends list. Is this what Blizzard wanted to achieve?
Blizzard constantly feel the need to tweak and fiddle with the system, allegedly in an attempt to get players to feel some (false) sense of achievement and progress, and to play more often. Instead, with each added tweak (aka, complication) they further confuse and obfuscate the league, at the same time as denying everyone the clarity of an explanation of how bad things *can be* for an individual player, instead choosing to play down everything and claim its all fine, the hype is over nothing.
Well its not all fine.
Blizzard, what is wrong with giving each of us a rating, just like the chess rating, which is clear and visible to everyone? If you do that we can all see that match ups are correctly allocated AND we can see our exact position and progress so when we are working for something (e.g. trying to improve and rank up a league) we can see EXACTLY what impact our attempts are having and EXACTLY how much progress we are making.
But no, instead we have this FUBAR system where you imply league and rank mean something and yet they mean virtually nothing because of all the idiotic complications you added that you only need to add because you won't tell us what our rating truly is. And now you have everyone upset about what you've done because problems with the system, perceived or real, are immediately blamed on your FUBAR idiotic and UNNECESSARY complications.
Seriously, I really REALLY hope you reconsider showing us our ratings in battle.net and if you still will not (from which the only conclusion I can draw is that you truly want to piss everyone off) please PLEASE explain to us why you won't instead of just ignoring it and banging on about how your latest change is working as intended yadda yadda and only has some tiny minuscule impact anyway yadda yadda, and only affects some small percent of people yadda yadda you don't know what all the fuss is about we should all trust you and no you won't actually give any evidence to back up anything you say because you're so trust worthy and releasing evidence would cause what? More confusion? FFS...
They say they WANT our feedback but the one piece of consistant fedback they have had for the last 3 (?) years, since day 1 of this game, is that we want to see the real rating. And the one thing they have consistantly done since day 1 is make it harder and harder to see the rating and more and more confusing. Conclusion: they don't give a damn about our feedback at all, they just ask to make us feel like we're being listened to. Blizzard make me so angry.
PS:
I think Excal should be given a "veto" on all Blizz changes to ladder so they can actually be held to account by a trusted member of the community.
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Was diamond, didn't play during 3 months, now i'm silver. I crush every real silver and gold players and play against a lot of other diamond or plat players who have the same problem (they are silver).
Poor silver and bronze, they now have a tons of plat and diam players in their league.
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First of all, thank you excalibur for yet another enlightening presentation of data 
I find this whole matter very interesting and a lot of ppl are quite vocal about them being stuck in lower leagues. what I do not understand though is how ppl can claim that they crush everyone they play against and are on absurd winning streaks. Even if your are still in a low league, shouldn't MMR adjust after a few games so that after let's say 10 easy wins one should play stronger opponents even if one is not promoted?
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On December 20 2013 23:45 tar wrote:
what I do not understand though is how ppl can claim that they crush everyone they play against and are on absurd winning streaks. Even if your are still in a low league, shouldn't MMR adjust after a few games so that after let's say 10 easy wins one should play stronger opponents even if one is not promoted?
You apparently need 19 out of 20 wins to recover if you had the full 2 weeks deflation. You can be on a major winning streak (say 15 out of 20) and still not recover, leaving you with a lower rating than before the deflation kicked in. Perhaps for whatever reason you then don't/can't play and suffer ANOTHER deflation period. Now you are winning 18 out of 20... and still not recovering the new deflation, let alone the old deflation.
You're winning a lot, so someone is losing. Bet they full understand and are completely happy with this situation too.
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Thank you Excalibur for ever so good write up, and insight in how blizzard once again has managed to destroy something that was working fine.
I too am hit by this stupid change of theirs, I completely don't care what anyone says about my league or status on Bnet, but it's just so annoying, and counter progressive, to play a game, that requires this much time, then for only to take a few weeks for something else, and you back to basics, maybe even longer behind than if you started off with a new account.
