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United States12237 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 States12237 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 States12237 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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