EPTSo demoting is now enabled again or am I getting this wrong?
StarCraft II Ladder Update -- March 2, 2015 - Page 4
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b3nd3r
Germany158 Posts
So demoting is now enabled again or am I getting this wrong? | ||
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Deleted User 137586
7859 Posts
I'll finally get above gold in a season again. I only have time to play a few games a season due to work and other obligations, so I was stuck around silver level forever. I also can't remember the last game I lost, but apparently losing is fun... | ||
NonY
8751 Posts
During our analysis, we found that [MMR decay] was helping create even matches for players who were coming back from breaks and looking to ease back into StarCraft II. I wish. I didn't play on an account for over 5 months, came back and matched against top 50 GM. I guess the evidence shows that it takes more than 5 months for MMR decay to activate but skill in SC2 certainly drops much quicker than that. And I imagine that many of the people complaining about MMR decay were talking about periods of less than 5 months, and thus crying wolf the whole time. Unless the behind-the-scenes picture is much more complicated (inconsistent) and even worse at accomplishing its goals than we imagined. One change I hope to see for LotV is a different system for top ranks on the ladder. I don't know why the top 200 gets locked out from the rest of the system. The transition from divisions and leagues to a straightforward numerical ranking needs to be smoother. I say make it top 1000 or something, so any player who is decent (as in has any chance of going pro in the near future) can be ranked, and definitely do not let it get locked up. Make a system where people enter and leave based on performance, not activity, all season long. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20345 Posts
I wish. I didn't play on an account for over 5 months, came back and matched against top 50 GM. I guess the evidence shows that it takes more than 5 months for MMR decay to activate but skill in SC2 certainly drops much quicker than that. And I imagine that many of the people complaining about MMR decay were talking about periods of less than 5 months, and thus crying wolf the whole time. Unless the behind-the-scenes picture is much more complicated (inconsistent) and even worse at accomplishing its goals than we imagined. Every time i play the game with a few friends (sometimes after having not played for ~2-9 months) our MMR has decayed to hitting ~silver-golds in 2v2. We're pretty much all previous 1v1 master players | ||
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NonY
8751 Posts
On March 03 2015 09:05 Cyro wrote: Every time i play the game with a few friends (sometimes after having not played for ~2-9 months) our MMR has decayed to hitting bronze-golds in 2v2. We're pretty much all previous 1v1 master players, and that usually results in winning 5-10 games for free. Yeah.. I've just spent some time reading various accounts of MMR decay. I don't think there's any way so many people are inaccurately reporting. I'm leaning heavily toward the system being complex and faulty and obviously inconsistent. My hypothesis to explain at least part of it is that average MMR shifts and depending on when you quit and when you return, your MMR decay could either be nullified by the whole system shifting along with it or amplified by the whole system moving the other way. But if that's totally wrong, then there must be something else weird going on. | ||
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KrazyTrumpet
United States2520 Posts
On March 03 2015 09:13 NonY wrote: Yeah.. I've just spent some time reading various accounts of MMR decay. I don't think there's any way so many people are inaccurately reporting. I'm leaning heavily toward the system being complex and faulty and obviously inconsistent. My hypothesis to explain at least part of it is that average MMR shifts and depending on when you quit and when you return, your MMR decay could either be nullified by the whole system shifting along with it or amplified by the whole system moving the other way. But if that's totally wrong, then there must be something else weird going on. This post from Blizz explains the MMR decay system: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/12055065/situation-report-the-starcraft-ii-multiplayer-ladder-12-18-2013 The highlighted/important parts: -Each ladder queue is adjusted separately. For example, an absence from games in team queues will not adjust your 1v1 matchmaking rating. -The adjustment only kicks in after a player has played no games (ranked or unranked) in a given queue for more than two weeks. -Once it kicks in, the adjustment ramps from zero adjustment to our maximum adjustment over a period of two weeks. There is no further adjustment after four weeks of inactivity. -At its maximum value, the adjustment is small; it’s the equivalent of losing a few games. If a player plays even a single game on the ladder every two weeks, their hidden rating will never be adjusted downward. The problem seemed to stem from people who only played a few games every 4+ weeks (like me!), which is beyond the max decay time. This would continually kick in the MMR decay system, causing those sorts of players to steadily fall over time. In your case, a period of not playing *at all* for a full 5 months would cause only that initial 4 week decay period. Someone else feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but this is how I understand everything to work, based on what Blizzard has said. edit: for some clarity and because I accidentally some words | ||
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PresenceSc2
Australia4032 Posts