It's completely and utterly retarded, what they have done to the ladder. One game you play a gold player who is decayed from masters, the next its a diamond player straight up, and third you get silver.
I mean how are you suppose to predict if your progressing ? when what you see, is never what you get on ladder ?
Poor people that are actually in the lower leagues, they must have a really hard time.
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On December 22 2013 21:13 KenZo- wrote:
Thank you Excalibur for ever so good write up, and insight in how blizzard once again has managed to destroy something that was working fine.
I too am hit by this stupid change of theirs, I completely don't care what anyone says about my league or status on Bnet, but it's just so annoying, and counter progressive, to play a game, that requires this much time, then for only to take a few weeks for something else, and you back to basics, maybe even longer behind than if you started off with a new account.
It's completely and utterly retarded, what they have done to the ladder. One game you play a gold player who is decayed from masters, the next its a diamond player straight up, and third you get silver.
I mean how are you suppose to predict if your progressing ? when what you see, is never what you get on ladder ?
Poor people that are actually in the lower leagues, they must have a really hard time.
It's definitely frustrating, gold league has a huge skill variety. I was top 8 diamond in the weeks leading up to HotS but recently I've been placed in gold (took a ~3 month break or so). One game will be stupidly easy and I'll roll my poor opponent, next game I will get utterly stomped, then check the guy's profile to see he is a multi season master league player. Very rarely do I get an even match. I'm trying to stay positive and look at the games when I get rolled as a chance to learn something, but it's kind of frustrating when it happens so often.
I don't mind playing really tough opponents, that's how I improve the fastest, but I prefer that to be in my practice games, not on ladder where I'm trying to implement what I've learned T_T
Whatever, I'm using this mess to try and fix my mindset and just play 10+ games every day no matter what starting this week.
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Czech Republic12129 Posts
On December 22 2013 23:17 KrazyTrumpet wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2013 21:13 KenZo- wrote:
Thank you Excalibur for ever so good write up, and insight in how blizzard once again has managed to destroy something that was working fine.
I too am hit by this stupid change of theirs, I completely don't care what anyone says about my league or status on Bnet, but it's just so annoying, and counter progressive, to play a game, that requires this much time, then for only to take a few weeks for something else, and you back to basics, maybe even longer behind than if you started off with a new account.
It's completely and utterly retarded, what they have done to the ladder. One game you play a gold player who is decayed from masters, the next its a diamond player straight up, and third you get silver.
I mean how are you suppose to predict if your progressing ? when what you see, is never what you get on ladder ?
Poor people that are actually in the lower leagues, they must have a really hard time.
It's definitely frustrating, gold league has a huge skill variety. I was top 8 diamond in the weeks leading up to HotS but recently I've been placed in gold (took a ~3 month break or so). One game will be stupidly easy and I'll roll my poor opponent, next game I will get utterly stomped, then check the guy's profile to see he is a multi season master league player. Very rarely do I get an even match. I'm trying to stay positive and look at the games when I get rolled as a chance to learn something, but it's kind of frustrating when it happens so often. I don't mind playing really tough opponents, that's how I improve the fastest, but I prefer that to be in my practice games, not on ladder where I'm trying to implement what I've learned T_T Whatever, I'm using this mess to try and fix my mindset and just play 10+ games every day no matter what starting this week.
I stayed positive for this whole time. I'm one of those who doesn't have the decay. TBH since the beginning of HotS I'm on negative win ratio. Though I'm getting tougher and tougher opponents. Now I said "Enough! Let the decay kicks in." Well, maybe I'll turn the game again in a month. Or not. This is probably the way of Blizzard, well definitely not my way, the only reason why the game is still on my HDD - my connection to Blizzard network isn't the greatest, so I don't want to download the game each time I want to try arcade or single player...
And thanks for the thread, interesting numbers.
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China6329 Posts
On December 23 2013 01:49 MilExo wrote:Don't forget about the weird league distribution at the moment: http://imgur.com/fJV8fBv
Damn this is beyond ridiculous.
