Update 7/6 Reddit had a Live Q&A with the devs. Here are the big takeaways:
- Contender league is a parallel league that is always open, not just for the promotion window times. Players can be in Master league and Contender league at the same time, so it's more of a preview window of who will get into GM. - MMR will not be reset (makes sense, no reason for it, only the presentation is changing) - MMR will be visible on any player's profile in the Division View (e.g., here, in the bottom margin). You will not be able to see other players' MMRs outside of a game without going into their individual profile pages. - The decision to show MMR outweighed the concern of ladder anxiety, so it cannot be hidden by a toggle in the Options menu, for example. However, it is not overly prominent in order to avoid toxic behavior (that's why you have to do some digging before you can find other players' MMRs). - League sizes/population distribution will continue to happen on a seasonal basis, as it always has. - MMRs will still not be comparable across regions (4k on one server may not carry the same meaning as 4k on another). - The activity requirement for GM league changed from 180 bonus pool to 10 games per 3 weeks to allow pro players to travel without jeopardizing their ranking (plus the really good players could have difficulty spending bonus pool fast enough). - The ladder revamp affects all expansion levels (WoL, HotS, LotV). - Divisions were not removed so that the change to a more MMR-focused ladder would be less jarring. Therefore, players who enjoy the division system can still find fun in it. - Demotions outside of GM will continue to be locked during a season. - The rating bar that serves as a promotion indicator will warn you that you may be demoted next season if it goes into the negative. Additionally, hovering over the bar shows the exact MMR requirements to reach the next tier.
The StarCraft II ranked ladder is one of the most challenging and competitive arenas in the video game world. Many enter, and only a few rise to the top. In order to be the best, you have to be able to track your progress and know how you stack up against the competition. There are two primary goals behind the revamping of the StarCraft II ladder system: increased accuracy and increased transparency. We believe the following changes, coming in Patch 3.4, are steps towards these goals.
Key points:
New ladder tab and progression system
New league tiers and icons
Revised league distribution
Grandmaster demotions everyday at 5pm local time
Bonus pool deactivated in GM
David Kim and the Starcraft 2 development team have given us our first look at the new, revamped ranked ladder.
I had a pretty looking thread in the works but I'll guess we use this one because it's first :/
Anyway. This looks really cool. I'm glad we finally have some info on what was involved in the revamp. I was expecting a bit more grand scale change but just having MMR is nice.
On June 23 2016 03:29 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: I had a pretty looking thread in the works but I'll guess we use this one because it's first :/
Anyway. This looks really cool. I'm glad we finally have some info on what was involved in the revamp. I was expecting a bit more grand scale change but just having MMR is nice.
On June 23 2016 03:29 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: I had a pretty looking thread in the works but I'll guess we use this one because it's first :/
Anyway. This looks really cool. I'm glad we finally have some info on what was involved in the revamp. I was expecting a bit more grand scale change but just having MMR is nice.
Poor SGTK You should snipe the first post with a basic one, then gradually add your snazzy format and images!
Regarding the update... I think it sounds nice. I have always thought MMR should be displayed, since, let's be real, that's what everyone cares about. I hope it ends up being an improvement to our current system, at the very least.
So with GM having more of a role in WCS (at least, that's the intention with the daily promotions and demotions) does this mean demotivation for barcode user ids?
Best news since sc2 was launched literally a dream come true thanks it took an eternity but its here boys!... i wish this happened when HotS launched , it could literally saved thousends of people leaving..
On June 23 2016 04:03 GGzerG wrote: Sweet changes, although it took them way too damn long.
Only 6 years since the game was first launched lol. I thought we were going to get more changes to the ladder but this is great to see nonetheless. Finally I'll know when I'm near a promotion, what my skill is according to MMR and ladder, demotions and promotions to GM.
Great changes. I remember always using things like sc2gears with the MMR plugin just to get this info. Glad we can get it right in the game now. I like the progress to next league as well.
Awesome! Is this for the next season? That means the next month?^^
What about the interface of the profile? I heard somewhere that they could show the "Best rank of the season" instead of the current rank"? I feel that could be very encouraging too for many people who fear the ladder to have the 3 ranks shown : Current, Best of the season, Best of the carreer.
I'm really exciting about that changes^^ I can't wait.
This gm change is nice. It doesn't affect me because I'm not gm, but I've seen a few boosted gm players so far. It'll probably stop this practice now. Someone will still be crazy to pay but they'll be demoted quickly.
Really happy about this change. I've been masters for a long while now and I'm never motivated to fully play my bonus pool as getting the next promotion is quite a bit harder. This revamp will motivate me to reach the highest tier and GM won't be as much about just being active on the 8th day, but a real achievement.
On June 23 2016 04:23 Shield wrote: This gm change is nice. It doesn't affect me because I'm not gm, but I've seen a few boosted gm players so far. It'll probably stop this practice now. Someone will still be crazy to pay but they'll be demoted quickly.
There's plenty of people in EU GM who just let their friends play to keep them there with proper mmr and winrate. This won't change that unfortunately.
Interesting update for sure. I just hope that Ladder Revamp gonna fix stupid things like (bronze, gold, gold, Top Master) match making in 2v2 because it is extremely annoying and it happens way too much since 3.0 update.
On June 23 2016 04:46 y0su wrote: Any bullet points I can read at work?
Here you go (feel free to steal, OP):
- MMR is visible at bottom of ladders screen
- On the match-victory screen -> Progress bar for promotion (without numbers, not sure how useful it will be) -> You can see your opponents' gain / loss and your gain / loss as well as final MMR
- Awesome promotion visuals (the league icon does a transformers-type animation)
- Leagues are split up into 3 tiers (except for GM) (numbered 1-3, 3 is bottom of league, 1 is top of league) -> Wherever league icons appear, the number appears on the base of the icon
- League and tier information is highest-rank achieved for current-season
- GM updated daily basis (promotions and demotions)
- Some other ui visualization improvements (animations of league icons, borders for leagues more distinct)
It looks great! I like the animations for promotion, progress bar, the overall style and highest reached rank. Everything sounds great. I hope the video just forgot to mention race specific mmr. It was part of the discussion, but not confirmed. Hell they kept their release date!
