I’d like to know why MMR remains hidden. The community gets shown these shiny badges, attached to a numeric, visible, Competitive Skill Rank. This CSR goes up and down with W/L and is shown after every match. Now we have them listed on Leaderboards. It’s all we see, they get reset every season, and we’re told to get our placements and work our way up in rank. It’s only logical that players believe these ranks to be the basis for matchmaking. But when they try to apply their CSR to their matches it most often appears unbalanced and creates a crap ton of needless confusion, frustration and anger. There are multiple threads on here about it every day. Then they get told, “Oh that’s not your real Rank”. Well what is my real rank? “Oh we can’t tell you.” Utterly ridiculous.
The only reason I could see why you wouldn’t want MMR to be visible would be to prevent exploits. But what I don’t understand is why there are two ranks, one visible to all and is tied to your win/loss rate, and a second true skill rank that is used to match you against teams of equal strength.
Those two systems counter each other, if MMR takes precedence over CSR in choosing your matches then you should have a win/loss rate of 50% under ideal circumstances so you wouldn’t progress in rank at all.
And if CSR takes precedence then there’d be no reason to have MMR, you’d just match against people of your exact rank regardless of their skill.
I’m sure 343 has thought of that and try to have a balance between the two but it’s just weird that they’d try to do both at the same time. I’d like to think that each of the two could carry the matchmaking system separately. CSR corrects itself over time, naturally skilled players get a higher csr as they win more often, and MMR if it works properly could accurately determine a player’s skill on the spot.
According to one of the current 343 employees, the CSR system was changed to better reflect your MMR, which is why it is now harder to rank up.
Feel free to use the MM feedback thread.