So the blog post was about as expected, no new or surprising information to anyone with even a cursory understanding of how ranking systems work in shooters. Nevertheless there are two things that I think are worth addressing, those being the influence of socials on ranked mmr and the use of mmr rather than csr to put ranked matches together.
I get why you might want to use performance in socials to set a baseline for ranked placements, but doing so with no protections in place for the different nature of those games is a staggeringly bad idea. Naturally, itâs worth noting the case of the unfortunate player who played bot bootcamp and then got pushed straight into the onyx lobbies for his placements, got destroyed and still placed in d1. This is a great example of why there should be no mmr in the bot playlist, but also serves as a worst case scenario of letting socials have too much impact on the baseline.
People donât necessarily play the same in socials as they do in ranked. They might play socials to sweat against players who dont care and pad their stats, or they might be the player who doesnât care and is just there to do challenges or have something to do with their hands while paying attention to something else. there is zero guarantee that socials will provide an accurate baseline, so you need to be ready to immediately discard whatever impact socials have on ranked mmr the moment you see a difference in performance. Otherwise you make it blindingly easy for a top tier player to place into bronze and stomp their way to the top, or vice versa for enabling middling players to boost their rank.
And on that subject, though you didnât acknowledge it in your post, it is very clear from playing the game and many people conducting tests, and abusing the system, that socials continue to impact your mmr long after you have finished your placements. When I was grinding fiesta killjoys for the weekly, I had to intentionally play like trash so that my enemies would spree (because good players donât let you spree - side effect of too strong sbmm in socials). When I finished doing that and went back into ranked, the first few games were absurdly easy. Not only were the skill of the lobbies substantially lower than my typical games, the matches were skewed to give me better teammates than enemies to help me win. The only reason I can assume this happened is because my fiesta games lowered my global mmr to the point where the game just ignored my diamond csr and put me into lobbies full of plat/golds, and distributed the players to balance out the mmr, ignoring the very lopsided csr averages.
Socials simply should not do this. If I play socials to warm up, and intentionally play like an idiot because I just want to get into as many gunfights as possible before going into ranked, am I now boosting my rank gains by lowering my mmr? If I use bots to warm up, am I doing the inverse, punishing myself and my teammates by putting me in lobbies I canât compete in? Even if the influence is not so strong off of 1-2 games, what if I play for a day with friends who are much better or worse than me? When I then go back into ranked, should that performance in socials (another case where strong sbmm in socials is a problem) be used to weight my ranked games?
Clearly not. Social and ranked mmr should be fully segregated, or at the very least should have no affect on each other once placements are completed for the first time. Subsequent placements can use previous ranked mmr as a baseline, which would be more accurate in any case.
The next issue I have is with the use of mmr to balance ranked games, rather than csr. In short, this system punishes players for good performance by increasing the difficulty of subsequent games separately from their progress through the ranks. It also decreases the accuracy of the ranks themselves.
I have no issue with mmr being used to adjust the rank gains and losses on the basis on performance relative to the estimated difficulty of the match, but it causes real problems when it becomes a tool to attempt to force perfect 50/50 games while ignoring the visible player rank. A player who performs very well in one game will immediately experience a series of difficult games, as the mmr apparently adjusts much faster up than down, but this is true whether or not they won the game where they performed well. So a player who works very hard trying to carry a losing team gets their mmr boosted, but they see no csr gain to acknowledge their hard work and skill.
Instead, they are rewarded with even harder games, which they are less likely to win, and which will cost them greater amounts of csr as the system judges them to be higher skill relative to the lobby than csr might suggest. This will then continue until they have enough games at subpar performance to lower their mmr to where they will be given games that arent weighted against them, and in which winning will now give them greater amounts of csr for beating the odds as determined by the invisible mmr system. All of this reads to players as a punishment for good performance and a reward for mediocrity, all for the sake of appeasing the systemâs need to force 50/50 win/loss.
A better system would be to use csr to balance matchmaking, and have mmr exist solely to nudge csr as close to true skill as possible. Essentially, mmr should serve as a buffer to keep csr gain/loss from moving away from where a player âbelongsâ too rapidly once they have reached the level where their performance is the average. This then exclusively rewards players for improvement and good performance, and punishing them only for poor performance.
No one wants to play a game that actively prevents them from climbing by pushing them into games way outside their rank bracket. If you are better than your rank suggests, you should climb until this is no longer the case. If you are worse than your rank suggests, you should drop until this is no longer the case. End of story.
And as an aside, loosen up the sbmm on socials. The current parameters create a massive sweatfest that promotes complacency by never matching you against better players, while failing to reward players for becoming more skilled by increasing the difficulty of matches as you get better. This is great in a ranked experience where you want to play at your best against similarly skilled players, and you have a visible rank to display your competence and track your improvement. But it sucks when you want a casual experience.
Note that Iâm not asking to stomp noobs in quickplay, I just think that a looser sbmm does a better job at giving everyone a decently rounded and relaxed experience where you will do somewhat better on average as you become better on average. It also disincentives smurfs from ruining low ranked games by giving everyone more of a chance to get the occasional great game where they feel like a god.
TLDR: Separate social and ranked mmr; one should never affect the other once the first placements are done, possibly not even then. And use csr to put together ranked matches, allowing the system to actually do its job as an indicator of skill, while mmr functions as a weight to pull csr closer to actual skill despite fluctuating win/loss.