Guys does it look like a changed score menu? There is a tab for units! Could that mean more statistics/information about the match overall? Or does the unit tab already exist?
The changes are great but the fact that we had to literally wait YEARS to get this basic stuff is really infuriating. Why did it take them so long? Its unbelievable.
On June 23 2016 04:46 Bojas wrote: Really happy about this change. I've been masters for a long while now and I'm never motivated to fully play my bonus pool as getting the next promotion is quite a bit harder. This revamp will motivate me to reach the highest tier and GM won't be as much about just being active on the 8th day, but a real achievement.
On June 23 2016 04:23 Shield wrote: This gm change is nice. It doesn't affect me because I'm not gm, but I've seen a few boosted gm players so far. It'll probably stop this practice now. Someone will still be crazy to pay but they'll be demoted quickly.
There's plenty of people in EU GM who just let their friends play to keep them there with proper mmr and winrate. This won't change that unfortunately.
Any reason why it won't change it? They say there will be daily demotion. If someone is good enough to stay in gm, then they're gm.
On June 23 2016 04:46 y0su wrote: Any bullet points I can read at work?
Here you go (feel free to steal, OP):
- MMR is visible at bottom of ladders screen
- On the match-victory screen -> Progress bar for promotion (without numbers, not sure how useful it will be) -> You can see your opponents' gain / loss and your gain / loss as well as final MMR
- Awesome promotion visuals (the league icon does a transformers-type animation)
- Leagues are split up into 3 tiers (except for GM) (numbered 1-3, 3 is bottom of league, 1 is top of league) -> Wherever league icons appear, the number appears on the base of the icon
- League and tier information is highest-rank achieved for current-season
- GM updated daily basis (promotions and demotions)
- Some other ui visualization improvements (animations of league icons, borders for leagues more distinct)
On June 23 2016 05:44 Doctorasul wrote: Maybe I should get back in this game, but I'm scared my ego will get a huge hit when I see objectively how crap I have become.
why is everyone happy about this changes? what its so important to know your MMR and your opponents MMR? does this help you to increase your skill? does this help you to micro better?
On June 23 2016 06:05 SC2BF3Love wrote: why is everyone happy about this changes? what its so important to know your MMR and your opponents MMR? does this help you to increase your skill? does this help you to micro better?
No, but now I will know my real rank and not some irrelevant points and fake ladder placement. I, for example, sure as hell wasn't top diamond last season even though it said so. That's huge!!
Or, am I wrong here? In the video you can still see old points, bonus pool and old badges but I thought that this was just because they used current UI combined with the new for the video. Seems strange to have both.
Wowowow, did not expect the progress until next promotion. That will be sooo nice and really ignite peoples burning desire to compete on the ladder! GJ BLIZZ TEAM, also Homestory Cup is around the corner, so thank'you David Kim
I like that they are doing SOMETHING (sorry caps) to bring back the game... but I would like to ask something:: Whats the point of showing our MMR? IMo its just like in dota2 it will probably add more pressure and frustration(when losing, specially losing streaks)
I saw a video for what blizzard has plans for the ladder revamp and i thought i might as well throw this is to see what everyone thinks about it.
Ladder Points? so what do they actually count for ? well you get ladder points and based on other players in your division you are placed in 25th 10th 2nd etc etc , but after its all said and done you have milestones that you can look back and see how you done in the past. pretty simple
i think to get people to possible play more they should allow once a season is over say i finished with 1250 ladder points. they go to our "B.net Bank" where we can use those ladder points to buy things like "portraits , skins , animations , custom profiles t-shirts, blizzard key chains for example , chat room banners , etc etc . of course these points won't carry on to our next season as ladder points , we will as usual just revert back to zero as normal. but they will be added to our "b.net bank"account. Imagine grinding out the ladder not just for promotions but also get credits for some blizzard loot!
I just feel that this will give an incentive for people to ladder more!! what do you all think?
On June 23 2016 08:59 Frawz wrote: I saw a video for what blizzard has plans for the ladder revamp and i thought i might as well throw this is to see what everyone thinks about it.
Ladder Points? so what do they actually count for ? well you get ladder points and based on other players in your division you are placed in 25th 10th 2nd etc etc , but after its all said and done you have milestones that you can look back and see how you done in the past. pretty simple
i think to get people to possible play more they should allow once a season is over say i finished with 1250 ladder points. they go to our "B.net Bank" where we can use those ladder points to buy things like "portraits , skins , animations , custom profiles t-shirts, blizzard key chains for example , chat room banners , etc etc . of course these points won't carry on to our next season as ladder points , we will as usual just revert back to zero as normal. but they will be added to our "b.net bank"account. Imagine grinding out the ladder not just for promotions but also get credits for some blizzard loot!
I just feel that this will give an incentive for people to ladder more!! what do you all think?
So this is going to sound kind of lame, but points are there primarily to drive activity. I made some suggestions for improvement to the ladder system which were mostly centered around ranking directly by MMR. The problem with that is that once you reach your skill potential, your MMR kind of stagnates (it might hover +/-100 of your potential, or however wide your personal uncertainty is), and when things stagnate, they become boring. I didn't really have a good answer for how to drive activity and keep people interested in coming back. That's why the bonus pool still exists, and that's why points still exist. They're not really connected to anything useful like promotion (except for the bonus pool in determining GM eligibility) but they still give you a more immediate-term goal of "if I get 10 more points I can be rank 4 in my division instead of rank 5", and those little "mini-goals" can push some players into playing one more game, which is honestly fine.
