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The horrifically-flawed system known as MMR is getting fixed...

Despìca Bìll··6 votes·921 views

...Just not in League.

"In our current system, an individual player’s Matchmaking Rating (MMR) is primarily determined by the amount of games that player wins versus how many the player loses. When you win a game, your MMR goes up, while the opposite is true for when you lose. In addition to that basic rule, your MMR will go up more, or less, based on the comparative skill of both yours and the opposite team. If the enemy team has a higher MMR than your team, you’ll gain more points for defeating them and lose less if they win. The opposite applies to enemy teams that have a lower MMR. However, the team-focused nature of Heroes presents challenges when using this system to determine an individual player’s matchmaking rating, since any single player is only 1 part of the 5-man team that won or lost the match. The system works since, all things being equal, a player will win more games than they lose over the long run if their skill is higher than other players at the same rank. However, unless the difference is significant, it can take a significant number of games before the difference in wins vs losses adjusts the player’s MMR enough to match their true skill level." -Blizzard, Heroes of the Storm Update Notes.

http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/21179036/introducing-performance-based-matchmaking-11-17-2017

Hey Riot, here's a great idea. If a system like this gets implemented in League, along with something to fill the punk-busting void left by the Tribunal, I would come back to the game in a heartbeat, and I betcha I'm not alone. Leaving MMR as it currently stands just penalizes everyone on the losing team for every troll, feeder, and "it's just norms/it's just a game/this is my smurf account so I don't care that it's ranked" that pop up in an astounding number of matches. This, in turn, causes you to be matched with even lower skill individuals, who are even more likely to exhibit these behaviors. The grind required to eventually scrape your way past these types is currently way more trouble than it's worth. The current system uses probability rubrics that say, eventually, you will advance if you can win at least 51% of your games. In reality, this takes a staggering amount of time for solo queue players, and some will take years to get to their correct level. I'm not particularly great, but I also don't think I should still be stuck in bronze after almost two years of play, and I've run into a lot of players in the same situation. If it's really Riot's intention for solo queue players to spend years advancing to the next level, then I will close my mouth and leave this game to people who feel like investing that kind of time in it.

Edit: Since I apparently wasn't clear enough, I'll spell it out more simply: Using KDA as the sole measure for a performance-based MMR would, indeed, be completely and utterly retarded. I'm not quite sure why that seems to be the assumption of how this system would work, unless the stupidity I see inside the game crosses over to the outside, too. There are hundreds of thousands of data points for each match that are recorded, correlated, and used by the developers when making changes. Quite a lot of those data points could be used to make a performance-based MMR system that takes complex player behavior (like dives, split-pushes, and sacrificial steals) into account, rather than simply saying, "If you win, you deserve to be rewarded, regardless how you did as an individual. If you lose, you deserve to be punished, regardless how you did as an individual". The current system is just as broken as anything that could possibly go wrong with trying to improve it. I resent having to play hundreds of games for a minor adjustment in rank simply because it takes that many rolls of the dice to get past players who should still be playing bot matches. Everyone started somewhere, and that's fine, but I take the game seriously and I want to get matched with other people who take the game seriously. Then, if the match is lost, I can feel satisfied that it's because I deserved to lose, not because one or more teammates were stoned/texting/watching Netflix.

27 Comments

ValyrianBlade5 votes

I'm going to throw this out there to try to make you understand riot's view on this: I've had games where I've received an S rank in a win, and played like garbage. Literally got hard carried by good allies and got an S (sometimes the only person in the team with an S) because it was easy to do my job when my team was kicking ass, and they were making the risky engages and big plays, while all i had to do was add a little damage.

I've had games I've won, hard carried a garbage mid and bot Lane who each fed early starting a combined 0/10/0 but i started 6/0/0 and hard carried a 50+ min game. The feeding lanes both came out of the game with S+ ranks because the game went sufficiently long that they had loads of cs and damage dealt. I got an A- because i was playing J4 Top and died in almost every teamfight from 30-50min off of AMAZING engages where i got 3+ people in every ult and we won every single one of those fights off of my self-sacrificing play. Yet the feeding carries get the S and the guy who 1v9'd the game gets an A-.

Now, does it seem fair how performance adjusted mmr would rate those games? It doesn't to me. The players who play well would get less than the ones who don't. Knowing how to get carried is an important skill and is still rewarded in our current system, but their system would go way too far.

