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Promotional MMR Broken: Silvers vs. Plats???

Zullar·10/26/2015, 5:28:11 AM·1 votes·425 views

TLDR; When in a promotional it should use a MMR of the promo (i.e. Silver 2), not your hidden rating (i.e. Gold 2). I think **everybody **can agree that in a Silver2 promotional that your opponents shouldn't be this: Gold1 Gold1 Gold4 Plat5 Gold3

With a hidden MMR of around Gold2 and just after being placed into ranked it will place you in ~Silver2 (5x tiers lower than your hidden ELO/MMR). When you win you gain about 30pts, and when you lose you only drops about 10pts. This is fine and you quickly converge upon your true hidden MMR at a 50% win rate. However in comes the problem: promotionals. When trying to get from Silver2-->Silver1 it still uses your Gold2 hidden MMR. THIS MEANS TO GET OUT OF SILVER2 YOU END UP PLAYING AGAINST GOLD2's AND SOMETIMES PLATS! It also means that a Silver2 promotional is just as hard as Gold2 promotional... which makes no sense. One solution, is that if you are in a Silver2 promotion then it should que against other Silver2/1's regardless of your hidden MMR.

Yes we just lost a Silver2 promo against a Plat which drove me to the forums in a rage :P
But that doesn't mean what I'm saying doesn't make sense!

5 Comments

buff me10/26/2015, 5:38:29 AM2 votes

I can understand why you're mad and I can sympathize.

However(!) I can honestly say, just because a player is Platinum or Gold, it doesn't make them better than a SIlver or Bronze. OF COURSE rank is a good indicator but it's not absolute. For instance while climbling on my smurf from Gold to Plat, I've played with very skilled Gold/Plat players who were far more deserving of Diamond than the actual Diamond players I've played with on my main. Rank is flawed in many aspects but the "gatekeepers" who won against you during your promos were more likely than not, on-par with your skill level. Maybe they were just really bad Gold/Platnium players. Then again this is just my assumption and you could have been robbed of your promos but who knows?

Side note: If your win rate is around 65%+ the system tends to match you up with people 4-5 ranks above you. This prevents smurfs from abusing the system. For instance while climbing on my smurf, I was matched up against high Platinums even though I was Gold at the time.

Zullar10/26/2015, 2:57:02 PM1 votes

Silver vs. Plat broken matchmaking. Please fix!

BadmoonBC10/26/2015, 3:01:31 PM1 votes

I only started playing a little over a year ago. But everyone that I've talked to that's played before this season has told me it was much easier to rank up in years past. And that there used to be a better way that the system matched you up. My question is why did they ever change it?

Zullar10/26/2015, 3:25:02 PM1 votes

Yeah the old system was fine. You just had a visible match-making-rating (MMR). If you win it went up and if you lost it went down. The old system was simpler and more transparent, but very boring to most players. They still use the old system for match making, but it acts behind the scenes.

In my opinion the old system was better (you more quickly converged upon your true rating and weren't artificially forced to get a few wins in a row during promotionals). I believe they changed it for 2 reasons:

1: Make it more interesting. Having a MMR raise/lower by 15pts isn't very exciting. It's much more exciting to have brackets, promotionals, and discrete brackets. Old system: Your MMR is 1436 and you are ranked 1,372,193 out of 2,313,256 players. New system: You are gold 2 and if you win 2/3 games you get promoted to gold1. It's fun to have discrete brackets with rewards.

2: The other major reason they changed to the new system is so your surface rating and hidden rating can be different. This allows your hidden MMR to always keep you que'd against players of equal skill (a healthy thing for the game), while still sticking you in a rank 5 tiers lower than your hidden MMR after your promotional. This gives the illusion of "progression" as you increase 5 tiers of rankings (from Silver 2 to Gold 2 in my case) even though your hidden MMR never changes because win rate is 50%. With the old system at the beginning of the season they either had to place you at your exact MMR (in which case there is no MMR progression which isn't healthy for the game), or alternatively they can place you a few 100 ELO/MMR less than where are expected so you can feel progress (a healthy thing) then you get matched against noobs and stomp them which also isn't healthy for the game. The only solution is to have a visible rating and hidden rating that are different. This lets you feel progress, while also getting matched against people of equal skill.

In any case back to my main point, in a Silver2 promo I shouldn't get penalized for having a high hidden MMR and have to play against plats...