David Kim reiterates that the ladder revamp is about making the ladder more accurate and transparent, but every time there's news, he backslides, announcing it is less accurate and transparent.
This isn't even a revamp. Looking at 1:09 of the video, we see that there are only 3 minimal changes. 1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
In particular, 1:09 confirms the following problems remains completely unaddressed: 1. Divisions of 100 arbitrary and meaningless players stays. 2. Points, which is mostly progression based, not skill based stays. 3. Bonus pool, which is what makes points progression based, also stays. 4. You can see your MMR, but you CANNOT see the MMR of other players in the ranking, so that you CANNOT compare your skill with other players in the ranking. 5. Players can't be ranked by MMR, that is they can't be ranked by skill.
So how can it be about accuracy and transparency when you can't even compare the MMR (skill) of players in the ranking?
Overwatch completely flip-flop from a pure progression-based Hearthstone-style ladder to a pure skill-based Dota2-style ladder in the span of 3 months while this "revamp" has become more and more disappointing over the 8 months we've known about it. Take the hint from Overwatch.
These changes are needed: 1. Remove divisions and rank everyone from the same league tier together. 2. Display the MMR of all players in the ranking. 3. Allow the ranking to be sortable by MMR and filterable by active players. 4. Remove bonus pool or at least reduce it my an extremely significant amount. 5. Increase the number of league tiers, to 5 or 10. 6. Display percentile of MMR.
On June 23 2016 10:46 paralleluniverse wrote: D 2. Points, which is mostly progression based, not skill based stays. 3. Bonus pool, which is what makes points progression based, also stays.
if the bonus pool is spend the ladder points are a quite accurate reflection of skill.
On June 23 2016 10:46 paralleluniverse wrote:
These changes are needed: 1. Remove divisions and rank everyone from the same league tier together. 2. Display the MMR of all players in the ranking. 3. Allow the ranking to be sortable by MMR and filterable by active players. 4. Remove bonus pool or at least reduce it my an extremely significant amount. 5. Increase the number of league tiers, to 5 or 10. 6. Display percentile of MMR.
those changes would be terrible and would make laddering extremely unmotivating. what encourages you more to ladder actively? Seeing you're 2nd in your division or seeing you're 2000th from all players in the league.
On June 23 2016 08:59 Frawz wrote: I saw a video for what blizzard has plans for the ladder revamp and i thought i might as well throw this is to see what everyone thinks about it.
Ladder Points? so what do they actually count for ? well you get ladder points and based on other players in your division you are placed in 25th 10th 2nd etc etc , but after its all said and done you have milestones that you can look back and see how you done in the past. pretty simple
i think to get people to possible play more they should allow once a season is over say i finished with 1250 ladder points. they go to our "B.net Bank" where we can use those ladder points to buy things like "portraits , skins , animations , custom profiles t-shirts, blizzard key chains for example , chat room banners , etc etc . of course these points won't carry on to our next season as ladder points , we will as usual just revert back to zero as normal. but they will be added to our "b.net bank"account. Imagine grinding out the ladder not just for promotions but also get credits for some blizzard loot!
I just feel that this will give an incentive for people to ladder more!! what do you all think?
So this is going to sound kind of lame, but points are there primarily to drive activity. I made some suggestions for improvement to the ladder system which were mostly centered around ranking directly by MMR. The problem with that is that once you reach your skill potential, your MMR kind of stagnates (it might hover +/-100 of your potential, or however wide your personal uncertainty is), and when things stagnate, they become boring. I didn't really have a good answer for how to drive activity and keep people interested in coming back. That's why the bonus pool still exists, and that's why points still exist. They're not really connected to anything useful like promotion (except for the bonus pool in determining GM eligibility) but they still give you a more immediate-term goal of "if I get 10 more points I can be rank 4 in my division instead of rank 5", and those little "mini-goals" can push some players into playing one more game, which is honestly fine.
But as you said on the ladder threads "Once your MMR reaches a certain threshold you may be eligible for promotion." How about the ladder point matter on "if I get 10 more points I can be rank 4 in my division instead of rank 5" ?
1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
Having your MMR displayed isnt minimal , who cares about leagues and splits if you can see their MMR? , it goes up and down accordingly to your opponent MMR meaning bad diamonds will have terrible MMRs even if they are in the top 10
basically divisions are irrelevant if you can see their real level (MMR) , the higher the MMR your opponent has the more points you will get , and viceversa
On June 23 2016 08:59 Frawz wrote: I saw a video for what blizzard has plans for the ladder revamp and i thought i might as well throw this is to see what everyone thinks about it.
Ladder Points? so what do they actually count for ? well you get ladder points and based on other players in your division you are placed in 25th 10th 2nd etc etc , but after its all said and done you have milestones that you can look back and see how you done in the past. pretty simple
i think to get people to possible play more they should allow once a season is over say i finished with 1250 ladder points. they go to our "B.net Bank" where we can use those ladder points to buy things like "portraits , skins , animations , custom profiles t-shirts, blizzard key chains for example , chat room banners , etc etc . of course these points won't carry on to our next season as ladder points , we will as usual just revert back to zero as normal. but they will be added to our "b.net bank"account. Imagine grinding out the ladder not just for promotions but also get credits for some blizzard loot!
I just feel that this will give an incentive for people to ladder more!! what do you all think?
So this is going to sound kind of lame, but points are there primarily to drive activity. I made some suggestions for improvement to the ladder system which were mostly centered around ranking directly by MMR. The problem with that is that once you reach your skill potential, your MMR kind of stagnates (it might hover +/-100 of your potential, or however wide your personal uncertainty is), and when things stagnate, they become boring. I didn't really have a good answer for how to drive activity and keep people interested in coming back. That's why the bonus pool still exists, and that's why points still exist. They're not really connected to anything useful like promotion (except for the bonus pool in determining GM eligibility) but they still give you a more immediate-term goal of "if I get 10 more points I can be rank 4 in my division instead of rank 5", and those little "mini-goals" can push some players into playing one more game, which is honestly fine.