I've also got plenty of losses where I've started fine (e.g. 2/0/1) while other people feed like mad early, and i finish the game 4/8/4 with the worst score on the team. Why? Because i don't give up and i make risky plays hoping I'm catching the enemy out in order to get us back in the game. I'll often have the worst score in those losses, but i guarantee you i also win a much higher percentage of those games than the guy who sits on his 2/0/1 and surrenders at 15 in that game.

Adjusting your LP gains/losses based on in game stats will encourage players to pad those stats instead of playing to win. It will further encourage players to play selfishly and only play carry roles. It will make the issue worse, rather than better.

Literally the only performance based metrics that could help are:

  • manual video review of games played (highly impractical)
  • player voting review of skill level after games (except players aren't honest, and also especially at low ranks may be poor evaluators of skill)
  • a metric that is perfectly correlated with trying to win.

For the last point, currently killing the nexus is the only item that matters. I've offered an idea in the past that games could be labeled "close games" if you get an inhibitor as the loser, and LP gains/losses could be smaller. However people rightly pointed out that it's not always optimal to take/defend an inhibitor even though it's required to win the game (defending an inhibitor when you can instead kill their nexus is the most obvious example. Taking Baron instead of an inhibitor may be another). Again though, this is a team-wide metric. There's no individual evaluation that can possibly be 100% correlated with trying to win the game.

Despìca Bìll1 votes

I appreciate you not getting all emotional about this, but none of your information is new, and you're missing quite a lot of the point. Yes, personal performance MMR based off KDA would be utter horse shit. But there are hundreds of parameters that you could base it around besides KDA. Damage to objectives, damage taken and mitigated, healing given, ward score, responsive pings, presence during team fights, objectives taken in split push....all of the things you see in the end game stats screen, and probably a lot of things I haven't even thought of. Riot has mountains of data they could work with. We don't need 100% accuracy...we need something that is better than the system that we have now which says that if you get matched with monkeys, you deserve to be punished. That's not even close to 100% accurate. Do you really feel like those games you mentioned were scored fairly in either case? If the current system doesn't work, something else needs to be tried, even if it has a chance of being worse.

ValyrianBlade1 votes

{quoted}

I appreciate you not getting all emotional about this, but none of your information is new, and you're missing quite a lot of the point. Yes, personal performance MMR based off KDA would be utter horse shit. But there are hundreds of parameters that you could base it around besides KDA. Damage to objectives, damage taken and mitigated, healing given, ward score, responsive pings, presence during team fights, objectives taken in split push....all of the things you see in the end game stats screen, and probably a lot of things I haven't even thought of. Riot has mountains of data they could work with. We don't need 100% accuracy...we need something that is better than the system that we have now which says that if you get matched with monkeys, you deserve to be punished. That's not even close to 100% accurate. Do you really feel like those games you mentioned were scored fairly in either case? If the current system doesn't work, something else needs to be tried, even if it has a chance of being worse.

I referred to post -match grading rather than kda for exactly that reason - an evaluator of many things still does a poor job compared to visually evaluating the performance of the game.

It still comes down to the fact that people will play to optimize whatever performance metrics there are, rather than play to win. People may afk at fountain at 0/1/0 in a counter match up because they already know they're going to get killed a lot and get punished really badly for the loss if they keep playing.

Then there's the whole idea that what it takes to win in bronze isn't the same as what it takes to win in silver, let alone diamond or challenger. At one elo your individual cs may matter a lot, at another you may need a lot of kills on your Lane opponent, in another you may need to roam for a lot of map pressure, and in another it's your cs differential (i.e. compared to your Lane opponent) and your personal cs doesn't matter much. It varies by matchup too. So you get a system rewarding you for good last hitting, and suddenly caitlyn stops giving up cs to bully vayne out of lane constantly early game, because she wants high cs for the better performance. Meanwhile, to win caitlyn needs to bully vayne and keep her from becoming relevant for as long as possible.

Is the system broken? Maybe - it assumes we all will play hundreds or thousands of games so our long run numbers work out to get a fair ranking. We don't do that. Otherwise though, it's pretty decent. You arent going to win every game - but if you're good enough to climb you should in the long run. More importantly, it let's us play to win, rather than to maximize some metric.

Sasogwa4 votes

performance-based MMR is shit and biased It rewards a gameplay based on having good stats, and not actually trying to win Oh, you had a good kda despite playing like a bitch and never doing anything in teamfights to not waste your precious 0 deaths? Let us make you challenger, you deserve it. This discussion has been there a billion times. I'm really sorry if it sounds offensive, but if you're stuck in bronze, there's much more than just afk/trolls. Ignore your team's performance, never use chat to express your rage, don't even focus on your team mistakes at all. Focus all on your performance, watch your replays, see your mistakes, try to improve those. Watch high elo streams to compare your gameplay to theirs. Watch what's different, ask them about why they do that, so you'll understand why they do this or that. You'll improve, and will automatically climb even if swarmed with trolls and afkers.

