Guild Wars 2

Sismis.5390:

Wake up for god sake…MMR cannot and will never work with low player base. Guild wars 2 has dropped under 200k users how you expect a program should match people up? Show me one game where Match Making works with low population. People complained about long wait times for matches. They removed some restriction letting people pair up with anything. Now you complain about MMR what a joke if they turn it back on guess what you will wait for a game from 1 to 2 or 6 hours to have a match.

Harshly put, but I agree completely. Also using MMR purely to stack odds just compounds the problem.

It is pretty obvious: the system is broken because they tried to mesh division (pip system) and MMR together. You either trust the MMR to find balanced matches (then of course the division system becomes just a grind like in season 1) or you just use the division system without taking in account the MMR at all (most likely this is more skill based). Anet just should not have stacked odds in a division system by putting together the best players vs the bad players, instead they should have just trusted that people would eventually end in the proper division without taking in account at all the individual MMR (that is anyway a fairly inaccurate measure for a team game).
Pro players will always surge to the top no matter what, whereas in the system as it is now silghtly above average players that had some bad luck may actually be stuck in the MMR hell as outlined from the OP. Of course this is from a solo queue perspective.

Unless you know the standard deviation of the MMR this is impossible to prove either way. With that piece of knowledge and assuming the average MMR is 50% then I could calculate exactly your probabilities assuming a normal distribution.

To be precise:
The true probability is calculated as follow according to the Probability Theorems:
Chances of not having a critical in one attack is 0.86 (86%).
Chances of not having any critical in three attacks in 0.86^3 = 0.636 (63.6%)
Chance of having at least one critical in three attacks = 1-0.636 = 0.364(36.4%)