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As the ladder situation was realy strange, i stoped playing on my eu account (gold) and started playing random on am.
Since two week it's totally fine. I got matched vs. slightly better or slightly worse opponents. Rarely against gold or beginner.
Is it already getting better? If i point out the data correctly, bronze and silver should be effected the most, but that does not meet my experience since the past 2 weeks. Gold eu was a mess 3 weeks ago.
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Very nice write up of the ladder situation. I have personally quite the game because of this issue as i felt i was being "toyed" with by a lot of these players dumped into Bronze\Silver from the higher leagues.
Games are supposed to be either fun or challenging( hopefully both) and SC2 was rapidly becoming neither.
Hopefully Blizzard will fix this and get some fun back into the game before its too late
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Was Grandmaster 1 year ago before hots ( at the start of the patchzerg era )
Then only played placement match after
Dropped one league to diamond ( did not know why this was strange but was thinking people got higher mmr since im inactive ) and now played my placement today and I'm currently gold....
Played about 10 games after = 10-0 .... People I'm playing are really not my level even if I was not playing for one year....
That really not fair for the poor guy I'm destroying too....and boring for me !!
Yeah, you hear it right, Grandmaster to gold while playing only placement
And blizzard tells people this changes nothing, I'm not even feeling like restarting to play at any time now.....
That's the biggest fuck you from blizzard for restarting to play they could give me... Yeah like I'm gold level now because I was inactive for 1 year....
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On December 29 2013 06:58 quebecman77 wrote:
Yeah, you hear it right, Grandmaster to gold while playing only placement
Didn't MMR get reset completely at the start of HOTS? So, if you've played only placements, it made some midrange assumption about how good you were based on some placements and you haven't really moved far from there. Why would you be anywhere but gold?
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It´s not just this rating system that is wrong. Everything is wrong with this game. The complete lackness of listening to sc2 players is the problem. Who wants to play a game, where u can cheat and win? Nothing has been done in this issue. Who wants to play a game that constantly change the metagame? Who wants to play a game when the only real option is 1v1, teamgames are so not in the money. etc etc etc etc. alot of factors, all due to Blizz.
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On December 20 2013 08:07 Excalibur_Z wrote:
This is a little closer to what I expected. On a per-player basis, high-level players play a lot more games.
Or it could mean people who play more, get into higher leaguesm
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Sometimes I wonder what terrible dark place we'd all be in if it wasn't for Excalibur_Z's phenomenal efforts.
What I'm curious about, lets say someone was diamond league and they decayed down to plat or gold or even silver, shouldn't that then open up more spots in diamond for easier promotion to whomever? It seems like it doesn't or isn't. Cause I don't hear about ANYONES promotions... But maybe this is just another byproduct of everything being completely jacked.
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United States12235 Posts
On December 30 2013 11:01 thurst0n wrote:
Sometimes I wonder what terrible dark place we'd all be in if it wasn't for Excalibur_Z's phenomenal efforts.
What I'm curious about, lets say someone was diamond league and they decayed down to plat or gold or even silver, shouldn't that then open up more spots in diamond for easier promotion to whomever? It seems like it doesn't or isn't. Cause I don't hear about ANYONES promotions... But maybe this is just another byproduct of everything being completely jacked.
Thanks for the kind words! Again, there are no "slots" in leagues. Let's say you're a 1500 MMR Diamond player who decays down to 1200 MMR (the Diamond promotion threshold is 1400, let's say). There's one less person in Diamond and one more person in Platinum (that's you). But, someone else doesn't get bumped up to Diamond as a result because they haven't earned 1400 MMR. In fact, it may make it even more difficult for others to get promoted into Diamond depending on how often you play, because if your skills haven't actually deteriorated to a 1200 level, then you won't stay there very long, and anyone you beat will lose MMR. If you go right back to decaying, the cycle repeats.
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The MMR decay is ridiculously overdone. I work full time. I go out on the weekends. If my schedule doesn't line up and I don't get a game in for a few weeks, I drop from master down to diamond. It takes me a hundred games or more with a 60% winrate to get back into master.
