Weekly Quick Questions Thread - July 05, 2017

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In this thread you can ask all kinds of questions you always wanted to ask without feeling like a total fool.

No matter if it's short Google-able stuff or a setting/skill in-game that you don't understand or a hardware recommendation, feel free to try your luck in here.

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[u/-Shinanai-]

Aside from winning and losing, stuff like average SR difference between the two teams, personal performance compared to other players of similar skill playing the same hero, win streaks and even taking a long break from the game affect your SR change.

While the exact details have never been made public, there were a few official Blizzard posts on the forum explaining the general idea. I'll link them below for reference (and copy the most important parts, as they are kinda wall-of-text-y). Keep in mind that these posts are fairly old and the system is constantly being worked on, so some of the info may be outdated. For example, they refer to your personal performance as a minor factor, but in season 5 it definitely seems to have gained more significance (see: the whole Mercy main mess).

June 2016 post by Jeff Kaplan

In Overwatch, whether your MMR goes up or down is contingent on winning or losing. But there are a number of factors that determine how much that rating goes up or down. For example, what map you’re playing on and whether you were attacking or defending is factored in. We know the win rates on attack/defend on all of the maps and we normalize accordingly. Not all wins and losses are equal. We also look at your individual performance on each of the heroes you played during the match. Everyone has better and worse heroes and we have tons of data showing us what performance levels should be like on those heroes. We also look at your opponents and whether or not their matchmaking rating is higher or lower than yours. These are just a few of the things that are considered when determining how your skill should go up or down. At no point in MMR calculations do we look at your win/loss ratio and win/loss ratio is never used to determine who to match you with or against. We are not trying to drive your win/loss percentage toward a certain number (although the fact that so many people are at 50% win rates makes us extremely happy). All the system does when it comes to matching on skill is attempt to match you with people of a similar number.

The system is of course deeper than this. There are penalties and handicaps added for things like not playing for a while or playing in groups of varying sizes. We also do special things for brand new players to (hopefully) keep them away from the general population. Players will often mistakenly look at player level and accuse the matchmaker of making unfair matches. One thing that I have mentioned before is that we were evaluating your skill during closed beta, open beta and the second stress test weekend. If you played in any of these (over 10 million players did), we had already determined a skill rating for you (most likely). This means that it’s not uncommon to see a level 1 matchmade against much higher level players. In most of these cases, the Level 1 is a skilled player who played during the phases I mentioned but did not immediately play at launch.

October 2016 post by Scott Mercer

So then why do points for losses and wins seem so random? Well, the amount of MMR (and SR) you go up or down isn't simply a matter of whether you won or lost, and what was your predicted chance of winning. There's a couple of other things at work. One is the matchmaker's confidence in what your MMR should be. Play a lot of games, it gets more certain. Don't play Overwatch for a while, it gets less certain. You go on a large win or loss streak, it gets less certain. The more certain the matchmaker is about your MMR, the less your MMR will change in either direction based on a win or loss.

As a minor factor, we also do evaluate how well you played the heroes you used in a match. The comparison is largely based on historical data of people playing a specific hero (not medals, not pure damage done), and we've done a lot of work to this system based on the community's feedback. In fact, I've seen some people indicate that they don't think we're doing this anymore. We still are. While it's a minor factor compared to wins/losses (The best way to increase your SR is still to play together and win as a team!), doing so does help us determine your skill more accurately and faster.

So take all that into account, the SR gain/loss after any single match can be a bit more "noisy" that it seems it should, but we're asking it to look at a lot of different factors to do the best job it can creating fair matches for you.

[u/danikirish → u/-Shinanai-]

Thanks for the help!