But as you said on the ladder threads "Once your MMR reaches a certain threshold you may be eligible for promotion." How about the ladder point matter on "if I get 10 more points I can be rank 4 in my division instead of rank 5" ?
It's a psychological thing. If the player above you has 1000 points and you have 990, you think "I'll just play one more game to get those points" even if they don't result in a promotion or anything beyond a temporary sense of accomplishment. "I'll get to rank 5 today then stop." "I'll play until my bonus pool is gone." "I'll play until I get to 90 wins then stop." "I'll stop when I hit 3 losses in a row." These are small incremental goals that everyone has to some degree as they play.
Showing MMR is great, but I think it can be very frustrating as well. Thought I'd like it when they started showing losses again. Turns out I didnt. I would love it if they were to move those MMR numbers to a tab that doesnt show immediately or if they could give us an option to hide the numbers. It's really hard to play the game for fun if that MMR rating keeps showing you how bad you are.
1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
Having your MMR displayed isnt minimal , who cares about leagues and splits if you can see their MMR? , it goes up and down accordingly to your opponent MMR meaning bad diamonds will have terrible MMRs even if they are in the top 10
basically divisions are irrelevant if you can see their real level (MMR) , the higher the MMR your opponent has the more points you will get , and viceversa
Who cares about your MMR if you can't compare it with other people's MMR?
MMR is a meaningless number on its own. Your MMR is 2500. What does that mean? How skilled are you? Knowing your MMR says nothing about that.
In the score screen your MMR is 2500, your opponents is 2600, a difference of 100. What does this difference mean? Is that 100 a big difference in skill or a small difference in skill? Again, that difference of 100 is meaningless without looking at the MMR distribution.
You can only see your own MMR, so you can't compare MMR with other people that are ranked. Thus, it is not useful. What matters is percentile of MMR, how your MMR compares with other people's MMR.
At the very least, everyone's MMR should be displayed, like how everyone's points are displayed.
On June 23 2016 10:46 paralleluniverse wrote: D 2. Points, which is mostly progression based, not skill based stays. 3. Bonus pool, which is what makes points progression based, also stays.
if the bonus pool is spend the ladder points are a quite accurate reflection of skill.
These changes are needed: 1. Remove divisions and rank everyone from the same league tier together. 2. Display the MMR of all players in the ranking. 3. Allow the ranking to be sortable by MMR and filterable by active players. 4. Remove bonus pool or at least reduce it my an extremely significant amount. 5. Increase the number of league tiers, to 5 or 10. 6. Display percentile of MMR.
those changes would be terrible and would make laddering extremely unmotivating. what encourages you more to ladder actively? Seeing you're 2nd in your division or seeing you're 2000th from all players in the league.
Bonus pool is never spent for everyone, so it's inaccurate. There is nothing unmotivating about displaying MMR for everyone. Points are already displayed for everyone. "2nd in your division" is a lie. There's also no reason why ranks such as 1 to 5437 can't simply be rescaled to 1 to 100 by simply dividing by 5437.
1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
Having your MMR displayed isnt minimal , who cares about leagues and splits if you can see their MMR? , it goes up and down accordingly to your opponent MMR meaning bad diamonds will have terrible MMRs even if they are in the top 10
basically divisions are irrelevant if you can see their real level (MMR) , the higher the MMR your opponent has the more points you will get , and viceversa
Who cares about your MMR if you can't compare it with other people's MMR?
MMR is a meaningless number on its own. Your MMR is 2500. What does that mean? How skilled are you? Knowing your MMR says nothing about that.
In the score screen your MMR is 2500, your opponents is 2600, a difference of 100. What does this difference mean? Is that 100 a big difference in skill or a small difference in skill? Again, that difference of 100 is meaningless without looking at the MMR distribution.
You can only see your own MMR, so you can't compare MMR with other people that are ranked. Thus, it is not useful. What matters is percentile of MMR, how your MMR compares with other people's MMR.
At the very least, everyone's MMR should be displayed, like how everyone's points are displayed.
it is shown the mmr of both players... watch the video
you have never experienced MMR have you? why do you talk about something you dont understand.. i played rts with MMR for over 10 years... people get stuck between 2500 - 2600 for years sometimes.. to give a random number example.. 100 points difference means alot , because you have to consistently beat people around 2500-2600 you will realise that more often than not you will actually go down in the number.. unless you get better.. because loses count much more in this system , its not like divisions that you GRIND points.. you lose more points than you gain with this.. unless you beat someone with much higher MMR and gain little to nothing against lower MMR
so this way noobs wont be able to beat 10 bad diamonds to get into top 10 , they have to beat a 2700or a 2600 to get enough points.... and you have to actively beat higher MMR players to progress as well.. which will be much harder this way people are punished for losing .
On March 28 2016 04:04 Excalibur_Z wrote: I decided to create a mockup of what I imagine the new ladder will look like. I'll explain the differences:
1. No bonus pool. 2. "Points" replaced by MMR. 3. Tier specified directly in the header. 4. Icon representing highest tier achieved for the season next to each player's name
It is interesting to note every guess from this post a few months ago about what Blizzard would change about how ranks will be displayed proved to be wrong. As I predicted, they changed nothing about how ranks are displayed, they just added MMR on top.
But it's even worse than that, because I was at least expecting that everyone's MMR will be displayed, but in fact, only your MMR is displayed, making MMR meaningless because it cannot be compared with other people's.
To see whether a ladder system is fit for purpose, ask if it can answer 2 very simple questions: 1. How skilled am I? 2. How skilled am I compared to you?
This ladder "revamp" cannot even answer these 2 most elementary, utterly basic, questions.