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On December 20 2013 23:18 Wertheron wrote:
Was diamond, didn't play during 3 months, now i'm silver. I crush every real silver and gold players and play against a lot of other diamond or plat players who have the same problem (they are silver).
Poor silver and bronze, they now have a tons of plat and diam players in their league.
as a silver for life player this is the most annoying bit about the whole ladder system atm. i happily go along with like a 50% win rate at like high to mid silver then every so often i come up against people still in silver who crush me. you can just feel that the system is broken atm. it gets really annoying ( for both parties i imagine) i don't mind losing that's fine but when the ladder fucks me and i get stomped it gets rather annoying
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Really good write-up thanks Excalibur_Z.
I was wondering why the leagues felt so wonky recently.
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On December 30 2013 04:24 Matisyahu wrote:
It´s not just this rating system that is wrong. Everything is wrong with this game. The complete lackness of listening to sc2 players is the problem. Who wants to play a game, where u can cheat and win? Nothing has been done in this issue. Who wants to play a game that constantly change the metagame? Who wants to play a game when the only real option is 1v1, teamgames are so not in the money. etc etc etc etc. alot of factors, all due to Blizz.
this!
i dont understand what blizzard is doing actually. its like LoL lobbyists paying blizzard staff members to fuck up the whole multiplayer sc2 section. especially ladder system/ no punishment for maphackers/ no support for teamgame section/ ridicule protss PvT buffs (ez defense + ez harass + ez deathball - IQ level put into protoss: zero). these are exactly the points which make the game worse. thus having no hope for better times since blizzard seems learning resistent
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I'm still in gold on NA playing half legit gold half masters people so not catching up to my mmr fast at all rofl. Just played a masters terran that was definitely pretty good, lost to him with my terrible zerg. But the decay is definitely annoying to put it mildly, or total bullshit to be honest. Hope they just remove it, I'm more frustrated never knowing which level my opponent is than losing a bit when I'm coming back to the game.
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Excalibur_Z does a fantastic job shuffling through all the data.
I have to agree with some of the pessimists though. Just because we can explain what's happening doesn't make it any better. Hopefully the new patch helps!
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On December 20 2013 08:15 Littlesheep wrote:
I'm most surprised how active the lower ladder is, that's the most interesting piece of data in my opinion.
I'm not because I keep hearing a lot of guys talk about how they got placed in silver after extended breaks heh.
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On December 30 2013 11:54 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2013 11:01 thurst0n wrote:
Sometimes I wonder what terrible dark place we'd all be in if it wasn't for Excalibur_Z's phenomenal efforts.
What I'm curious about, lets say someone was diamond league and they decayed down to plat or gold or even silver, shouldn't that then open up more spots in diamond for easier promotion to whomever? It seems like it doesn't or isn't. Cause I don't hear about ANYONES promotions... But maybe this is just another byproduct of everything being completely jacked. Thanks for the kind words! Again, there are no "slots" in leagues. Let's say you're a 1500 MMR Diamond player who decays down to 1200 MMR (the Diamond promotion threshold is 1400, let's say). There's one less person in Diamond and one more person in Platinum (that's you). But, someone else doesn't get bumped up to Diamond as a result because they haven't earned 1400 MMR. In fact, it may make it even more difficult for others to get promoted into Diamond depending on how often you play, because if your skills haven't actually deteriorated to a 1200 level, then you won't stay there very long, and anyone you beat will lose MMR. If you go right back to decaying, the cycle repeats.
This is an important point to make, actually. The bottom-biased ladder is not only directly caused by the decayed players decaying into those leagues, but indirectly as their decayed MMR allows them to win against players that shouldn't be matched together. That, in turn, pushes the lower MMR players even lower.
I personally experienced this, in fact. I went from 3rd in Platinum down to 28th, winning only 2 games in 20. I'm an active player, mind you. I raged, quit the league, then was re-placed into Gold. I then went on a winning streak... According to MMR stats, I lost one complete league. According to the b.net profiles, I lost to a LOT of ex-masters players with twice my APM (I check after every loss).
