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On November 21 2013 22:10 deacon.frost wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2013 21:11 FaCE_1 wrote:On November 21 2013 05:34 iamcaustic wrote:Here's my fancy attempt at graphs, based on AM region 1v1 data from nios.kr (June 1st, 2013 vs. November 18th, 2013). Basically demonstrates the changes in percentile thresholds at this point in time compared to the middle of this year. Basically, if you got demoted this season, don't feel too bad about it. Chances are your MMR didn't actually drop significantly. That post should be in the OP. Best explanation. I don't get this explanation. How does this explain me being matched against opponents who are two or three levels above my skill? Back in Wings I wouldn't get those matches unless I won 10+ games in a row and even then I wouldn't get so hard opponents. Now I have the score 19:31 and getting roflstomped left and right... IMO this explains nothing about matchmaking being broken. I can see some of my games being lost to my bad mechanics, but when I see in the replay how good my enemy was... damn. This graph only explains why some friends of mine started their season in platinum instead of diamond :-)
There are two reasons for why matchmaking is frustrating to many people right now.
1.) The post you're commenting on - the mmr cutoffs for each division have somehow changed, causing a pyramid effect where most players are in bronze and silver (at the bottom), gold is big, platinum is small, and diamond is tiny with masters/gm being pinpoints on the top. My brother, for example, was in diamond before, but if you notice in the graph, what was once low diamond is now top gold; he feels pissed off at Blizzard because he feels like he worked so hard for diamond previously, but now his effort was all pointless, as he is now in a lower tier than he ever was in the past.
2.) As most people in this thread are complaining about, the ladder feels more difficult in general, because of MMR decay. This makes it so that if a GM/Masters/Diamond player doesn't touch the game for a while, they may come back, play their placement, and get put into silver/gold/platinum instead of their former (and proper) league. The longer they stay away from playing the game, the lower their MMR will sink. Therefore, you never know anymore how good your opponent actually will be based on their league. You expect to play against players of equal skill to yourself, but then get crushed because the other guy was ex GM (drastic example, but possible on today's ladder).
Hopefully the way I explained it makes some sense.
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On November 22 2013 01:39 iggym wrote:Show nested quote +On November 22 2013 00:57 korona wrote:On November 22 2013 00:09 iggym wrote:On November 21 2013 23:46 CrankOut wrote:
Obviously, fewer players play and with the MMR-decay masters/dimaonds get demoted to gold/platinum and when they decide to play again they play the real gold/plat players... That is not my point; I understand the mechanism, and I do not dispute that MMR decay will cause some ladder deflation, as well as increased variance in skill at the same MMR. I'm asking people to think about and defend the scale that they are proposing. Given no change in the average skill across the ladder, how many games do people have to lose to decayed players for a two league shift to occur? What percentage of players are going inactive for 2+ weeks, and then playing regularly enough following that break to affect the behavior of the entire ladder? According to the graph above (and replacing the Season 6 numbers with the current ones from the same site), ~85,000 players have dropped from ranked since Season 4. This is more than half the players, and this is larger than Season 4 bronze and silver combined. If these players were evenly distributed across leagues, then this would have no effect. If these players were disproportionately low MMR players, the ladder would rebalance around it, and players would be demoted. This has a large and obvious effect, while a global effect of MMR requires a substantial population of players with month-long inactivity cycles. People are going to be sorely disappointed when Blizzard eliminates MMR decay and they don't get promoted. First the graph you are referring to is incorrect. The first numbers are not from start of S14, but from the end of S13. In the beginning of S14 Blizzard changed the offsets and tried to fix the distribution. After that Blizzard has not changed the offsets (or if they have, the change has been very small. In a week or two I can check this season's offsets more carefully). Also in the end of the season naturally more people have played their 1v1 placements. Thus the player numbers are not comparable if you compare numbers from start of the season to numbers from end of the season. But if you look at table I showed earlier: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=20264300It compares numbers from last season (S15) and this season (S16). First it compares numbers from 1 week from the season start. You can notice major shift towards the lower leagues. Then you can check the numbers from the end of last season. Between 8 k to 15 k people entered both EU and NA 1v1 ladders each week after the first week. You can easily deduce that major percentage of the ladder population goes inactive for 2 weeks or more during one season. MMR decay is logically the main reason for the population shift, like I answered to you already earlier: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=436056¤tpage=5#100And yes. If the decay mechanism would now be removed, nothing visible would happen for a while. Ladder is so messed up, that it takes lots of time for people to fight back to the MMR levels they were typically before. The distribution would start healing up, but it would take time. In this case it might be beneficial to do a full MMR reset to all players. The MMR changes much more rapidly when starting from blank MMR. People can get to master range with less than 10 games when starting from blank MMR (but master promotion at earliest at 25th game). But after the MMR change rate has stabilized, it takes easily 20 straight wins or more to go over one league MMR range. On November 22 2013 00:09 iggym wrote:
Given no change in the average skill across the ladder, how many games do people have to lose to decayed players for a two league shift to occur?