1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
Having your MMR displayed isnt minimal , who cares about leagues and splits if you can see their MMR? , it goes up and down accordingly to your opponent MMR meaning bad diamonds will have terrible MMRs even if they are in the top 10
basically divisions are irrelevant if you can see their real level (MMR) , the higher the MMR your opponent has the more points you will get , and viceversa
Who cares about your MMR if you can't compare it with other people's MMR?
MMR is a meaningless number on its own. Your MMR is 2500. What does that mean? How skilled are you? Knowing your MMR says nothing about that.
In the score screen your MMR is 2500, your opponents is 2600, a difference of 100. What does this difference mean? Is that 100 a big difference in skill or a small difference in skill? Again, that difference of 100 is meaningless without looking at the MMR distribution.
You can only see your own MMR, so you can't compare MMR with other people that are ranked. Thus, it is not useful. What matters is percentile of MMR, how your MMR compares with other people's MMR.
At the very least, everyone's MMR should be displayed, like how everyone's points are displayed.
it is shown the mmr of both players... watch the video
you have never experienced MMR have you? why do you talk about something you dont understand.. i played rts with MMR for over 10 years... people get stuck between 2500 - 2600 for years sometimes.. to give a random number example.. 100 points difference means alot , because you have to consistently beat people around 2500-2600 you will realise that more often than not you will actually go down in the number.. unless you get better.. because loses count much more in this system , its not like divisions that you GRIND points.. you lose more points than you gain with this.. unless you beat someone with much higher MMR and gain little to nothing against lower MMR
so this way noobs wont be able to beat 10 bad diamonds to get into top 10 , they have to beat a master or a top diamond to get enough points.... and you have to actively beat higher MMR players to progress as well.. which will be much harder this way people are punished for losing .
Read the post, I know the MMR of the opposing player is shown, that's exactly where the 2500 v 2600 MMR example comes from. But you can't compare the MMR of any two players. For example, I can't compare my MMR to yours, if I see two people in a chat room, I can't compare who has higher MMR, if I have MMR of 2500, I can't tell how many players I'm better or worse than.
There is nothing canonical about the assertion that a 100 difference in MMR is "a lot". The difference in skill for a 100 difference in MMR depends on the scale they use. If a win against an equally skilled opponent gives 1, then a 100 difference is huge, if it gives 100, then a 100 difference is very small.
In some games, MMR ranges from 0 to ~3500, in other games MMR ranges from 0 to ~8500. In the former, 100 is big, in the latter, 100 is small.
So the point remains, without knowing the distribution of MMR it is not clear what a 100 MMR difference means, and MMR is meaningless without being able to compare it to others.
It's also not true a loss counts more than a win. The amount that MMR changes after a loss or a win depends on the MMR of the opponent. If you win against a high MMR opponent and lose to a similar MMR opponent, then the win counts more than the loss.
really great change for casuals, the more promotions there are, the better. people like me, who play max 2 games a day severly suffered from the smaller player base - SC2 became more skill demanding. This season i really struggeled and finally didn`t managed to get gold, and 2 years ago gold was so easy to win... so now I will have at least 5,6 promotions a season because of the tiers - definitely more fun thx Blizzard
On March 28 2016 04:04 Excalibur_Z wrote: I decided to create a mockup of what I imagine the new ladder will look like. I'll explain the differences:
1. No bonus pool. 2. "Points" replaced by MMR. 3. Tier specified directly in the header. 4. Icon representing highest tier achieved for the season next to each player's name
It is interesting to note every guess from this post a few months ago about what Blizzard would change about how ranks will be displayed proved to be wrong. As I predicted, they changed nothing about how ranks are displayed, they just added MMR on top.
But it's even worse than that, because I was at least expecting that everyone's MMR will be displayed, but in fact, only your MMR is displayed, making MMR meaningless because it cannot be compared with other people's.
To see whether a ladder system is fit for purpose, ask if it can answer 2 very simple questions: 1. How skilled am I? 2. How skilled am I compared to you?
This ladder "revamp" cannot even answer these 2 most elementary, utterly basic, questions.
It is, therefore, worthless.
There is no ladder system in the world which can tell you how "skilled" you are, but I bet there are ladder systems who lure you into the thought that they show this to you (e.g. the WoW Arena Ladder System). It may tell you that from the relation of wins and losses you had you are in the top X% of the playerbase but the ladder does not care about how you play.
There are many ways to climb the ladder and increase your skill in several parts of the game (the usual stuff like micro, mechanics, decision making,... ). In StarCraft 2 you might be playing all-ins all day long and it is fair way to do so. I once read that koreans are actually starting to learn StarCraft2 with the concept of playing all-ins and learning a simple, straightforward gameplan first before moving on to more complex macro games. However, there is no ladder in the world that would reflect on how you play games and therefore, it can only give you a small statement about your skill or none at all.
On March 28 2016 04:04 Excalibur_Z wrote: I decided to create a mockup of what I imagine the new ladder will look like. I'll explain the differences:
1. No bonus pool. 2. "Points" replaced by MMR. 3. Tier specified directly in the header. 4. Icon representing highest tier achieved for the season next to each player's name
It is interesting to note every guess from this post a few months ago about what Blizzard would change about how ranks will be displayed proved to be wrong. As I predicted, they changed nothing about how ranks are displayed, they just added MMR on top.
But it's even worse than that, because I was at least expecting that everyone's MMR will be displayed, but in fact, only your MMR is displayed, making MMR meaningless because it cannot be compared with other people's.
To see whether a ladder system is fit for purpose, ask if it can answer 2 very simple questions: 1. How skilled am I? 2. How skilled am I compared to you?
This ladder "revamp" cannot even answer these 2 most elementary, utterly basic, questions.
It is, therefore, worthless.
There is no ladder system in the world which can tell you how "skilled" you are, but I bet there are ladder systems who lure you into the thought that they show this to you (e.g. the WoW Arena Ladder System). It may tell you that from the relation of wins and losses you had you are in the top X% of the playerbase but the ladder does not care about how you play.