Despìca Bìll1 votes

It's only "shit and biased" if you base it off of obvious metrics like KDA. How about creep score? How about ward score? How about effective use of CC? How about damage to objectives? How about every goddamn thing they show stats for at the end of the game? I don't deserve to be in challenger yet. Maybe I don't even deserve to be in gold yet. But a person would have to be genuinely mentally challenged to not learn anything after playing frequently for two years. If the discussion has been raised a "billion" times, maybe it's actually a problem. Your opinion is in the minority of players who have climbed to a level they feel good about. Diamond? Yeah, I'd be happy, too. Would you still be happy if it had taken you ten or more years to get there?

I won't take offense, as long as you don't.

I have been doing all of the things you've suggested for upwards of a year. They're really obvious, and it's the same advice that is offered by every person who isn't stuck in some level of bronze or silver. That either means that every other player who doesn't like this system is so stupid that they can't do the things you've suggested, or there's something else at work here. You're right, it's not just AFKs and trolls. The most common problems I'm seeing are players who repeatedly don't ping MIAs, who don't ward and then push the lane, who all-in an obviously fed opponent over and over and die, who chase single kills all over the map while objectives are going down, who take champs they don't understand into ranked games...I could go on forever.

The point is, you're clearly a better player than I am...but we're not so fundamentally different that your obvious advice is going to make the difference between being stuck in bronze for two years, and climbing to diamond. There is a level of suck past which, not even challengers can carry. And that is my issue. That the only way to advance is to play so many hundreds of games that you can carry a team full of suck to the next bracket, where you will meet enemies who once again are too strong to carry against, and then play hundreds more games, rinse, repeat. If bronze was where I belong, I wouldn't still be getting matched with people who don't even understand the material that we learned in the tutorial. I would see players who mostly do just as good/bad as me, with occasional people who are having really good/really bad games.

ChargeItDownMid3 votes

[deleted]

Despìca Bìll1 votes

I think you're looking at this from a high level perspective. The level I'm playing at, you're lucky if your jungler ever shows up in your lane, let alone any other lanes coming to help. I fail to see how things like CC score, ward score, damage to objectives, etc, are more an indication of your team's performance than your own. If your jungler/roaming mid/whatev spends a lot of time hanging around your lane, and we assume you're good enough to make use of it, a great deal of those stats (CC, wards, objective damage, etc) are going to show up on your ganker's board, not yours.

That's not a good example of the system I'm talking about. The mastery system weighted CS so heavily, that's all you had to do to get an S. That barely measures anything besides whether you're playing a good wave-clear champ or not.

The idea that, because something hasn't been tried by industry leaders yet, it must be a bad idea, is a pretty narrow view to take. League just cocked up the runes and mastery system royally, and I doubt it would take much to point out similarly poor decisions made in DotA. Innovation does not occur by doing what everyone else is already doing. I'm impressed by the fact that they're making an effort to fix a cumbersome and discouraging system, whether it actually works or not.

ChargeItDownMid2 votes

[deleted]

Despìca Bìll1 votes

That's not even close to the best implementation. The mastery system failed because they were basing it on CS, because high level games get won mainly off CS. Rather than letting a computer decide which stats are most critical, and then weight one of them to the moon, a development team should look at the data, and weight quite a few of them appropriately.

Valderis Vandala1 votes

You won't learn how to play LoL just by playing long enough, if you want to get better you'll actually have to work at it. There are so many people that have been playing LoL for years and years and yet are still in bronze blaming everything but themselves for why they don't get anywhere. The system isn't holding these people back, they are just not skilled enough to climb.

I'm sorry if this is also the case for you, maybe LoL just isn't your game.

Pyromaniacks3 votes

The current mmr system is good. Amazingly good considered the fact that the league competitive culture is based around the convenience of solo queue rather than pre formed teams like wow was for arena. How do you measure the fact that your tryndamere just got dogpiled on top by 4 people and killed enabling your team to push down a tower and inhib bot lane? As far as a performance based system would go, tryndamere fed and that's it. He didn't do tower damage. He didn't get a kill or assist.

Despìca Bìll1 votes

Once again, I'm seeing that you are a higher-level player, and I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that platinum players aren't refusing to ping MIAs, pushing out without wards, and taking champs they've barely touched into ranked. My complaints with MMR are not going to look much like yours.

