Here is fine with me.
Lets start with some misconceptions players have.
Tiers are garbage to measure skill or match quality. They exist to distract the average players and provide a feeling of achievement. The standard Tier is given to players after 10 games. MMR is a Balance, like a checking book. 10 games is not enough to make significant gains or losses, its the most dramatic K factor on accounts usually and that's so it can get a feel for what a good range is for folks assuming they are playing with the intent to win.
Quality of games tends to be higher only as you move higher up the ladder, much less uncertainty there because not everybody in a game of skill can win even if they play to win. If skill impacts your ability to win then Skill can measured by your ability to win.
Quality admitidly does down the ladder. It simply requires less effort to lose then to win. Afking a match for example requires almost zero effort on a players side and typically results in a loss in a massive amount of games. running it down mid and feeding takes slightly more effort but greatly ups the odds of a loss for your team beyond afking.
MMR really does not care about gameplay. At all. it does not subjectively rate your plays. its not checking how good your vision control on barron is. MMR Its more about the math used to rate players. Honestly Its not very kind to the average player which Is why riot hides it. Normal players are expected to never climb to the top.
Uncertainty creates bad mismatches. MMR systems are built with uncertainty in mind, its just part of the program. Hence why I state its not very kind to the average player. All new high uncertainty accounts get placed near the starting value.
MM being weak is not the fault of MMR systems, that's gonna be on Riot. When MM chronically is bad that's not the fault of a MMR system failing or being broken but the devs doing something stupid. MM is a very core part of making a healthy MMR system for 5 man rng team games.
Riots MM does have some visible issues, which as far as I can see are allowed exist because they are enjoyable for players and wont break the top ends of the ladder. Duo queing is off tiers, Tiers are slower then MMR gains and losses, A silver player and gold player can que, but have bronze and Plat MMR. When you think about how that represents 80% or so of the games entire player base… that's a pretty Massive range. And that's just 8 Divisions.
Tiers and divisions really do a good job distracting folks, people don't think oh im in position 1,590,114 out 3,000,00. They think hurray! im silver 2. (that's random numbers. Don't treat that as a accurate reflection of riots ladder.) People treat each division as equal mesurements of skill. That's a mistake. The range of skill varys by divisions because population varys by divisions.
MMR is an expected range, when its accurate or low uncertainty what it represents is a players Mean average performance.
MMR was made with humans in mind so it does not do absolutes its constantly is looking to correct itself and adjusts player ratings.
Its rarely talked about but League as a game is constantly shifting, constantly changing, constantly evolving. Skill is measured by winning and its very rare for players to acknowledge when they drop in skill. Its low awareness of the games basic designe, the fact that having your main reworked, nerfed, fall out of meta, or just get countered a lot = a loss in impact thus skill. Its counter intuitive because as a player it does not feel like its your fault the devs changed something but if you don't accept and account for this that's on you. Being adaptable is a important part of playing a moba, you need to always be aware of the gamestate. Many players aren't and yet they still expect to be rewarded for doing the same things over and over and over again. Rather then change or adapt they just get frustrated and upset at the game.
People go on about win rates, about winning lane, about Tiers. And have low awareness of what that means. MMR is a balance. 80% win rate... out of 10 games? More or less your going to see 2 losses remove 2 wins so that accounts MMR balance has go up by 6 games best case. A player with a 52% win rate and 500 games would be higher MMR because they have a net gain of 10 matches.
Streaks don't really matter because people don't get the context. Players feel like its very important because of tiers, promotional matches, seeing LP gains etc. If you care about truly climbing just stop caring about any of that crap. Focus on winning each and every game you play to the best of your ability, try to be objective when your team is outclassed, and on your personal impact. Dont give up just cuz a game looks like a write off. A consistent and steady win rate will overcome those issues. Streaks? its just about the gratification. Take a look outside of your experience and check riots system. You will see that if your MMR gets to far from Tiers Riot knows that's an issue and they play catchup. You can skip divisions for a reason. When your looking at systems that expect 100+ games to get a good gauge on a players rating. 3 back to back wins is nothing. When you start with Lets say you play 100 games and end up a Balance debut of 30-40 losses? your MMR below your balance, and a "hot streak" of even 8 games still leaves your balance in debut. still out 22-32 matches to break even with your starting value.