The matchmaking system is creating a frustrating and hostile environment. Being pitted against a bunch of decayed players causes even greater loss streaks followed by corresponding win streaks as the system tries to correct the win/loss ratio.
The ladder decay is compounded further by people coming back for the holidays, Blizzard putting SC2 on sale, and EU players seeking Master in AM.
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China6329 Posts
On December 31 2013 00:26 StarStruck wrote:Show nested quote +On December 20 2013 08:15 Littlesheep wrote:
I'm most surprised how active the lower ladder is, that's the most interesting piece of data in my opinion. I'm not because I keep hearing a lot of guys talk about how they got placed in silver after extended breaks heh.
That's one reason I stopped laddering for 2 weeks and counting, 1v1 ladder isn't a enjoyable place to go any more.
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Thanks for the write up, Excalibur_Z Awesome as always.
I can understand the initial impetus for MMR Decay; Blizzard wants to slowly cleanse the higher leagues of players who are no longer active, opening up more spots for those who are still playing a lot and working hard to move up the ladder.
But I think this level of decay is absolutely overkill. The decay is just too fast. Why doesn't Blizzard work to adjust the rate of decay so that it doesn't actually present a futile situation for those who can only play a game or two every other week (or those who are playing team games but still have the MMR of their other teams lowered, etc.). It just seems like there are so many glaring issues that can be tinkered with to find a more comfortable solution for all parties involved, and Blizzard is just making ladder useless and unenjoyable.
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I usually play Random 2v2s and 3v3s and this decay thing has messed things up like huge. First of all there are numerous players with insane win ratios even in platinum (50-5 insane, and those are random partner team games). I feel like the introduction of the decay has brought up a new type of playing SC strategy. People constantly switch between servers, ranked/unranked modes, and 1v1's 2v2s 3v3s to be severely underMMRed and have a very high win ratio. Whenever their win ratio falls they just switch mode and have fun again. As a result even a light % of people using the strategy fu** up ladders big time because of their high skill and high activity. As a result MMR predicts the outcome to a much lesser extent, so it's much harder to keep your high MMR up than it was before. Which makes all ladders much closer in terms of points. From my observation the #1 platinum on EU 2v2 random ladder is usually just 100 points over the bonus pool.
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the decay is something ur going to have to get used to. Can we all not accept that this is going to happen. I watch a lot of streamers on twitch do the so called Bronze to masters series and they seem to do it in around 40 - 60 games, im assuming a lot of the delay on this may be down to accounts already with an mmr, making me think there are other ratings going on we simply dont know about. Anyway . .what im saying is, the system cannot be broken when ur actually playing as these people consistently get to their master league (or GM if ur puck, i cant count now how many times he did this over the last few months) Now then i use myself as an example. I was a dia player in wol on my NA account and in plat in EU but playing dias and masters all of the time, it was great i thought i was soon to get that masters league (or at least dia) but it didnt and hots came out. I stopped playing as much as i did and was forever platnGold facing the odd dias. I then started going on other servers (and have myself 3 accounts) so i was playing all over the place and not that long on any. Last month(maybe 7 weeks ago now) i streamed my own bronze to whatever i called it and made sure i had 6 solid hrs to do it, (i may do it again tonight as ive switched to terran and want to see how far i can get in 50ish games as a brand new nub race player) and i got to platinum by the time id finished and played 12 dia iconned players and 2 masters. Im back to where i was. I dont think its broke really BUT ur right in the sense i stopped playing for 7 weeks on that account, left the league the other day and hgot put in silver on beating a plat placement match. so i played about 6 games and played silvers and golds from then on but i made a point of looking at their last leagues achieved and noone was sub dia out of all of the 6 i played. what im saying here is i think the system is working but you are all mad at that icon next to ur name indicating ur league. they simply need to get rid of it. If you lose out of 18 games 8 games (this is my tally) are you REALLY in that league anyway? id say no. ive lost to some straight up gold level players in this last week and have no shame I DIDNT play to my potential so deserved to loose. these lower players arent that bad if you play stupid as well. There is a lad on stream called winter and he tried trolling a few games the other day and lost to some silver and gold level players. i regard him as excellent at this game but if you dont respect the player on the other end you are going to loose games and then get mad saying you should be in this league anyway, i want to avoid all this goofy play.