There are many ways to climb the ladder and increase your skill in several parts of the game (the usual stuff like micro, mechanics, decision making,... ). In StarCraft 2 you might be playing all-ins all day long and it is fair way to do so. I once read that koreans are actually starting to learn StarCraft2 with the concept of playing all-ins and learning a simple, straightforward gameplan first before moving on to more complex macro games. However, there is no ladder in the world that would reflect on how you play games and therefore, it can only give you a small statement about your skill or none at all.
How skilled you are is always relative to others. If you all-in every game and because of that, you can beat 95% of players, then your skill is top 95%.
The WoW Arena system is a good example. Unlike this "ladder revamp", it displays MMR for all players, and thus you can see how skill you are compared to everyone else and even work out your MMR percentile. Similarly with the Overwatch ladder revamp. Both those games can answer the question of: 1. How skilled am I? 2. How skilled am I compared to you?
So many people left the game because of the brokenly morronish ladder system, and now they are coming back to the roots...
I hope so, but I really doubt it. I think this exciting ladder change comes a bit too late..Ofc I don't know the exact numbers but I believe that too many people already left the game and found a new "main" game..
And tbh I dont really see this "ladder revamp" as such a big deal to justifiy taking them months/years to develop.. Like someone already mentioned, look at Overwatch: complete turnaround on the ranking Systems within couple of months..
I think the SC2 hypetrain already left the Station
On March 28 2016 04:04 Excalibur_Z wrote: I decided to create a mockup of what I imagine the new ladder will look like. I'll explain the differences:
1. No bonus pool. 2. "Points" replaced by MMR. 3. Tier specified directly in the header. 4. Icon representing highest tier achieved for the season next to each player's name
It is interesting to note every guess from this post a few months ago about what Blizzard would change about how ranks will be displayed proved to be wrong. As I predicted, they changed nothing about how ranks are displayed, they just added MMR on top.
But it's even worse than that, because I was at least expecting that everyone's MMR will be displayed, but in fact, only your MMR is displayed, making MMR meaningless because it cannot be compared with other people's.
To see whether a ladder system is fit for purpose, ask if it can answer 2 very simple questions: 1. How skilled am I? 2. How skilled am I compared to you?
This ladder "revamp" cannot even answer these 2 most elementary, utterly basic, questions.
It is, therefore, worthless.
There is no ladder system in the world which can tell you how "skilled" you are, but I bet there are ladder systems who lure you into the thought that they show this to you (e.g. the WoW Arena Ladder System). It may tell you that from the relation of wins and losses you had you are in the top X% of the playerbase but the ladder does not care about how you play.
There are many ways to climb the ladder and increase your skill in several parts of the game (the usual stuff like micro, mechanics, decision making,... ). In StarCraft 2 you might be playing all-ins all day long and it is fair way to do so. I once read that koreans are actually starting to learn StarCraft2 with the concept of playing all-ins and learning a simple, straightforward gameplan first before moving on to more complex macro games. However, there is no ladder in the world that would reflect on how you play games and therefore, it can only give you a small statement about your skill or none at all.
How skilled you are is always relative to others. If you all-in every game and because of that, you can beat 95% of players, then your skill is top 95%.
The WoW Arena system is a good example. Unlike this "ladder revamp", it displays MMR for all players, and thus you can see how skill you are compared to everyone else and even work out your MMR percentile. Similarly with the Overwatch ladder revamp. Both those games can answer the question of: 1. How skilled am I? 2. How skilled am I compared to you?
This ladder "revamp" cannot.
Then you would reduce "skill" to your win percentage which is a false assumption from my point of view. But this is the old discussion topic about whether it takes more "skill" to execute an all-in or to scout/hold an all-in and there is no sense of discussing this.
1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
Having your MMR displayed isnt minimal , who cares about leagues and splits if you can see their MMR? , it goes up and down accordingly to your opponent MMR meaning bad diamonds will have terrible MMRs even if they are in the top 10
basically divisions are irrelevant if you can see their real level (MMR) , the higher the MMR your opponent has the more points you will get , and viceversa
Who cares about your MMR if you can't compare it with other people's MMR?
MMR is a meaningless number on its own. Your MMR is 2500. What does that mean? How skilled are you? Knowing your MMR says nothing about that.
In the score screen your MMR is 2500, your opponents is 2600, a difference of 100. What does this difference mean? Is that 100 a big difference in skill or a small difference in skill? Again, that difference of 100 is meaningless without looking at the MMR distribution.
You can only see your own MMR, so you can't compare MMR with other people that are ranked. Thus, it is not useful. What matters is percentile of MMR, how your MMR compares with other people's MMR.
At the very least, everyone's MMR should be displayed, like how everyone's points are displayed.
Actually, the MMR works exactly the same as the elo ranking in chess. Players get used to it and know what being 1800 means and what a 100 difference between two players is also, even if the difference between 1300 and 1400, and 2000 2100 is nothing to be compared. I know what is my opponent skill based on this elo. Now that the MMR is shown people will learn that too. Especially if it is displayed in tournaments and you can see what is the top MMR. just as we know that Carlsen is 2800+, a top world is 2700+, a GM is 2500 etc...
1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
Having your MMR displayed isnt minimal , who cares about leagues and splits if you can see their MMR? , it goes up and down accordingly to your opponent MMR meaning bad diamonds will have terrible MMRs even if they are in the top 10
basically divisions are irrelevant if you can see their real level (MMR) , the higher the MMR your opponent has the more points you will get , and viceversa
Who cares about your MMR if you can't compare it with other people's MMR?
MMR is a meaningless number on its own. Your MMR is 2500. What does that mean? How skilled are you? Knowing your MMR says nothing about that.
In the score screen your MMR is 2500, your opponents is 2600, a difference of 100. What does this difference mean? Is that 100 a big difference in skill or a small difference in skill? Again, that difference of 100 is meaningless without looking at the MMR distribution.
