Something Anet Should Consider...
…Allowing us to manually reset are MMR once in awhile. Perhaps once a month or maybe every other month.
With the new back-end servers we can do this, but I’m unsure if or when we’d be want to do this. I’ve mentioned it to the team on several occasions, but I don’t recall what the designers said, and I know it just isn’t as high a priority as other work right now.
I am finding myself in matches that are too easy to me because before the switch to the new leaderboards I multiclassed a lot in solo queue and accumulated losses on some of my off classes. I have no idea what else would be possible to help players to play at their skill levels if they’re stuck in a weird MMR spectrum.
Then again I have played against some players like Ostrich Eggs and others who have high MMR in the past month.
These kind of matches can be caused by a number of things, but rating is probably the least responsible. Nearly everytime I’ve looked up a bad match, rating was usually the strongest factor trying to prevent the match.
Justin: Do you think MMR sometimes is overvalued metric for skill level considering the game’s design?
No, I don’t think that.
I’m aware there are some critical combinations of things (team comp, # of people queued at your rating, rank, etc..) that can be very detrimental to match quality. Those things will drop quality regardless of rating accuracy or emphasis.
That’s not to say rating is perfect. I’ve got it on my todo list to explain in more detail in a forum post, but here is the gist of two problems that are now fixed.
- Early on after the Dec 2nd build there was a bug that caused deviation to stay at the max. This bug was caused by a mismatch between how I was calculating the amount of time that elapsed since the last time you played. One section of code worked in milliseconds and the other in microseconds. I had poor test coverage of this code which is why it was missed.
- Due to some improvements we made intended to more accurately reflect a player’s impact on a team when updating ratings, the rating changed much slower. Unfortunately deviation was still changing at the normal rate which mean people zero’d in sooner than they should have relative to where their rating was. I’m still not 100% certain how much an effect this had on match quality, but I’m optimistic the fix will improve things.
These two impacted some players (especially those that had desertions early on before #1 was fixed) more than others causing them to have wildly inaccurate ratings that took far too long to adjust to where they should be.
These problems are both fixed now, and we did the partial-reset so that anyone affected will stabilize in their proper location much sooner. We could have done a full reset, but it was a minority of players that were hugely affected.
Everyone will benefit from the fix to #1, but you may not notice the impact of the fix because it will still take time for the population to spread out and stabilize.
Notice that both these problems aren’t with Glicko2, but how I set up the servers to use it. Mae Culpa.
Even with these problems, for players unaffected by the bugs the ratings are still mostly accurate. E.g. the top players are still the top players.
Server Programmer (sPvP)
Isle of Janthir: Flux, Latch, Aegir
Isle of Janthir: Flux, Latch, Aegir
(edited by Justin ODell.9517)
best post 2015
JQ: Rikkity
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…Allowing us to manually reset are MMR once in awhile. Perhaps once a month or maybe every other month.
With the new back-end servers we can do this, but I’m unsure if or when we’d be want to do this. I’ve mentioned it to the team on several occasions, but I don’t recall what the designers said, and I know it just isn’t as high a priority as other work right now.
I am finding myself in matches that are too easy to me because before the switch to the new leaderboards I multiclassed a lot in solo queue and accumulated losses on some of my off classes. I have no idea what else would be possible to help players to play at their skill levels if they’re stuck in a weird MMR spectrum.
Then again I have played against some players like Ostrich Eggs and others who have high MMR in the past month.
These kind of matches can be caused by a number of things, but rating is probably the least responsible. Nearly everytime I’ve looked up a bad match, rating was usually the strongest factor trying to prevent the match.
Justin: Do you think MMR sometimes is overvalued metric for skill level considering the game’s design?
No, I don’t think that.
I’m aware there are some critical combinations of things (team comp, # of people queued at your rating, rank, etc..) that can be very detrimental to match quality. Those things will drop quality regardless of rating accuracy or emphasis.
That’s not to say rating is perfect. I’ve got it on my todo list to explain in more detail in a forum post, but here is the gist of two problems that are now fixed.
- Early on after the Dec 2nd build there was a bug that caused deviation to stay at the max. This bug was caused by a mismatch between how I was calculating the amount of time that elapsed since the last time you played. One section of code worked in milliseconds and the other in microseconds. I had poor test coverage of this code which is why it was missed.
- Due to some improvements we made intended to more accurately reflect a player’s impact on a team when updating ratings, the rating changed much slower. Unfortunately deviation was still changing at the normal rate which mean people zero’d in sooner than they should have relative to where their rating was. I’m still not 100% certain how much an effect this had on match quality, but I’m optimistic the fix will improve things.
These two impacted some players (especially those that had desertions early on before #1 was fixed) more than others causing them to have wildly inaccurate ratings that took far too long to adjust to where they should be.