god i love having says off i just waste it relplying to threads . . .but i love it oh and noone gives a fuck about team games , ,,who really fucking cares, just double cheese every game, masters in a day as proved nearly evertime ive done it with a real bronzie on my team . . .fucking stupid way to judge improvement, team games should have the most basic of basic mmr or loosly go off 1v1 with nothing affected
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I would be fine with it if the decay was computed on your overall activity (including all servers if possible), and not individually computed on all possible queues. I get that you don't want people to stay in master only playing a 4v4 every 2 weeks, but at least don't destroy the match making for the other players. I don't care if too many players are master league, but I would like my opponents to have a pretty consistent level.
Nowadays it ranges from legit gold who do random strats to barcode with 300 APM. I'm pretty active in teamgames with my friends, but less in 1v1, but it doesn't drive me to do more 1v1 if I am to play with basically no ELO matchmaking at all...
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How often are people TRULY playing people they have no chance at beating? I just started playing again after a year. The last time I played I was high plat playing some diamond players. I'm bronze now. I'm certainly not seeing many plat/diamond/masters players there. And let's be serious, anyone who is plat or lower IS going to see a massive drop in performance from not playing. It would affect everyone, but it affects the lower league players in a more significant way.
So people start playing again and they're too good for the league they're in? So what? They play some games and they are back up there playing opponents they should be playing. You get beat up on by some former master? So what? Those people won't be playing you for long as they'll be moving back up. I feel like the system generally does a pretty good job of matching me up with like opponents. A few hiccups are to be expected though.
I completely believe the 6% of games statistic which is not a huge amount when spread across 6 leagues and thousands of players.
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lol mmr decay is stupid, used to be diamond then got demoted to play in season 2 of HOTS and now i got demoted to silver due to decay, yet i own everyone in silver i am currently 17-1 with a 12 win streak. its just retarded and not fun for the people in the lower leagues who get demolished.
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On December 31 2013 01:51 SCguineapig wrote:
lol mmr decay is stupid, used to be diamond then got demoted to play in season 2 of HOTS and now i got demoted to silver due to decay, yet i own everyone in silver i am currently 17-1 with a 12 win streak. its just retarded and not fun for the people in the lower leagues who get demolished.
You went 17-1 and you're still playing silver players?
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On December 31 2013 01:57 big_aug wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2013 01:51 SCguineapig wrote:
lol mmr decay is stupid, used to be diamond then got demoted to play in season 2 of HOTS and now i got demoted to silver due to decay, yet i own everyone in silver i am currently 17-1 with a 12 win streak. its just retarded and not fun for the people in the lower leagues who get demolished. You went 17-1 and you're still playing silver players?
You guys know the ladder is locked at the moment, right? So even if you go 100 - 0 you're not going to get promoted. Just keep on playing and you'll get the promotion next season.
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On December 31 2013 01:59 MilExo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2013 01:57 big_aug wrote:On December 31 2013 01:51 SCguineapig wrote:
lol mmr decay is stupid, used to be diamond then got demoted to play in season 2 of HOTS and now i got demoted to silver due to decay, yet i own everyone in silver i am currently 17-1 with a 12 win streak. its just retarded and not fun for the people in the lower leagues who get demolished. You went 17-1 and you're still playing silver players? You guys know the ladder is locked at the moment, right? So even if you go 100 - 0 you're not going to get promoted. Just keep on playing and you'll get the promotion next season.
Its not about the league youre in at the moment. You won't get promoted but you'll play better players if you win. Thats how the whole system works unless I'm mistaken.