You can only see your own MMR, so you can't compare MMR with other people that are ranked. Thus, it is not useful. What matters is percentile of MMR, how your MMR compares with other people's MMR.
At the very least, everyone's MMR should be displayed, like how everyone's points are displayed.
Actually, the MMR works exactly the same as the elo ranking in chess. Players get used to it and know what being 1800 means and what a 100 difference between two players is also, even if the difference between 1300 and 1400, and 2000 2100 is nothing to be compared. I know what is my opponent skill based on this elo. Now that the MMR is shown people will learn that too. Especially if it is displayed in tournaments and you can see what is the top MMR. just as we know that Carlsen is 2800+, a top world is 2700+, a GM is 2500 etc...
Exactly
No system is perfect , its evident that he have never experienced MMR , just wait until its here , yes you can tell very well what lvl someone is by their MMR , for example in AOC (age of conquerors) you started at 1600 , a new player would drop down to 1200 1300.. most players 6 months - 1 year of practice used to get 1700 which meant you were somehow experienced , someone between 1750 and 1800 was someone just a bit below 50% winrate..against 1800s i saw people stuck between 1550 and 1650 for years.. , others were 1700 ,1740 max after 5 years.. so it was CLEAR that they belong there.. telling the difference between diamond skill lvl in the current system is imposible.. because beign in diamond doesnt mean anything at all , the range is way too big.
someone above 1800 -1900 was a very experienced player , above 2000 was considered an expert something like master is in sc2 , 2000 - 2200 was about the same skill lvl , then 2300 - 2400 was top player - 2500+ was a legend basically 2700 = bonjwa lvl (maybe about 3 people in 15 years) , because he had to climp through countless of 2200 to get just 4 or 6 points per game and 40 -60 if they lose... my english is terrible but hopefully you get the idea lol.. you can even tell if someone is getting better just by that number , if he is in slump his number will drop instantly , and only if you improve you will get higher , just having a winning streak will not work because eventually you will fall back to where you really belong unless you really become better
1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
Having your MMR displayed isnt minimal , who cares about leagues and splits if you can see their MMR? , it goes up and down accordingly to your opponent MMR meaning bad diamonds will have terrible MMRs even if they are in the top 10
basically divisions are irrelevant if you can see their real level (MMR) , the higher the MMR your opponent has the more points you will get , and viceversa
Who cares about your MMR if you can't compare it with other people's MMR?
MMR is a meaningless number on its own. Your MMR is 2500. What does that mean? How skilled are you? Knowing your MMR says nothing about that.
In the score screen your MMR is 2500, your opponents is 2600, a difference of 100. What does this difference mean? Is that 100 a big difference in skill or a small difference in skill? Again, that difference of 100 is meaningless without looking at the MMR distribution.
You can only see your own MMR, so you can't compare MMR with other people that are ranked. Thus, it is not useful. What matters is percentile of MMR, how your MMR compares with other people's MMR.
At the very least, everyone's MMR should be displayed, like how everyone's points are displayed.
Actually, the MMR works exactly the same as the elo ranking in chess. Players get used to it and know what being 1800 means and what a 100 difference between two players is also, even if the difference between 1300 and 1400, and 2000 2100 is nothing to be compared. I know what is my opponent skill based on this elo. Now that the MMR is shown people will learn that too. Especially if it is displayed in tournaments and you can see what is the top MMR. just as we know that Carlsen is 2800+, a top world is 2700+, a GM is 2500 etc...
But you can't see the top MMR. You can't see any MMR except your own MMR (and those of your opponents which will be almost the same as your own). So no, that doesn't work.
If you can't see other people's MMR, and you can't, even if you know you are 2500 MMR, you will still have no idea how skilled you are compared to everyone else. You will not know what 2500 means.
1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
Having your MMR displayed isnt minimal , who cares about leagues and splits if you can see their MMR? , it goes up and down accordingly to your opponent MMR meaning bad diamonds will have terrible MMRs even if they are in the top 10
basically divisions are irrelevant if you can see their real level (MMR) , the higher the MMR your opponent has the more points you will get , and viceversa
Who cares about your MMR if you can't compare it with other people's MMR?
MMR is a meaningless number on its own. Your MMR is 2500. What does that mean? How skilled are you? Knowing your MMR says nothing about that.
In the score screen your MMR is 2500, your opponents is 2600, a difference of 100. What does this difference mean? Is that 100 a big difference in skill or a small difference in skill? Again, that difference of 100 is meaningless without looking at the MMR distribution.
You can only see your own MMR, so you can't compare MMR with other people that are ranked. Thus, it is not useful. What matters is percentile of MMR, how your MMR compares with other people's MMR.
At the very least, everyone's MMR should be displayed, like how everyone's points are displayed.
Actually, the MMR works exactly the same as the elo ranking in chess. Players get used to it and know what being 1800 means and what a 100 difference between two players is also, even if the difference between 1300 and 1400, and 2000 2100 is nothing to be compared. I know what is my opponent skill based on this elo. Now that the MMR is shown people will learn that too. Especially if it is displayed in tournaments and you can see what is the top MMR. just as we know that Carlsen is 2800+, a top world is 2700+, a GM is 2500 etc...
But you can't see the top MMR. You can't see any MMR except your own MMR (and those of your opponents which will be almost the same as your own). So no, that doesn't work.
If you can't see other people's MMR, and you can't, even if you know you are 2500 MMR, you will still have no idea how skilled you are compared to everyone else. You will not know what 2500 means.
