Since Hots is my first Moba like Game, im fairly new to MMR aswell (never played RTS ranked. May i ask why there is a double Punishment and double reward system? Wouldnt it be "clearer" to have Just X amounts of Points lost and X amounts of Points won (w/o favoured adjustment and personal rank adjustment for Solo Ranked)
Reason i ask is: Why should player X Lose his points and gets punished in addition to that, same goes for winning. You won and earned your Points, no need to get more Points.
That way we could avoid experiences (on the Forums) like i need 2 Wins to get where i was because of 1 Loss. Hope that makes sense to you @BlizzTravis
Hey, so, first...welcome and thanks for playing! :)
You've got a bit of a bee's nest here, but let's shake it anyway. Warning: this is probably going to get long.
When we were making the system, we wanted rank to be relatively flexible so a player can go on a streak and see change. By it's nature, MMR shouldn't react quickly to streaks since MMR's purpose is to be a measure of skill for use in matchmaking. Anything that artificially messes with MMR can make matchmaking quality suffer and, in general, gaining skill is something that happens over the long term so MMR changes take time (at low uncertainty values, anyway...uncertainty and how that works is a whole different novel). So, if we were to base rank entirely on MMR, players wouldn't see visible rank changes happen much. In concrete terms, if you look at the MMR players start a season at and the one they end a season at, for the vast majority of players, that MMR is within the same rank.
So, we use rank points instead. Rank points aren't directly tied to matchmaking (though there's some implications there as I'll get to in a second). Their primary purpose is to be a reward system so they are free to move and react as quickly as we want. If you go on a win streak, your MMR will move slightly up but your rank is free to move much more quickly. This is also one reason why we do season end rewards based on max rank, not end of season rank: we want you to be able to go on a win streak and push to a higher rank than what your skill actually is and get the rewards for that. That feels good.
Now, the other side of the coin: the perception of fairness. Because there's no way to see a player's MMR in-game (which is yet another, long conversation), rank is the only visible indication of a player's skill and players are reasonably unhappy when they get matched with, or against, players of significantly different ranks even if those players actually have very similar MMRs. So, matchmaking prefers to match you only with people of similar rank. This is where we get to the root of your question: for matchmaking quality to be good, it's the MMR of the players that is the key component so if rank and MMR diverge too greatly, match quality would degrade since we're trying to also match on visible rank. Personal adjustments solve that by adjusting the total amount of rank points you gain to "pull" your rank toward where your MMR thinks you should be so that your visible rank and your MMR can't diverge too greatly.
This has some obvious downsides. It's simplifying things a bit, but when you go on a winning streak, your rank is outpacing how quickly your MMR is going up so you get negative personal adjustments as the system tries to keep your visible rank from getting too far from your MMR. This feels bad and is something I want to correct. One possibility is to get MMR visible in-game and drop the visible rank preference for matchmaking, then get rid of personal adjustments altogether and just let rank diverge from MMR since players would now be able to see that they are being matched with people of similar skill regardless of rank.
Favored adjustment is a different beast and more directly ties into how MMR works. MMR is a purely comparative stat. By itself, it has no meaning. It only matters when you compare it to someone else and the amount that MMR increases or decreases is affected by the MMR of the players on the team you beat. If you're matched against a team that has a higher overall MMR than your teams, the system expects you to lose. If you do, your MMR doesn't decrease as much since that was the expected result. Conversely, if your MMR was higher and you lost, your MMR takes a bigger reduction since you were expected to win that match. The Favored Adjustment is the rank point reflection of the same principal.
I really think the game needs MMR decay. People who come back at the start of each season not knowing what has happened in the last 3 months hurts games.
Interestingly, we've dug into this and the effect is minimal. The longer someone is gone, the more impact it has, but even for folks who are gone months, they get back to a normal win rate within a few games.
Interestingly, when we were looking at the rework, the original version had lowball placements like you mention. After playing with it, we dropped it because it felt bad to be reset to a lower rank at the start of each season. Instead, we went with the current system and just try to be as accurate as possible with your rank. If you increase rank over the course of a season, it's because you're doing well, not because you were placed low.
For the Diamond 3 placement cap, the back end system is still doing matchmaking based on MMR. There is some consideration that limits matchmaking based on visible rank for perception reasons, but when there's a range of MMRs available, like there are at the start of the season, the system prefers to make like-MMR matches. Where it gets wonky is after a few weeks, the Masters/GMs have moved on, and Diamond 3 is truly Diamond 3 MMR players. At that point, a higher MMR player getting placed into that tier is likely to be matched with regular Diamond 3 players since there aren't many higher MMR folks in Diamond 3 to match with. That's something we can improve.
Related to the above, for the cap itself, there's the question of whether we really need it. It's primarily there because it feels weird to place directly into GM, and Master to a lesser degree. Diamond 3 felt far enough away from Master to be significant without being overwhelming. There are some other methods of attaining that goal we've been considering, though. For example...