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On December 31 2013 01:59 MilExo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2013 01:57 big_aug wrote:On December 31 2013 01:51 SCguineapig wrote:
lol mmr decay is stupid, used to be diamond then got demoted to play in season 2 of HOTS and now i got demoted to silver due to decay, yet i own everyone in silver i am currently 17-1 with a 12 win streak. its just retarded and not fun for the people in the lower leagues who get demolished. You went 17-1 and you're still playing silver players? You guys know the ladder is locked at the moment, right? So even if you go 100 - 0 you're not going to get promoted. Just keep on playing and you'll get the promotion next season.
was 14-1 before the lock.
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United States12235 Posts
On December 31 2013 00:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Thanks for the write up, Excalibur_Z Awesome as always. I can understand the initial impetus for MMR Decay; Blizzard wants to slowly cleanse the higher leagues of players who are no longer active, opening up more spots for those who are still playing a lot and working hard to move up the ladder. But I think this level of decay is absolutely overkill. The decay is just too fast. Why doesn't Blizzard work to adjust the rate of decay so that it doesn't actually present a futile situation for those who can only play a game or two every other week (or those who are playing team games but still have the MMR of their other teams lowered, etc.). It just seems like there are so many glaring issues that can be tinkered with to find a more comfortable solution for all parties involved, and Blizzard is just making ladder useless and unenjoyable.
Well, first of all, like I said above, there are no slots in leagues. Your reasoning for decay is predicated on a belief that Blizzard primarily cares about the size of the leagues. However, Blizzard sees things a lot more simply.
The reason for the decay mechanic is all about competitive matchmaking and keeping their players in the game. The design is intended to give players gradually weaker opponents at a rate which corresponds to perceived skill deterioration, and according to their Situation Report, that part is working fine (who knows if it really is or not, only they know for sure). The effect on the leagues is collateral, and I don't want to say "unforeseen" but everyone's been posting that damn chart comparing June to now.
As for how the design was planned out, I have a theory. They probably went through parses of players who hadn't played games in 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, and beyond. Then, they looked at the win rates of those players after they returned. They probably found that most players who had spent 4 or more weeks away from the game were beating equal-MMR players 25% of the time. Because the ladder system uses an Elo model, it's simple mathematics to adjust the returning player's MMR so that it reflects a value which corresponds to that 25% win rate -- that is, 315 rating lower. They probably did the same for 1 week, 2 weeks and 3 weeks and crafted a model around it until they arrived at the linear decay we have now (1 week was probably still 50%, 2 weeks still 50%, 3 weeks 36%, and so on).
One suggestion I've seen a lot is allowing rapid rebounding for decaying players. That is, if you haven't played for 4 weeks, is it really going to take 20 wins over losses for you to return to your old skill level? That's probably a variable that could be added and tweaked. Maybe it only takes 5 games, maybe 10, who knows?
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On December 31 2013 01:57 big_aug wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2013 01:51 SCguineapig wrote:
lol mmr decay is stupid, used to be diamond then got demoted to play in season 2 of HOTS and now i got demoted to silver due to decay, yet i own everyone in silver i am currently 17-1 with a 12 win streak. its just retarded and not fun for the people in the lower leagues who get demolished. You went 17-1 and you're still playing silver players?
That's what we're all saying. When I get demoted from master to diamond due to inactivity I've gone a legit 15-0 my first 15 games and still been playing diamond players, and diamond is a SMALL division.
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On December 31 2013 01:48 big_aug wrote:
How often are people TRULY playing people they have no chance at beating? I just started playing again after a year. The last time I played I was high plat playing some diamond players. I'm bronze now. I'm certainly not seeing many plat/diamond/masters players there. And let's be serious, anyone who is plat or lower IS going to see a massive drop in performance from not playing. It would affect everyone, but it affects the lower league players in a more significant way.