For each player ~ 16 to 20 games per league. Thus if you lose 40 games in a row, then your MMR is little over 2 leagues lower than before (if no decay happens in between). Thank you for such a good response! I missed those numbers you posted before, sorry about that. I was not aware that the ladder grew by that rate (~10K/week) each season. That is far, far, far more than I intuited, and you're right, that means a substantial portion of the player base goes inactive then comes back. It not only means that I was wrong about the number of half-season inactive players, but that I was also wrong about the number of players who have dropped out entirely... so MMR decay has a bigger effect than I realized and the base drop-off has a smaller effect than I realized. Whoops. Sorry folks. 
But it is true that the population is also getting smaller even if the numbers are healthy. But it still has much smaller effect than the decay. For example during the last month of last season, when I played on NA server during EU evening (early morning to mid-day on NA), the matchmaker sometimes gave opponents with higher MMR difference than before. Largest difference was more than 300 points on MMR tool scale (more than a typical league). I don't remember personally facing an opponent with that big MMR difference ever before.
--> During the 'silent hours' matchmaker may need to match players with larger MMR difference than normally. If you want to maximize your chances to face opponents that belong to certain MMR range, you play only during the prime time, when there are most players online.
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its true there are less players now and only the more dedicated play this game anymore. so you could say the skill level is expanding due to people dropping out and no new blood to fill it in ><
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On November 21 2013 21:11 FaCE_1 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2013 05:34 iamcaustic wrote:Here's my fancy attempt at graphs, based on AM region 1v1 data from nios.kr (June 1st, 2013 vs. November 18th, 2013). Basically demonstrates the changes in percentile thresholds at this point in time compared to the middle of this year. Basically, if you got demoted this season, don't feel too bad about it. Chances are your MMR didn't actually drop significantly. That post should be in the OP. Best explanation.
This is a good explanation, but brings up the question of why we lost ~50% of all sc2 players in two seasons?
That's a HUGE drop, and not one that make sense....
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Well as long as you don't improve there will be others who improve their game and get up in MMR and play vs you. This may seem that it's getting harder which might also be a reason.