On March 03 2015 03:46 GGzerG wrote: Oh great another announcement about changes that haven't happened yet, Oh joy. Maybe now I can get excited about waiting even longer for Blizzard to care about SC2. "SOON" TM. -_- Pretty much lol We already know all this shit is broken blizz. Just fix it already.... | ||
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KrazyTrumpet
United States2520 Posts
On March 03 2015 09:28 Za7oX wrote: Pretty much lol We already know all this shit is broken blizz. Just fix it already.... Well, at least they are telling us some of the initial steps they are taking. | ||
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PresenceSc2
Australia4032 Posts
On March 03 2015 05:53 Days wrote: Lol yeah the MMR is pretty messed up. I'm currently in Grandmaster right now, and one game i'm beating a grandmaster, and then the next game I get placed against a diamond...... we're both like what the fuck?!?! Iv'e vsd more GM's when i'm in diamond now, then when 2+ years ago when i was high master. I guess the lower player base has something to do with it. | ||
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zerK
Canada176 Posts
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Shield
Bulgaria4824 Posts
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
On March 03 2015 09:23 KrazyTrumpet wrote: This post from Blizz explains the MMR decay system: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/12055065/situation-report-the-starcraft-ii-multiplayer-ladder-12-18-2013 The highlighted/important parts: -Each ladder queue is adjusted separately. For example, an absence from games in team queues will not adjust your 1v1 matchmaking rating. -The adjustment only kicks in after a player has played no games (ranked or unranked) in a given queue for more than two weeks. -Once it kicks in, the adjustment ramps from zero adjustment to our maximum adjustment over a period of two weeks. There is no further adjustment after four weeks of inactivity. -At its maximum value, the adjustment is small; it’s the equivalent of losing a few games. If a player plays even a single game on the ladder every two weeks, their hidden rating will never be adjusted downward. The problem seemed to stem from people who only played a few games every 4+ weeks (like me!), which is beyond the max decay time. This would continually kick in the MMR decay system, causing those sorts of players to steadily fall over time. In your case, a period of not playing *at all* for a full 5 months would cause only that initial 4 week decay period. Someone else feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but this is how I understand everything to work, based on what Blizzard has said. edit: for some clarity and because I accidentally some words Yeah, I think so too. Also we have no clue how the MMR really works. For example, it could just add MMR on top of MMR if you are winning. This means in the middle of the ladder with 50% winrate your MMR stays the same. With 55% it is growing and you are ranking up through the leagues. Now if you are at the top of the ladder, you are going to have between 50-75% winrate, since there simply aren't many opponents better than you that you could be matched against. Now if the MMR works as simply as I said above - it just adds MMR when you win - that means that the top of the ladder has really high MMR. And that could mean that even a regular decay with a percentage of even fixed value over 4weeks might not be enough to really rank you down. This is all just speculation and meant as an example to illustrate that MMR decay could work very differently for different players, in particular the ones at the very top and the very bottom of the ladder which are not in the 50% winrate equilibrium. Unless blizzard tells us about their way to measure and influence MMR, we can never know and only report what we feel uncomfortable with. | ||
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lurchpanda
United States51 Posts
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NonY
8751 Posts
On March 03 2015 09:23 KrazyTrumpet wrote: This post from Blizz explains the MMR decay system: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/12055065/situation-report-the-starcraft-ii-multiplayer-ladder-12-18-2013 The highlighted/important parts: -Each ladder queue is adjusted separately. For example, an absence from games in team queues will not adjust your 1v1 matchmaking rating. -The adjustment only kicks in after a player has played no games (ranked or unranked) in a given queue for more than two weeks. -Once it kicks in, the adjustment ramps from zero adjustment to our maximum adjustment over a period of two weeks. There is no further adjustment after four weeks of inactivity. -At its maximum value, the adjustment is small; it’s the equivalent of losing a few games. If a player plays even a single game on the ladder every two weeks, their hidden rating will never be adjusted downward. The problem seemed to stem from people who only played a few games every 4+ weeks (like me!), which is beyond the max decay time. This would continually kick in the MMR decay system, causing those sorts of players to steadily fall over time. In your case, a period of not playing *at all* for a full 5 months would cause only that initial 4 week decay period. Someone else feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but this is how I understand everything to work, based on what Blizzard has said. edit: for some clarity and because I accidentally some words I see, but that still leaves unexplained some other things that can affect your effective MMR over time. I wonder what other factors have been at play that have made it seem as though MMR decay was doing more or less than that. If MMR decay is removed and those factors are still at play, then people will continue to observe weird things when they take breaks. If the idea is for people to be able to take any length break and always be able to match against the same people, then presumably the system needs to be adjusted in other ways. | ||
