Ladder Revamp: We Give MMR So Revamp Is Not Needed - Page 2

On March 28 2016 02:12 paralleluniverse wrote:

"We give you MMR in the ladder revamp, so the ladder revamp is not needed."

This is the excuse Blizzard gives for backpedaling out of the ladder revamp. It's the excuse they give about why it's OK that ranks are inaccurate, and why it's not going to be fixed.

The ladder "revamp" has been reduced to merely splitting leagues into 3, making GM update daily, and revealing MMR. This isn't a revamp, it's a few tweaks plus revealing MMR. But by Blizzard's logic, if it's OK that ranks are inaccurate because you're going to reveal MMR, why even bother with the first 2 changes? Just reveal MMR and be done with it.

But revealing MMR is not a good excuse for ranks to be inaccurate, and unspecified "potential problems" is not a good excuse for backpedaling out of accurate ranks, because revealing MMR is not good enough:

1. MMR does not show how good you are compared with the playerbase, i.e. your percentile out of all players, and your percentile out of all active players. If lots of data were somehow collected then it would theoretically be possible for people to estimate it, but this should really be in the game. Accurate ranks/leagues would do that. Backpedelling from 10 tiers to 3 won't.

2. MMR doesn't reveal uncertainty about MMR. Two players can have very similar MMR, but it's possible that the system is highly certain of the first player's MMR, but not so certain of the other player's MMR. Revealing MMR doesn't provide this information.

Accurate ranks as I've suggested (which must include removing bonus pool, reintroducing mid-season demotions, and frequent updates of all leagues not just GM) would deal with these issues.

Given such an unambitious, diminished scope for the ladder revamp, I hope Blizzard solves these problems even if it's the lazy way of just revealing the percentile of MMR (out of all players and active players), and just revealing a confidence interval for MMR, like how they're going to just reveal MMR.

That is my core suggestion to salvage what little remains of the ladder revamp after all this disappointing backpedaling.

Further reading: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/20743005369?page=6#117

On March 28 2016 04:04 Excalibur_Z wrote:
I decided to create a mockup of what I imagine the new ladder will look like. I'll explain the differences:



1. No bonus pool.
2. "Points" replaced by MMR.
3. Tier specified directly in the header.
4. Icon representing highest tier achieved for the season next to each player's name.

Is this different from your expectation? Honestly I think this looks pretty good. It has all the information we need without any clutter or confusion.

I don't think uncertainty needs to be shown (if indeed that's what you're proposing). It's too "mathy" and rather unnecessary, plus it makes comparing ratings too nitpicky. "Yeah you may be 10 rating higher but my uncertainty is lower so really I'm higher than you!" That's if the average player can be bothered to decipher what uncertainty is in the first place.

Knowing the percentile isn't useful either. That's what the leagues will represent loosely anyway, and the community will ultimately craft its own definition for what MMR threshold is colloquially considered "good".

If you want to double down on activity, you could have a player's rating grayed-out if they haven't played for a week.

If indeed they implement everything in the above mockup, I don't really have any complaints. Let's roll with it.

On March 28 2016 07:51 tokinho wrote:


I've not liked most of your ideas about the ladder. I find most of your suggestions disappointing and like the current system better. The vast majority of players have other things than starcraft. If you kick everyone off the ladder every day who isn't player, to be honest you'd only have 10000 or less players on the global ladder. I don't really care so much about my ladder rank e-penis to sit and complain that i cannot show it often enough or that it doesn't show it as a percentile. I don't think you need your e-penis percentile to shove it in everyone's face. (MMR does this already, and you probably don't understand mmr which is why you are complaining) I like the bonus pool system, and see no reason to worry about the other leagues other than gm. If you aren't gm and want to kick out of other leagues you are wasting your time on things that aren't important and don't help the player base.

On March 28 2016 10:57 paralleluniverse wrote:

You are too optimistic.

1. Blizzard hasn't said bonus pool is being removed.

2. There's nothing to suggest points are being removed. My interpretation (and I know Blizzard hasn't been clear about this), is that there's no change to points, MMR will be revealed on top of points. In fact, new players and new seasons not starting with 0 MMR suggests to me that points are not being removed.

3. Leagues don't represent percentile of MMR, because bonus pool, no mid-season demotions, and huge percentile ranges given 3 tiers makes it inaccurate and imprecise as an estimate.

4. The mockup shows different tiers and even different leagues being mixed together. I highly doubt that would happen. I even doubt that there will be a ladder ranked by MMR. It will probably be ranked by points, like it is now.

5. Nothing suggests that anything will be done about inactive players, which when you look at most division ladders, clogs up most of the ranks. Although in practice, as you've noted, it is easily dealt with by changing how the ladder displays information. But nothing suggests Blizzard is interested in this issue. It's never ever been spoken about.

The ladder revamp is very likely nothing changes but leagues split into 3, GM updates daily, and MMR is revealed.

And how is knowing percentile not useful? Why is knowing MMR so useful? MMR is a meaningless number on it's own, it's only useful relative to other's MMR. And comparing you to others is exactly what a percentile does.

Nothing has happened for the last 4.5 months and according to David Kim implementation will start this week. The time for fancy or grandiose solutions is over. It's time for small and easy solutions: just revealing more information associated with MMR as listed in the OP.

On March 28 2016 05:56 Elentos wrote:

It does, but in certain cases it also doesn't. For example, for the ladder competition that was held before the WCS Circuit Winter championship, the current ladder system doesn't feel adequate, because you're judged by "ladder points". But you can have 400 wins, 100 losses and not enough ladder points for top 16. That kinda sucks.

On March 28 2016 13:51 Excalibur_Z wrote:


You're misreading the image. Those icons represent season highs, not current position, just like DKim mentioned. I also mentioned that in my post hoping to clarify, no to avail it seems =( He also posted: The more we dug into the topic of making the ranks, divisions, and leagues as accurate as possible, the more we realized that there were other potential problems that we could have introduced. Since we have the MMR available already, we think it might be best to just show it as the most accurate measurement of a player’s skill. This means that rather than try to invent a new arcane and opaque system, it's much easier and better to just show MMR and use that as rank.

On March 28 2016 02:26 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
we don't know their budget and its probably too expensive to put much more into a "revamp" without introducing new problems that take more resources to solve.

i'd rather they spend time improving automated tournaments rather than "revamping" the ladder. if they can't afford to make automated tournaments better then i'd rather they just leave everything as is. the automated tournaments are pretty darn fun as they work right now.

i'm pretty happy with the ladder and the multiplayer experience in general. i'm not at all disappointed with this alleged "backpedaling".

what do you want for a lousy stinkin' $40 any way?