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On November 22 2013 01:40 CakeSauc3 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2013 22:10 deacon.frost wrote:On November 21 2013 21:11 FaCE_1 wrote:On November 21 2013 05:34 iamcaustic wrote:Here's my fancy attempt at graphs, based on AM region 1v1 data from nios.kr (June 1st, 2013 vs. November 18th, 2013). Basically demonstrates the changes in percentile thresholds at this point in time compared to the middle of this year. Basically, if you got demoted this season, don't feel too bad about it. Chances are your MMR didn't actually drop significantly. That post should be in the OP. Best explanation. I don't get this explanation. How does this explain me being matched against opponents who are two or three levels above my skill? Back in Wings I wouldn't get those matches unless I won 10+ games in a row and even then I wouldn't get so hard opponents. Now I have the score 19:31 and getting roflstomped left and right... IMO this explains nothing about matchmaking being broken. I can see some of my games being lost to my bad mechanics, but when I see in the replay how good my enemy was... damn. This graph only explains why some friends of mine started their season in platinum instead of diamond :-) There are two reasons for why matchmaking is frustrating to many people right now. 1.) The post you're commenting on - the mmr cutoffs for each division have somehow changed, causing a pyramid effect where most players are in bronze and silver (at the bottom), gold is big, platinum is small, and diamond is tiny with masters/gm being pinpoints on the top. My brother, for example, was in diamond before, but if you notice in the graph, what was once low diamond is now top gold; he feels pissed off at Blizzard because he feels like he worked so hard for diamond previously, but now his effort was all pointless, as he is now in a lower tier than he ever was in the past. 2.) As most people in this thread are complaining about, the ladder feels more difficult in general, because of MMR decay. This makes it so that if a GM/Masters/Diamond player doesn't touch the game for a while, they may come back, play their placement, and get put into silver/gold/platinum instead of their former (and proper) league. The longer they stay away from playing the game, the lower their MMR will sink. Therefore, you never know anymore how good your opponent actually will be based on their league. You expect to play against players of equal skill to yourself, but then get crushed because the other guy was ex GM (drastic example, but possible on today's ladder). Hopefully the way I explained it makes some sense.
For me your point in 2) is the issue -- you never know how good your opponent is anymore. I absolutely cannot stand that. If I know I'm playing someone who was a lot better than I was I can at least make sense of the end result -- likely a humiliating loss of some sort. Now, after being high Diamond last season I'm (at times) matched against people who are nominally in Gold league but yet seem to have a far better grasp of the game (and mechanics) than I do. It's incredibly frustrating. It always leads me to think -- am I getting worse, or just plain bad, or is this guy high masters in SEA, NA, etc. (which is sometimes the case)? Blizzard needs to figure out a way to give you a more accurate picture of the strength of your opponent. The easiest way to do this would be to give MMR figures -- MMR in a specific race, MMR in a specific matchup, MMR on other servers, and MMR in past seasons. These numbers could be safely tucked away for the few hardcore players who could handle seeing them. (Obviously Blizzard believes that MMR and Elo are scary concepts for casuals; otherwise blizzard would have released them.)
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Charts explain why plats can withstand my macro. I was surprised.
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I was Platinum at the end of 2013 S5, but placed into Gold at the start of 2013 S6. I was not playing Gold players when S5 ended. Within 4 days and 50 games of beating Gold players rather handily I was promoted back into Platinum. MMRStats thinks I'm in Gold as well but Blizzard doesn't think so.
The league distribution seems whack. Based on Blizzard's expected distribution, I should be in Diamond (which I was at the end of WoL and the start of HotS). I figured I fell out of Diamond due to the HotS changes (which I still believe).
Regardless of my league, I'm playing people of similar skill most of the time.
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Ladder isn't getting harder blizzard is trolling the fuck out of us since the beginning of new season. i.e. i finished rank 2 1200 point plat and got put in gold. never been gold since like early wol, and i was former diamond. most golds i face are easily "high" plat skill, if not diamond, or multiple time former diamond. since when does fast 3 base macro off 55 workers with adequate production not kill a gold leaeguer? kind of a joke, caused me to play a lot less
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On November 22 2013 10:27 justnny wrote:
I was Platinum at the end of 2013 S5, but placed into Gold at the start of 2013 S6. I was not playing Gold players when S5 ended. Within 4 days and 50 games of beating Gold players rather handily I was promoted back into Platinum. MMRStats thinks I'm in Gold as well but Blizzard doesn't think so.