Damage taken and mitigated could cover just the kind of scenario you're talking about, and it's a stat they already measure. They could also keep track of the number of times damage was done to objectives while the enemy laners were in combat with someone else. My point isn't that a system like this is easy to perfect, but that it is possible to start, and desirable. Blizzard heard their player-base talking about how grindy MMR felt, and decided to try and change it. That impresses me, and makes me more likely to play their game.

Titanium703 votes

Performance based rating will NEVER EVER be fair!

Some roles and especially playstyles will always get the short stick... that's beyond stupid.

Funny enough Blizzard gave the arguments AGAINST their system in their own post:

The system works since, all things being equal, a player will win more games than they lose over the long run if their skill is higher than other players at the same rank. However, unless the difference is significant, it can take a significant number of games before the difference in wins vs losses adjusts the player’s MMR enough to match their true skill level.

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY!

So if you can choose between an always fair system that takes some time and a system that finds 'your elo' fast but has alot of issues in th long run... their are no actual choices...

And btw... your so called Poll already tells alot...

Despìca Bìll1 votes

And shackling your matchmaking metrics to the performance of four other people who are just as likely to be high is fair? You think that there aren't roles and playstyles that get shafted in the current system? Ever bothered to wonder why they have to force people to play support? (I'll give you a little hint: it's because the role is no fun at all if your teammates suck). Ever wondered why so many champs that are really easily countered get banned/picked all the time in bronze? (Master Yi, Tryndamere, Twitch, Yasuo...). Here's another hint: it's because you can blow absolute chunks with those champs, and still carry the game if it goes on for long enough. Sound like it favors a playstyle?

Your over-abundance of emotion notwithstanding, Blizzard was not arguing against their own system. They were simply saying that MMR in its current form works in theory (the "all things being equal" part that you seem to have missed), but seems to be falling short in practice. Players are having to play hundreds of games to get a very small adjustment.

The only people that seem to think the current system is always fair are the ones who are sitting where they belong and don't mind that it took them an unnecessarily long time to get there. I have this problem with wasting time, so I'd like to see the system get changed so that I start seeing people who are roughly as good and as bad as I am appear in my games, rather than the wild mismatches I'm seeing now.

Ooh, look, I can insert random pieces of formatting in my post, too!

I figured that would offend a few snowflakes. Your response tells me a lot, too.

Titanium702 votes

And shackling your matchmaking metrics to the performance of four other people who are just as likely to be high is fair?

Well, there the problem - it isnt! (Btw: This ^ is the Boards-Version of a "quote" and people use it to mark text massage writen by not them selfes - not random formating!)

While true for ONE game the influence of randoms is reduced by high numbers.

A dice role would be an appropirate example:

Throwing two teams of 5 dices where 1 is biased towards higher numbers - equaling 9 players at their "true elo" (here 3.5) and one player below his "true elo" (let's say 5) who contributes more to the team because of that.

It doesnt matter how safe this one dice lands at 6. If you throw them ONCE there's a good chance the 5 unbiased dices win. And if you throw them 5 times the 1 biased dice scoring better than his entire team can still loose all!

BUT! If you throw them a thousand times... the Team with the one biased dice will ALWAYS get ahead! (Yeah.. not always but let's forget this incredibly low percentage - pretty please... ^^) Here equaling your winrate when matched with 4 random against 5 randoms IF you actually are better than the Elo you're playing in.

And once again it doesnt matter, this time how bad individual randoms perform in a single dice roll, (HEY you can get events with all 4 unbiased dices in TeamA land at 1 while the diased one lands at 6 - it still doesnt matter) - over many games the impact of one bad random, one bad game becomes completely meaningless for your actual rating - as long as you contribute more to a team than the avarage player of what ever Rating you're playing you'll ALWAYS end up climbing. AND it doesnt even take a thousand game in League!

But what am I trying here... come on...

Ooh, look, I can insert random pieces of formatting in my post, too!

That's kindergarten level...

Despìca Bìll1 votes

Performance based rating will NEVER EVER be fair!

Some roles and especially playstyles will always get the short stick... that's beyond stupid.

"It'll NEVER EVER be fair, because it's stupid"...sounds pretty kindergarten to me. If you don't want juvenile responses, don't insult my idea with your juvenile comments. I'm more than happy to stoop to your level if that's what you're capable of understanding.

Titanium701 votes

First of all - it's not your idea - it's Blizzards. You just ask for Riot to do the same - so there is no need to feel attacked in the first place.