Again tiers are trash measurements of skill because despite them having easy number divisions like 1-4 the actual ranges of MMR they represent Vary a lot and ontop of that there is low accounting for uncertainty because a tier is instantly assigned out of placements despite account uncertainty being high.
Winning lane is irrelevant to MMR. Its not looking at anything other then if your able to consistently win games. It knows not every match is winnable, again its about the overall "MMR balance"
Most folks don't do well with Variables. Elo's Adjustment formula is Rn=Ro+K(W-We) You can add more to this btw, this is just what Arpad used. The entire system is a lot more then just that formula. Like We can be made with We = ΣPi. It can also be made at "A slight sacrifice in accuracy" as We = N X P(Dc). Dc = (R-Rc)
I don't expect folks to ever understand that with out context. The adjustments is the easy part to see in action, usually its about as far as most folks go to learn about Elo systems. RO is old MMR. RN is new mmr. K is a variable for uncertainty that I keep mentioning, Its around so that each account moves at different rates on the ladder and your system can be further modified to adapt to individual adjustment needs. W is the result of a match and We is system expectations.
Its less confusing when you fill in values. 1232 = 1200 + 32(1-0) Your RN becomes your next games RO. Hence why I tell folks to treat it like a check book balance.
K and We are used to protect accounts from mismatches. Placement games traditionally make an impact on match adjustment and will lower the players on a teams MMR gains and losses thru adjustments to K or We. If you have a "newbie account" in a match then the Stake of Balance you have in said match is usualy lowered. You don't want to fk player rating over when your systems at highest uncertainty. This wont make the game less painfull if that "newbie' is god awful on your team or a Smurf on the other side. So most folks are oblivious to how the system looks to protect their ratings.
Most folks suck at probability math. Birthday paradox is a good way to fleece family and friends. What are the odds for X people in a room sharing a birthday. Well 100% odds are easy. You just need any amount over the # of days in a year to hit 100% But how about 23 people. The probability is 50% odds. 70 people? your odds are 99.9% some one in that room has a birthday shared with some other person in that room.
Most folks are not objective about themselves, they treat their Best games as their average performance. MMR is your Mean performance of on and off games and only matters for accuracy once you have a good sample size. its not magic it cant predict the future and no stats are not a good measurement.
Good MM is keeping that MMR range to "fair" games where the lowest MMR players better games can beat the Highest MMR players off games. Gonna keep mentioning it... Duoing FKS that up for the majority of the games ladder and makes it pretty hard for MM to function for a quality match. By having a player whos off games performance would reliably beat their friend then go and que said friend whos best games you force the MM to try and balance that range out somehow.
You hear the phrase coin flip... Alright lets treat the game like one for a moment. Most folks are Awful exponential growth as well. Look back to the comment about probability. So The odds of losing a coin flip 20 times in a row? 2^20 = 1,048,576 to One For context The odds of you being struck by lighting 300,000 to One. Yet most folks who actually do go on a massive loss streak attribute it to "bad" luck ,teammates, riot, MMR, basically anything but themselves. Oh and also People suck at scale as well. 300,000 seconds would be a little under 4 days. A million seconds is about 12 days. A billion seconds is about 31 years. A trillion seconds is about 31,688 years.
So this year riot messed with their system. That added a lot of uncertainty to the system. Its going to be fked for a while.
Despite the fact it does not achieve perfection, MMR ultimately is a nice system for players in games of skill. Look at alternatives.
Leaderboards are trash at rating skill if it only tracks wins. your rewarded for time invested exclusively and they don't generate good results for building a MM system so MM is garbage most the time.
0 MM = constant match uncertainty. Look at how bad uncertainty games are with just 1 or 2 clearly mismatched teammates. Make that every game now. Complete removal of MM and making the game just constant custom lobby's is a negative experience. Pulling players from the entire games range is even worse then Riots worst case duos.
Individual Stats are bad at being objective.