Introduce rank decay for Master/GM players so a player can't roll over from season to season as a Master/GM and just maintain that status for "free".
Delay the GM rankings until a couple weeks into the season so even if we did allow placements into Master, you wouldn't instantly become a GM as well.
It'd be interesting to hear the community's thoughts there.
BlizzTravis
Hey, so, first...welcome and thanks for playing! :)
You've got a bit of a bee's nest here, but let's shake it anyway. Warning: this is probably going to get long.
When we were making the system, we wanted rank to be relatively flexible so a player can go on a streak and see change. By it's nature, MMR shouldn't react quickly to streaks since MMR's purpose is to be a measure of skill for use in matchmaking. Anything that artificially messes with MMR can make matchmaking quality suffer and, in general, gaining skill is something that happens over the long term so MMR changes take time (at low uncertainty values, anyway...uncertainty and how that works is a whole different novel). So, if we were to base rank entirely on MMR, players wouldn't see visible rank changes happen much. In concrete terms, if you look at the MMR players start a season at and the one they end a season at, for the vast majority of players, that MMR is within the same rank.
So, we use rank points instead. Rank points aren't directly tied to matchmaking (though there's some implications there as I'll get to in a second). Their primary purpose is to be a reward system so they are free to move and react as quickly as we want. If you go on a win streak, your MMR will move slightly up but your rank is free to move much more quickly. This is also one reason why we do season end rewards based on max rank, not end of season rank: we want you to be able to go on a win streak and push to a higher rank than what your skill actually is and get the rewards for that. That feels good.
Now, the other side of the coin: the perception of fairness. Because there's no way to see a player's MMR in-game (which is yet another, long conversation), rank is the only visible indication of a player's skill and players are reasonably unhappy when they get matched with, or against, players of significantly different ranks even if those players actually have very similar MMRs. So, matchmaking prefers to match you only with people of similar rank. This is where we get to the root of your question: for matchmaking quality to be good, it's the MMR of the players that is the key component so if rank and MMR diverge too greatly, match quality would degrade since we're trying to also match on visible rank. Personal adjustments solve that by adjusting the total amount of rank points you gain to "pull" your rank toward where your MMR thinks you should be so that your visible rank and your MMR can't diverge too greatly.
This has some obvious downsides. It's simplifying things a bit, but when you go on a winning streak, your rank is outpacing how quickly your MMR is going up so you get negative personal adjustments as the system tries to keep your visible rank from getting too far from your MMR. This feels bad and is something I want to correct. One possibility is to get MMR visible in-game and drop the visible rank preference for matchmaking, then get rid of personal adjustments altogether and just let rank diverge from MMR since players would now be able to see that they are being matched with people of similar skill regardless of rank.
Favored adjustment is a different beast and more directly ties into how MMR works. MMR is a purely comparative stat. By itself, it has no meaning. It only matters when you compare it to someone else and the amount that MMR increases or decreases is affected by the MMR of the players on the team you beat. If you're matched against a team that has a higher overall MMR than your teams, the system expects you to lose. If you do, your MMR doesn't decrease as much since that was the expected result. Conversely, if your MMR was higher and you lost, your MMR takes a bigger reduction since you were expected to win that match. The Favored Adjustment is the rank point reflection of the same principal.
BlizzTravis
Just browsing while waiting on a build and this is a topic near and dear to my heart. ;)
BlizzTravis
Interestingly, we've dug into this and the effect is minimal. The longer someone is gone, the more impact it has, but even for folks who are gone months, they get back to a normal win rate within a few games.
BlizzTravis
Good stuff, Bakery.
Interestingly, when we were looking at the rework, the original version had lowball placements like you mention. After playing with it, we dropped it because it felt bad to be reset to a lower rank at the start of each season. Instead, we went with the current system and just try to be as accurate as possible with your rank. If you increase rank over the course of a season, it's because you're doing well, not because you were placed low.
For the Diamond 3 placement cap, the back end system is still doing matchmaking based on MMR. There is some consideration that limits matchmaking based on visible rank for perception reasons, but when there's a range of MMRs available, like there are at the start of the season, the system prefers to make like-MMR matches. Where it gets wonky is after a few weeks, the Masters/GMs have moved on, and Diamond 3 is truly Diamond 3 MMR players. At that point, a higher MMR player getting placed into that tier is likely to be matched with regular Diamond 3 players since there aren't many higher MMR folks in Diamond 3 to match with. That's something we can improve.
Related to the above, for the cap itself, there's the question of whether we really need it. It's primarily there because it feels weird to place directly into GM, and Master to a lesser degree. Diamond 3 felt far enough away from Master to be significant without being overwhelming. There are some other methods of attaining that goal we've been considering, though. For example...
It'd be interesting to hear the community's thoughts there.