The league distribution seems whack. Based on Blizzard's expected distribution, I should be in Diamond (which I was at the end of WoL and the start of HotS). I figured I fell out of Diamond due to the HotS changes (which I still believe).
Regardless of my league, I'm playing people of similar skill most of the time.
You were playing gold players, you just didn't knew it because there is no demotion anymore mid season. Go check all these "platinum" you were playing at the time, i'm sure most will be gold now. Also, you were diamond at the start of hots because the ladder was fed at the time. Almost everyone were a league above where they should've been (I got master after playing 2 weeks of hots, now im back to diamond where I should be). The Sc2 ladder is perfectly fine. The only slight problem might be mmr decay, but even then... I have 52% win rate over 1500 games, as most have. Name me another matchmaking who will match you so evenly, there arent much, I stomp noobs every time in every other games I play online.
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On November 22 2013 01:59 tili wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2013 21:11 FaCE_1 wrote:On November 21 2013 05:34 iamcaustic wrote:Here's my fancy attempt at graphs, based on AM region 1v1 data from nios.kr (June 1st, 2013 vs. November 18th, 2013). Basically demonstrates the changes in percentile thresholds at this point in time compared to the middle of this year. Basically, if you got demoted this season, don't feel too bad about it. Chances are your MMR didn't actually drop significantly. That post should be in the OP. Best explanation. This is a good explanation, but brings up the question of why we lost ~50% of all sc2 players in two seasons? That's a HUGE drop, and not one that make sense....
wow, that explains a lot! Should really be part of the OP.
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On November 22 2013 11:09 sM.Zik wrote:
The Sc2 ladder is perfectly fine.
I don't think anyone is saying it is very broken in the matchmaking sense. Just that for whatever reason things got rearranged such that people are often in a lower league than they are used to, even if the quality of play is the same. Frankly, it doesn't matter what league you're in if you're getting matched against even people. But people so closely associate skill with league most of the time that it a lot of people are feeling a bit taken aback by working so hard to get into League X and then being "demoted" to League Y.
So in a sense the ladder is "harder" in that players who were formerly ranked higher are now ranked lower, BUT, in the end it really doesn't matter because those people are still in roughly the same overall place. In other words, if the SC2 ladder just used an overall rank/place (i.e, I'm ranked 20325 in the world) rather than leagues (i.e I'm "low platinum"), people would not have noticed a big change in their rank.
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On November 22 2013 11:38 JacobShock wrote:Show nested quote +On November 22 2013 01:59 tili wrote:On November 21 2013 21:11 FaCE_1 wrote:On November 21 2013 05:34 iamcaustic wrote:Here's my fancy attempt at graphs, based on AM region 1v1 data from nios.kr (June 1st, 2013 vs. November 18th, 2013). Basically demonstrates the changes in percentile thresholds at this point in time compared to the middle of this year. Basically, if you got demoted this season, don't feel too bad about it. Chances are your MMR didn't actually drop significantly. That post should be in the OP. Best explanation. This is a good explanation, but brings up the question of why we lost ~50% of all sc2 players in two seasons? That's a HUGE drop, and not one that make sense.... wow, that explains a lot! Should really be part of the OP.
Except those figures are incorrect. The first numbers are not from the start of S14, but from 9 days before the end of S13. Now lets look at those numbers.
Total players 2013-06-01 S13, 9 days before season end (from nios.kr via web.archive.org)
Global ~367 k (371 726 if counted by races or 366 280 if counted by leagues)
EU ~150 k (151 664 if counted by races or 149 482 if counted by leagues)
NA ~ 145 k (146 393 if counted by races or 144 445 if counted by leagues)
Total players 2013-11-04 S15, 7 days before season end (from sc2ranks)
Global ~ 349 k
EU ~ 144 k
NA ~ 133 k
Difference:
Global ~ - 18 k
EU ~ - 6 k
NA ~ - 12 k
Of course these numbers are not directly comparable as S13 was a lot shorter than S15. Also the sources were different, but most of the time both services have ended up having similar looking values. More exact S15 values can be found from one of my previous posts: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=436056¤tpage=6#119
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The ladders also bugged right now as confirmed by Blizz MVP's
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On November 20 2013 16:47 DinoMight wrote:
Hello all,
About last year I was promoted to Diamond. I had been practicing my ass off and watching pros play a lot and I improved a lot over the course of a month or so. I was in Diamond until HotS came out. HotS really caters to my play style more and I was destroying people. So I eventually made it into Masters.
