How the Rank 200 GM gamed the MMR system - Page 9

On December 12 2011 07:34 diophan wrote:


There aren't words in any language to describe how tilted you would have to be to be a GM and lose 130 games in a row, at the end to bronze league players. Do actually believe that's what happened?

On December 12 2011 03:37 Excalibur_Z wrote:
Wow yeah, okay, a lot of pretty huge misconceptions here.

1. As people have already mentioned, this guy was in GM league to start. He didn't get promoted there after the loss streak, that would be impossible.

2. The only way you can get demoted from GM league is to go over 180 bonus pool. Each league has a hidden offset which is kind of like a minimum point barrier in order to ensure that you don't get many points when playing against people below your league. That is, if a Master player at 0 points and a Grandmaster at 0 points both played the same mid-Master MMR opponent, the Master player would get maybe 12 while the GM would get maybe 6. Since the only way to spend bonus pool is to win games, this effectively makes it harder to spend your pool because it's easier to spend it at 12 points per win rather than 6 points per game. At the extreme end (say GM playing Bronze), you will earn 0 points for a win which means you didn't spend any bonus pool for that game. This means that there is a limit on how far your MMR can drop before you will inevitably be kicked from GM league due to earning 0 points for wins (as to how tight those restrictions should be, that's another debate).

3. This practice is not new and has been reported before, when the lowest GM players were facing Diamonds and only earning +2 or +3 points per win, just barely keeping their head above water and able to spend their bonus pool through mass gaming and eventual wins. Buki just took this to a more extreme level.

4. To get into Grandmaster league you have to have an MMR moving average of the top 200 on the server. It's going to be very difficult for Buki to raise that average back up for the next season.

5. Intentionally throwing games in order to get demoted or stomp lower leagues has been acknowledged by Blizzard as an actionable offense.

On December 12 2011 06:03 GreEny K wrote:


He won't get a ban for this... If he wants to ladder and lose on purpose, that's his prerogative, it's not Blizzards business.

On December 12 2011 09:15 antitrop wrote:

Blizzard made it their business.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/2743728019

"Daxxarri
Community Manager
Please be aware that we will continue to take action against accounts of players found to be purposefully losing games (smurfing) in order to be placed in lower leagues. Intentionally losing games can be punished by suspension from the game or permanent closure of the account.

For the original warning regarding this practice, please see: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/2416160162"

mBnBuki then went on a massive winning streak going 32-3 before being promoted to GM with the last loss...

On December 12 2011 09:50 johngalt90 wrote:
I don't feel what buki did was a bannable offense. It's blizzard's fault not his. I agree the gm system is stupid but it isnt buki's fault.

On December 12 2011 08:33 hmunkey wrote:
Why would you post the guy's picture too? It's completely irrelevant and an invasion of privacy.

On December 12 2011 06:51 Not_That wrote:
For people like me who have great interest in the inner workings of the ladder system this is a golden opportunity. Having a GM player facing bronze-silver and up players mean we get a rare glimpse at the unadjusted points difference between GM league and the lower leagues. By collecting data from Buki's match history we can learn quite a lot. Unfortunately I am an EU player and don't have an account on the NA server, so I am unable to do so myself. If someone can step up and gather the following data it can help determine what is the unadjusted points difference between GM and each of the leagues (we already have a good estimate of the difference between GM and master), as well and figuring out the points won/lost formula and how it relates to the difference in unadjusted points between the 2 players.

I'm not sure how many people are interested in figuring out the unadjusted points difference of the ladder system (just how far is bronze from gm? silver from diamond?). Occasionally we get a thread asking how many tiers of skills exist in starcraft. Well, this is a rare opportunity to get closer to answering this question.

The following data should be collected:
- Buki's points and his opponents points and league
- match result and points earned / lost by both parties. It's important to disregard any bonus points won as they are meaningless for our purposes.

The most important matches are those where Buki's opponent has lost (or won) roughly 12 points. This will tell us that this opponent has his ladder points close to his MMR, which is vital when trying to gather insights from the match data.

(explanation: seeing how the ladder system matches 2 players who are close in MMR together, we can assume that most players who are playing Buki have MMR similar to Buki's at the time of their match. However an opponent who wins much higher than 12 points for a win or losses very few [or vice versa] is an opponent whose ladder points are still playing catchup with his MMR. This is likely due to the player having not played enough games for his points to stabilize yet, but might also be due to sudden change in skill, race change, etc)

*All points should be calculated as the players ladder points + unspent ladder points


It's requires some work gathering the data. Will someone step up and do it?

On December 12 2011 12:51 Excalibur_Z wrote:


Well, we already have some information. I took the chart that Blizzard posted and corrected for adjusted points: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Ladder

Given this, we get the following approximations:

Bronze: 0-835 (across 7 tiers, 835-point gap)
Silver: 836-1270 (across 3 tiers, 435-point gap)
Gold: 1271-1705 (across 2 tiers, 435-point gap)
Platinum: 1706-2140 (across 3 tiers, 435-point gap)
Diamond: 2141-2675 (across 7 tiers, 535-point gap)
Master: 2676+ (3445 was the Near Grandmaster value given) (across 1 tier, 770-point gap)
Grandmaster: Top 200 MMR moving averages

Now here are some of the more interesting games from his history. Read in ascending order. Perfect 12 games are marked with asterisks.

G-0 vs Jobby (lost 13 points), Gold league with (466 + 2 remaining bonus - 355 total bonus = 133) adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1 point and had 0 points. This would mean that approximately a 2000-point gap would be worth +1/-23.
*G-1 vs George (won 12 points), Gold league with 121 adjusted points at time of match. Buki lost 22 points, which was all he had.
G-2 vs steelcurtain (lost 11 points), Gold league with 197 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1 point.
*G-3 vs Broseph (lost 12 points), Gold league with 200 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1 point.
G-4 vs Caliber (lost 13 points), Gold league with 219 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1(+1) point.
G-5 vs SGFeedOnFire (lost 13 points), Gold league with 110 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1(+1) point.
*G-7 vs BLITzNoble (lost 12 points), Gold league with 125 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1 point.
*G-8 vs ZenGraffix (lost 12 points), Gold league with 102 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1 point.
*G-9 vs Poiskail (lost 12 points), Gold league with 101 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1(+1) point.
*G-14 vs oxypovijovi (lost 12 points), Silver league with 72 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1 point.
G-15 vs Darkfaire (won 13 points), Silver league with 312 adjusted points at time of match. Buki lost 19 points, which was all he had.
G-16 vs MoistProduct (lost 13 points), Silver league with 47 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1 point.
G-17 vs Tiocrash (lost 13 points), Gold league with 102 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1 point.
*G-18 vs MoJuckTerran (lost 12 points), Silver league with 183 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1 point.
*G-19 vs Tanus (lost 12 points), Silver league with 129 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1(+1) point.
G-20 vs MoreBlankets (lost 11 points), Silver league with 170 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1(+1) point.
G-21 vs zero (lost 11 points), Silver league with 34 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1(+1) point.
G-22 vs Vyse (lost 13 points), Silver league with 108 adjusted points at time of match. Buki won 1(+1) point.

Beyond this point it gets a little sketchy because opponents are more likely to have longer match histories which may not necessary reflect their league or MMR at the time of their game against Buki. The rest of these match results are less than 24 hours old.

On December 13 2011 07:50 Adastrom wrote:
LOL, I messaged him online on why he's doing this, and he replied that his gf got mad. Apparently, she logged on his account and lose a bunch of games on purpose cause she was pissed that he played to much sc