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ETisME
12911 Posts
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Excalibur_Z
United States12281 Posts
On March 03 2015 12:02 NonY wrote: I see, but that still leaves unexplained some other things that can affect your effective MMR over time. I wonder what other factors have been at play that have made it seem as though MMR decay was doing more or less than that. If MMR decay is removed and those factors are still at play, then people will continue to observe weird things when they take breaks. If the idea is for people to be able to take any length break and always be able to match against the same people, then presumably the system needs to be adjusted in other ways. In the short term, and on an individual basis, decay is probably a fine thing. After all, you take a break, you come back rusty, you aren't going to be up to the task of playing against people that required your best game a month ago, so decay handles that for you. They ran the statistical models and found that after a month or more of inactivity, the average player's skill level falls to a point where opponents who were 75/25 matchups are now 50/50 matchups, so that's how it was tuned. The ripple effects are far more damaging. Heart of the Swarm launched two years ago, that's two full years of decay and general rating deflation. Think about it: when you come back to play a game, you are much more likely to face an active player than another inactive one (obviously), and the outcome of that game impacts your opponent's rating positively or negatively. You are, on average, playing against a different tier of opponents and your games will push them up or down. Again, in the short term, that's probably okay because if you play only a few games your impact on the ladder around you is minimal, and if you play a lot of games you'll eventually climb back to where you used to be. But what happens if you decay again a few months later? And again a few months after that? That's exactly what's resulted in the ladder's current state, with mid- and high-level players decaying to the bottom and middle of the ladder after multiple seasons of inactivity. In the immediate term, their fix is to adjust the league boundaries to match the target population percentiles, but that doesn't resolve the underlying issue. Each time they do this, it causes a league "crunch" where the rating ranges for the lower leagues become smaller and smaller (because if X rating range used to cover 8% of people and now it covers 20%, you need to find the new 8% intercept) while Diamond becomes a wide expanse collecting the chunks removed from the crunch, and that's untenable. Deflation and decay compounded over those two years have caused the league badges to mostly lose meaning, and that's important considering that's a player's only reference point. | ||
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bxc
35 Posts
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ZenithM
France15952 Posts
On March 03 2015 09:05 Cyro wrote: Every time i play the game with a few friends (sometimes after having not played for ~2-9 months) our MMR has decayed to hitting ~silver-golds in 2v2. We're pretty much all previous 1v1 master players Yeah, this exactly. Not so much a bad feeling, a good team morale booster actually, but eventually pretty repetitive. Edit: Well, these days I'm playing a game with no matchmaking at all so I shouldn't complain too much ;D. No matchmaking at all in a team game with reasonably high skill ceiling is completely ridiculous. | ||
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ZAiNs
United Kingdom6525 Posts
On March 03 2015 09:01 NonY wrote: I wish. I didn't play on an account for over 5 months, came back and matched against top 50 GM. I guess the evidence shows that it takes more than 5 months for MMR decay to activate but skill in SC2 certainly drops much quicker than that. And I imagine that many of the people complaining about MMR decay were talking about periods of less than 5 months, and thus crying wolf the whole time. Unless the behind-the-scenes picture is much more complicated (inconsistent) and even worse at accomplishing its goals than we imagined. One change I hope to see for LotV is a different system for top ranks on the ladder. I don't know why the top 200 gets locked out from the rest of the system. The transition from divisions and leagues to a straightforward numerical ranking needs to be smoother. I say make it top 1000 or something, so any player who is decent (as in has any chance of going pro in the near future) can be ranked, and definitely do not let it get locked up. Make a system where people enter and leave based on performance, not activity, all season long. I had a similar experience with MMR decay on a smurf. I've also had a friend who 'decayed' from Master to Bronze, but that's because he got into Master after about 25 games the week HotS came out and then lost a placement game every season for a year. Most people crying about MMR decay probably haven't played enough games. | ||
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Excalibur_Z
United States12281 Posts
On March 03 2015 14:50 ZenithM wrote: Fucking MMR decay shouldn't be specific to a single unique ladder queue. If buddies A&B and buddies B&C often play together, but A&C much more rarely, there is no reason to put such a heavy MMR decay on A&C. That's not the case. It's by queue, not by team composition. If A+B play every week and B+C play every week and A+C play every month, nobody will have decayed at all because every week A B and C are all playing 2v2. Read the language in the Dec 2013 Blizzard blog post again. | ||
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