I’ve been involved in plenty of discussion with people who are convinced their MMR is directly affected by form in other playlists. That playing in bots or social directly affects their MMR in ranked and vice versa. Some even believe there is only one MMR in the game.
Anecdotally I haven’t noticed any difference.
So here is the start of my data journey. I have been taking note of the average MMR of my team vs the average MMR of my opponents. I play Ranked very sweaty. Putting a lot of effort into improving and ranking up - even though I’m only high Platinum. So you can be assured I am going as hard as I can.
But in social I play very loose. Particularly on Tuesday nights with my mates. We will spend whole games of BTB just trying to get as many assists we can on the back of a warthog (with terrible drivers). We lose a lot. And I often go double figure minus K/D.
So at the very least I have a solid block of rubbish to work with once a week.
First bits of data are in;
a) Seven games of ranked - average opponents 1209
b) A little bit of fun (mainly LSS)
c) One ranked game - opponents 1205
d) A lot of social fun (Tuesday night Fiesta, BTB, KOTH)
e) Eight games of ranked - average opponent 1214
So far not a lot of change. And I’ve ranked up from P3 to P6 as we go. But a very small sample size so far. I’ll try and do this for the rest of the season. At some stage, once my rank has stabilised, I’ll throw in an hour on the bots as pre-Tuesday shenanigans.
Feel free to get your own data - or suggest how I should do this.
Should I just look at the averages of say six games before and six games after each social session?
Some even more unscientific manipulation of an insufficient sample size…
I got google sheets to count the progressive average over the eight games. The trend post Tuesday night shenanigans went; 1194 (1 game), 1198 (over 2 games), 1182 (over 3), 1177 (4), 1171 (5), 1209 (6), 1215 (7), and 1214 (8).
So from that point of view the trend did dip. It bottomed out after 5 games with a combined average of 1171. Which is 38 points below our starting point of 1209. That would support a bigger influence on MMR than I was expecting. 38 points is a about three quarters of a ranking tier.
But if it was a real dip - it was short lived. By 6 games it was well and truly back where we started (I played two teams averaging 1396 and 1256).
And I know that I will need a lot more data. My personal MMR is going to be drowned out a bit by the averaging of MMRs across the team. But we’re just looking for suspicious trends. And at the very least it’s going to be better data than anecdotal stories of having to face up to an Onyx 1500 for one game.
Is all your data from playing solo? I am curious because I mainly play with my friends and have noticed the team MMR listed seems to fluctuate a good amount when playing with a group. Very small sample sizes for me as well and don’t have it in front of me right now, but I remember seeing up to 200 team MMR difference in between a few matches when playing with a full group of 4. Everyone has 500+ matches of history across the game.
I don’t do a lot of ranked with mates. Probably half a dozen a week.
I’ll make sure I have a good run of solo games before using data for this.
And in the short term I’ll keep reviewing the averages over groupings of six games - given that this seemed to maximise the drop off in MMR in the first instance. Good scientist for going out of my way to disprove my hypothesis… bad scientist for ad hoc data interpretation.
I did note down the MMR I played with three friends. All of them were season 2 placing for the first time (so would have highly volatile MMRs).
Our team MMR went 951, 879, 1048 on three consecutive wins.
That’s a fair swing back and forth. And interestingly our average dropped 72 points with a win after the first game! I imagine our Silver/Gold players went backwards on a relatively rubbish effort.
Suggests that personal performance (eg K/min) is probably weighted in early placement.
During the week I pretty much only play ranked. Sweaty as.
On Tuesday nights I spend a few hours larking around with mates in social playlists. The complete opposite of sweaty.
I’ve been keeping track of my opponent team’s average MMR - and calculating a rolling average of the last six games - and looking for trends.
Week 1;
In week one I chilled to the max in Social and there was a definite drop in opponent MMR. I went in with an average of 1216 and on returning to rank the trend was; 1195, 1207, 1197, 1159, 1152, 1209, 1219.
It wasn’t really noticeable while I was playing - and pretty much returned to normal within a handful of games. But the trend was definitely there.
I wondered though, if it was more the fact that I lost five games in a row a bit before off-ranking.
Week 2;
In week two I started with a rolling average of 1183. I didn’t feel that this Tuesday night was quite as chilled as usual (Snoozer wasn’t there to repeatedly drive our Warthog off the cliff) - so I hit up a few extra games of Social by myself. Used the opportunity to try and tick off some assist challenges.
The trend on return went 1195, 1201, 1213, 1213, 1238, and 1262. A steady increase in opponents.
So, only two weeks in and it’s 50:50.
I suspect the main influence is wins and losses.
Scanning through the list for runs of three losses or more;
6 losses; 1224 → 1151
3 losses; 1226 → 1166
3 losses; 1189 → no drop (went up a bit)
3 losses; 1221 → 1209
7 losses; 1223 → 1138 (actually 10 out of 11 games - don’t wanna talk about it).
Finally got around to playing more ranked. Played with a full group of 4 again for all 10 of the 11 games, halo dropped one of them for one game.
Our team MMR changed from:
(My team MMR vs opponents team MMR)
867.22 vs 973.56 - won and dominated in slayer, not fair for the other team
1043.72 vs 1112.31 - won and dominated in koth
1173.44 vs 846.32 - won koth 4-2 though it should have been 4-1
1243.96 vs 1289.88 - won koth fairly easily, not as dominate as first 2 games.
1215.98 vs 1058.31 - lost strongholds as the game dropped a one of my friends (failed to join error on loading screen) and gave us a random (so not same group of 4)
929.80 vs 998.27 - won strongholds fairly comfortably
749.94 vs 964.90 - won oddball, fairly even, got dominated 1 round, dominated another round, final round was tough
1295.78 vs 1040.74 - won a very tough koth
1003.94 vs 922.70 - won a slayer match, pulled away after their 4th left/crashed
869.25 vs 1088.47 - lost oddball, wasn’t that close
911.01 vs 1341.67 - won koth, was actually a tough contested game but we won the hills and won comfortably on the scoreboard.