I stopped playing for a few weeks. Then got demoted twice. Then worked my way back up to Diamond. Then stopped playing for a few weeks and now I'm in Platinum again. Except it seems like the ladder has gotten WAY WAY WAY harder.
I'm watching the most pro StarCraft I've ever watched. My APM is the highest it's ever been (I averaged 160 in a 20+ min game the other day vs Z). Yet I'm struggling to get barely a 50% win ratio.
I just finished a PvP against a guy who seemed way better than Platinum. Indeed after I talked to him, I found out he used to be in Masters. Finished 5 Seasons in Masters too. Now he's Plat.
Have a few other friends who were Masters now Diamond, some Diamond now Plat, and some Plats who are now Gold.
Has anyone else noticed the ladder getting way harder recently or am I just hallucinating something?
EDIT - I should clarify I am playing on NA.
It's this MMR decay. I was playing tons of former masters one late night and I was only in gold. It was ridiculous. They were just pounding me into the dirt. Not even close.
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it's not the decay it's the population. look at the people you faces history.. you will see TONS of players that were master s1/2 of hots just to steadily get demoted.. the same goes for other leagues aswell. I've noticed this alot when playing 3v3s for fun with 2 friends... one is bronze so it's essentially 2v3 and that gets us mostly opponents around gold/plat 1v1.. almost everyone we face that are now gold/plat was diamond/master in the first 2 seasons of HoTS.
I remember this myself aswell.. played some masterleague players in the first 2 seasons that I doubt would have been even platinum at the end of WoL.
wether this is a change in the system aswell as the population decliningI do not know but it's only logicalto asume that a ton of new people starting the game will make the leagues way easier to achieve then before and steadly as they stop playing it will become harder again.
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hmm i noticed this too. Havent been playing actively for couple of months now. I just play sometimes at random from 4-6 games. I was in top Diamond in NA and KR last season and my W/L is near 50%. But this season i was placed at Plat/Gold respectively, i just shrugged it off and tell myself " meh im just gonna play some games and promote it back at diamond" but now lol.. KR gold is really something this season. T_T
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On November 22 2013 13:59 Esoterikk wrote:
The ladders also bugged right now as confirmed by Blizz MVP's
Link to the post?
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On November 22 2013 14:08 doffe wrote:
it's not the decay it's the population. look at the people you faces history.. you will see TONS of players that were master s1/2 of hots just to steadily get demoted.. the same goes for other leagues aswell. I've noticed this alot when playing 3v3s for fun with 2 friends... one is bronze so it's essentially 2v3 and that gets us mostly opponents around gold/plat 1v1.. almost everyone we face that are now gold/plat was diamond/master in the first 2 seasons of HoTS.
I remember this myself aswell.. played some masterleague players in the first 2 seasons that I doubt would have been even platinum at the end of WoL.
wether this is a change in the system aswell as the population decliningI do not know but it's only logicalto asume that a ton of new people starting the game will make the leagues way easier to achieve then before and steadly as they stop playing it will become harder again.
No the main reason is logically the MMR decay, not population changes. MMR decay affects fast & considerably especially as large portion of the ladder population goes inactive for more than 2 weeks during each season. Population changes would would not have so drastic & fast effects.
Learn more about the MMR decay from:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=429734
Also see my some of my previous posts in this thread:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=20269735
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=20273329
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EPT![[image loading]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BZaXMeoCMAEd2k3.png)