Second, reading it properly will make you realize I dont call the system stupid - The stupidity starts with the idea of it being possible to rate individual perfomarnce with so many variables existing in a game like LoL and THAN call it 'FAIR'!

Despìca Bìll1 votes

If you'd like to see how Riot answers this, leave a comment/upvote. That's how they notice posts.

Valderis Vandala1 votes

Don't get your hopes up. We don't know if their system will even work, or how biased it will turn out to be.

And even if it does end up working it might turn out to be quite a disappointment, its still going to work largely the same, you'll still be getting points for winning and lose them for losing, just with a little bit of an adjustment according to whatever their algorithm thinks of you.

Don't expect to suddenly start climbing to your "true mmr". Their system might even fuck over a lot of people if it turns out to be a crock of shit.

But it is interesting to see if Blizzard can do something with this, lets just wait and see what happens.

Despìca Bìll1 votes

There's always going to be fucked-uppedness in new systems, and tweaking afterward to get it right. League has plenty of that cough runes reforged cough The point is, they're doing something about how MMR penalizes single players for the performance of four others...20% is in your control, 80% is in the dubiously-skilled hands of your random teammates.

Valderis Vandala1 votes

Again, don't get your hopes up. From what I've read all they'll do is increase or decrease the amount of points you gain or lose in addition to the usual calculations. It may turn out to be nothing you even notice.

Or they could completely fuck over their whole matchmaking system if it turns out that their machine learning algorithm becomes biased towards the wrong things. Just look at Riot's own mastery ranking system that turned out to be way to heavily influenced by cs score instead of how well a player actually plays. Would you want something like that to influence your mmr? Their system may even turn out to be game-able, which open up a whole other can of worms.

Despìca Bìll1 votes

Again, yes, it's possible for all kinds of things to go wrong with it. I'm quite aware of that. I'm not looking for perfection. I'm looking for an attempt at improvement. Riot hasn't mentioned matchmaking in ages, and they seem to have no interest in looking at it, despite most of their player base complaining about it. The mastery system is not a good example of the changes I'm talking about. It was weighted so heavily toward CS, that anything else it may have measured became almost irrelevant, and the number of games required to max it out was laughable. Not to mention, it had no effect on anything besides another emote to spam.

The entire point of the post is that Blizzard is TRYING to do something about it, while Riot appears to be doing nothing at all.

Valderis Vandala1 votes

You know what they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Why do you even bring up all the stuff that is linked to the mastery system but is completely irrelevant to the argument we are having?

The mastery system is actually the perfect example of what can go wrong with what Blizzard is trying to do. The whole point of it being so weighted on cs is the perfect example of what happens when they get their numbers wrong. (and thats assuming there even are right numbers) If Blizzard makes the same mistake their matchmaking could become game-able just as Riot's mastery system.

There is a reason why Riot is loath to try something like performance based mmr, its because its a fundamentally flawed concept. Perhaps Blizzards machine learning attempt can find a way in which it does work, but I doubt it, its more likely going to turn into another lesson of exactly what not to do.

Sometimes doing nothing at all is what works best.

Despìca Bìll1 votes

It looks broken to me. I don't feel like playing hundreds of games to get a minor adjustment in rank is a good use of my time.

Could be because you brought it up as an example of how systems like the one I suggested don't work, when it's the equivalent of comparing a two-legged tent to an apartment building. If you cite something as evidence, you can't just cherry-pick the worst possible example and then bury the genre.

Yes, I do, indeed, get it. THINGS CAN GO WRONG WITH PERFORMANCE BASED MATCHMAKING. It's not a perfect system. God did not invent it. No one has perfected it yet. Got it. You've said that three times now. And, three times, I've said I don't care half as much whether it works right out the door, as seeing that they are trying to change a system that I already think is gameable.

Cool. Figuring out what not to do is a step in the right direction. Standing still and saying that, because this system exists and you're not unhappy with it, it must be perfect, is not going to change anything for the gosh-dang lot of people who aren't so happy with it.

Doing nothing at all is a great plan if everything is more-or-less working as intended. But it's not. Riot is trying to make their product appeal to as many people as possible, but the boards and Reddit and anywhere else where League is mentioned are filled with people who are put off by the matchmaking system.

Valderis Vandala1 votes

sigh I'm wasting my time here. Have a nice day, I hope Blizzard won't be too big of a disappointment for you.

Despìca Bìll1 votes

Yeah, I agree.

I understand what you're saying, I just disagree with it. Most of everything is disappointing to me, and I doubt Blizzard will be an exception. But I appreciate that they're at least trying.

G'day.

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