These problems are both fixed now, and we did the partial-reset so that anyone affected will stabilize in their proper location much sooner. We could have done a full reset, but it was a minority of players that were hugely affected.
Everyone will benefit from the fix to #1, but you may not notice the impact of the fix because it will still take time for the population to spread out and stabilize.
Notice that both these problems aren’t with Glicko2, but how I set up the servers to use it. Mae Culpa.
Even with these problems, for players unaffected by the bugs the ratings are still mostly accurate. E.g. the top players are still the top players.
yeah except those occasions where you get pug team (with not so great players) vs premade of top ESL players (sup ROM) few times in a row _
All is Vain~
[Teef] guild :>
[Teef] guild :>
yeah except those occasions where you get pug team (with not so great players) vs premade of top ESL players (sup ROM) few times in a row
_
That’s a totally different issue, and these changes won’t help. I’ll continue to let the team know about the communities desire for a comprehensive fix (i.e. hard filters and/or bad match abortion). Right now it happens pretty rarely so we aren’t quite ready to sacrifice queue times.
Of course now the more you hit them the more the ratings will change, so that could solve itself soon enough, queue time fail-safes withstanding.
Also, let me know if starts happening less often. You look like one of the unlucky ones, and your rating is settling downward toward where you were in solo and team arena.
Server Programmer (sPvP)
Isle of Janthir: Flux, Latch, Aegir
Isle of Janthir: Flux, Latch, Aegir
(edited by Justin ODell.9517)
Thanks for the answer Justin.
Hopefully at some point in the future you guys can look over allowing players to hard reset their MMR given some interval whether it be x-amount of games or months. I do think it might alleviate some of the bad matching as there’s players having MMR that don’t fully appreciate their skill levels because of reasons like playing different classes, not fully understanding the game mode and strategies for the early part of their pvp experience, etc.
they are pretty rare as a whole but for some people like high MMR solo queue’ers they are not nearly as rare. we are being punished it feels like even if not true.
they are pretty rare as a whole but for some people like high MMR solo queue’ers they are not nearly as rare. we are being punished it feels like even if not true.
This is true, but you aren’t in this category. I don’t mean that in an offensive way, just that if you’re still getting issues over the next week it may be something else.
Server Programmer (sPvP)
Isle of Janthir: Flux, Latch, Aegir
Isle of Janthir: Flux, Latch, Aegir
they are pretty rare as a whole but for some people like high MMR solo queue’ers they are not nearly as rare. we are being punished it feels like even if not true.
This is true, but you aren’t in this category. -snip-
Justin ‘Truth Bomb’ O’Dell for post of the week.
Love your involvement here, I am a big fan.
Forum Lord Chaith
Twitch.tv/chaithh
New Twitter: @chaithhh
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New Twitter: @chaithhh
Could we get some sort of account setting to say whether we preferred fast match or slow, even match?
they are pretty rare as a whole but for some people like high MMR solo queue’ers they are not nearly as rare. we are being punished it feels like even if not true.
This is true, but you aren’t in this category. -snip-
Justin ‘Truth Bomb’ O’Dell for post of the week.
Love your involvement here, I am a big fan.
I imagine he has a lot of fun looking at our MMRs to decide whether or not someone is being genuine or just flaming for no reason :P
I wonder if he predicts the outcome of tournaments for fun using the match prediction system…
Random Engineering // Trixxti // Random Noises (worst thief eu)
Svanir Appreciation Society [SAS]
Svanir Appreciation Society [SAS]
they are pretty rare as a whole but for some people like high MMR solo queue’ers they are not nearly as rare. we are being punished it feels like even if not true.
This is true, but you aren’t in this category. -snip-
Justin ‘Truth Bomb’ O’Dell for post of the week.
Love your involvement here, I am a big fan.
I imagine he has a lot of fun looking at our MMRs to decide whether or not someone is being genuine or just flaming for no reason :P
I wonder if he predicts the outcome of tournaments for fun using the match prediction system…
he should post what the match prediction system thinks the weeklies will turn out like after each ESL weekly (not the NA one though, we all know how NA ends)
LegendaryMythril/Zihark Darshell
Wow, that burn was so high I thought it was from a condi guard.
If you’re on EU and need help to get into dungeons, pm me.
they are pretty rare as a whole but for some people like high MMR solo queue’ers they are not nearly as rare. we are being punished it feels like even if not true.
This is true, but you aren’t in this category. I don’t mean that in an offensive way, just that if you’re still getting issues over the next week it may be something else.
well my MMR prob went down when I was playing thief for a bit, but when LB was based on MMR I made it to top 50 solo (after hundreds of games, not some lucky 10-0 or something)
So I really only have that assumption to go on since there is nowhere I can see any of this info.
You are sort of asking for speculation lol, but glad to hear you’ll be putting some data publicly available soon.