I peaked at Platinum in Wings of Liberty and I'm currently something like top-8 Silver. In the meantime, I haven't played much, and I haven't improved much. I'm still making the mistakes I was making back in the day. That said, I agree that I haven't seen the "ringers" in the Silver league that other people report. I'm mostly matched against people with records that are mostly gold & platinum going all the way back before the recent shift in the distribution, and the games are mostly pretty close. Once or twice I've been completely owned by someone with an extremely well-executed all-in, but even those people aren't former Master league players in disguise.
I think that the Bronze and Silver league boundaries being lowered by various changes has equipped players with new excuses for their losses, but I don't think that the characterization that Silver-level matching matches players of wildly different skill levels is in fact very accurate.
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On December 31 2013 01:48 big_aug wrote:
How often are people TRULY playing people they have no chance at beating? I just started playing again after a year. The last time I played I was high plat playing some diamond players. I'm bronze now. I'm certainly not seeing many plat/diamond/masters players there.
At the top of Platinum, it felt like 20-30% of my games were against decayed players. Oddly enough, at the top of Gold it is closer to 10%.
Here are my last games:
League, highest League-# number of times (G=Gold, P=Plat, etc)
example (me): G, D-4 means I am currently in Gold and have finished as high as Diamond four times.
G, P-4
G, D-1
G, D-4
G, D-8
G, P-2
G, D-3
P, M-2 *
G, G-1
G, P-2
G, D-3
G, P-1
D, D-8
G, D-5
G, P-3
G, D-3
G, M-8 *
S, <no career finishes>
G, P-4
G, <no career finishes>
G, D-1
* These guys played on a level far surpassing mine.
Granted this is a small sample set, but this data yields 10% of my last 20 games were affected by decay or, more accurately, completely mismatched MMR.
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Czech Republic12129 Posts
Yup, I can agree, that it is somewhere between 10 and 20 %. I cant get more precise numbers, since I stopped playing because of the broken MM => so it is more feeling than anything else.
Though what is more important(or interesting?) - I got rarely an easy opponent. If I say that 9 of 10 games were against better opponent than me I could not go wrong. I know, I know - I get better playing better opponents, but I want to enjoy my playing. I do not want to get better, I am good enough for me :-)
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ur mostly playing against urself anyway, was ur build the best it can be? i think if we arent competing in qualifiers and shit like that, i doint think it really matters . . so why do we care about this so much? Ive always winced when people say i want to get better and improve. .woah now hold ur horses . . in comes the fire . . let me explain. I want to get better at guitar, my band which makes me money would be able to play more songs, so i practice more and try harder things more often. I practice my maths so it aids me with my job which i get paid . . i want to improve at starcraft . .. . . . . why? Just so i can be better at it? What does it really matter
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I must be blessed by the gods because I don't have any problems with the ladder.. Ive been diamond the past 3 seasons and thats where I should be, the first two seasons of HoTS I was master because THEN the ladder had problems... everyone was masters and it shouldnt be like that.
Edit : Guess I should add that I don't mass games like a freak, I play about 0 to 20 games a week and anything in between...
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On December 31 2013 02:22 Excalibur_Z wrote:
One suggestion I've seen a lot is allowing rapid rebounding for decaying players. That is, if you haven't played for 4 weeks, is it really going to take 20 wins over losses for you to return to your old skill level? That's probably a variable that could be added and tweaked. Maybe it only takes 5 games, maybe 10, who knows?
That would be great if they implemented that. I really appreciate your efforts in explaining the current metrics for the MMR system. I definitely feel like tweaks could be made after researching this a bit, and the main issue seems to be morality within the community. The initial approach had the right intentions, matching players with lesser skill after an absence from the game, it's easy to infer the potential of keeping players playing. They don't possess a crystal ball, so they had no way of knowing the league percentages seasons down the line.
Thanks again xD
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I want to see what the 2.1 changes do but I can't imagine it fixing the situation. I dropped a league after taking a few weeks off. Played over 120 games in the past two weeks and then got promoted after beating someone in a league lower (two leagues lower after the promotion - they were playing ranked).
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