It is in the video and the first picture of this topic. you see the enemy MMR , and the exact points you lose or win.. that is the whole point of having the MMR shown .. that is the main video point to compare your MMR with others.. and forget about divison cosmetics
1. Leagues are split into 3. 2. Your MMR is displayed. 3. GM updates daily.
Having your MMR displayed isnt minimal , who cares about leagues and splits if you can see their MMR? , it goes up and down accordingly to your opponent MMR meaning bad diamonds will have terrible MMRs even if they are in the top 10
basically divisions are irrelevant if you can see their real level (MMR) , the higher the MMR your opponent has the more points you will get , and viceversa
Who cares about your MMR if you can't compare it with other people's MMR?
MMR is a meaningless number on its own. Your MMR is 2500. What does that mean? How skilled are you? Knowing your MMR says nothing about that.
In the score screen your MMR is 2500, your opponents is 2600, a difference of 100. What does this difference mean? Is that 100 a big difference in skill or a small difference in skill? Again, that difference of 100 is meaningless without looking at the MMR distribution.
You can only see your own MMR, so you can't compare MMR with other people that are ranked. Thus, it is not useful. What matters is percentile of MMR, how your MMR compares with other people's MMR.
At the very least, everyone's MMR should be displayed, like how everyone's points are displayed.
Actually, the MMR works exactly the same as the elo ranking in chess. Players get used to it and know what being 1800 means and what a 100 difference between two players is also, even if the difference between 1300 and 1400, and 2000 2100 is nothing to be compared. I know what is my opponent skill based on this elo. Now that the MMR is shown people will learn that too. Especially if it is displayed in tournaments and you can see what is the top MMR. just as we know that Carlsen is 2800+, a top world is 2700+, a GM is 2500 etc...
But you can't see the top MMR. You can't see any MMR except your own MMR (and those of your opponents which will be almost the same as your own). So no, that doesn't work.
If you can't see other people's MMR, and you can't, even if you know you are 2500 MMR, you will still have no idea how skilled you are compared to everyone else. You will not know what 2500 means.
It is in the video and the first picture of this topic. you see the enemy MMR , and the exact points you lose or win.. that is the whole point of having the MMR shown .. that is the main video point to compare your MMR with others.. and forget about divison cosmetics
It is in my post.
I acknowledged you can see your enemies MMR, but the enemies MMR will always be approximately the same as yours. Knowing your own MMR, and a bunch of MMRs that is basically the same as yours doesn't tell you the MMR distribution. It also doesn't allow you to compare the skill of players.
Unless MMR is displayed for everyone like how points are, the information given is worthless. You cannot tell how skilled you are, and other than for your last opponent, you cannot tell if you are more skilled or less skilled than another player.
After a really short while (few hours ?), it will be know exactly what MMR is required for each league (EDIT : and each tier), so even if the MMR of everyone is not displayed, you'll still have a rough knowledge of your skill according to your MMR.
On June 23 2016 20:27 LDaVinci wrote: After a really short while (few hours ?), it will be know exactly what MMR is required for each league (EDIT : and each tier), so even if the MMR of everyone is not displayed, you'll still have a rough knowledge of your skill according to your MMR.
How will you know? Where will this information come from? It's not given in the game. What if people refuse to share this information?
We know that league boundaries change over time, the percentage of players in each league drifts from the target value, and gets manually fixed by Blizzard when enough people realize and complain. So how do you know this information will be continuously available?
Why isn't this information just given in the game. If points are shown for everyone, why can't MMR be shown too?
And even if the MMR distribution is known, that tells you how your MMR compares to others, but it still does not allow you to compare your skill with others. Am I better or worse skilled than you? That's unknown because you can only see your own MMR.
It would be cool if they added a ladder only client so I dont have to have gigabytes of campaign installed to ladder. Why does it take six years to implement stuff like this? Why do we have to be happy that we get it now, better than never, and not critizise blizz for taking so long. The game would be in a way better state if seperate mmr and other encouraging stuff had been implemented from day 1.
YESSSSSSSSSSSS SO MUCH YES Been waiting for this far too long No I'll have it written out clearly how far I am from actually reaching GM Chances are pretty far Maybe i don't like the changes as much kek
On June 23 2016 20:27 LDaVinci wrote: After a really short while (few hours ?), it will be know exactly what MMR is required for each league (EDIT : and each tier), so even if the MMR of everyone is not displayed, you'll still have a rough knowledge of your skill according to your MMR.
How will you know? Where will this information come from? It's not given in the game. What if people refuse to share this information?
We know that league boundaries change over time, the percentage of players in each league drifts from the target value, and gets manually fixed by Blizzard when enough people realize and complain. So how do you know this information will be continuously available?
Why isn't this information just given in the game. If points are shown for everyone, why can't MMR be shown too?
And even if the MMR distribution is known, that tells you how your MMR compares to others, but it still does not allow you to compare your skill with others. Am I better or worse skilled than you? That's unknown because you can only see your own MMR.
Ok so this becomes a what if conversation. Well for the first point, this is f**king Internet, where did you ever see that people are not sharing that kind of information ?
After is you wanna play who has the bigger with me, we can just share our mmr. If I don't want that's my problem and I guess you should know how to leave with it (you currently do, if you didn't notice). So that's not a big deal.
Why are you so negative about it ? This should have been added years ago. Complain about the time, not the content, it's actually great.
Ok, I'll admit I didn't expect them to actually put in effort and go through with this with the state SC2 is in and how much Overwatch is thriving for them.
On June 23 2016 20:27 LDaVinci wrote: After a really short while (few hours ?), it will be know exactly what MMR is required for each league (EDIT : and each tier), so even if the MMR of everyone is not displayed, you'll still have a rough knowledge of your skill according to your MMR.
How will you know? Where will this information come from? It's not given in the game. What if people refuse to share this information?
We know that league boundaries change over time, the percentage of players in each league drifts from the target value, and gets manually fixed by Blizzard when enough people realize and complain. So how do you know this information will be continuously available?
Why isn't this information just given in the game. If points are shown for everyone, why can't MMR be shown too?
And even if the MMR distribution is known, that tells you how your MMR compares to others, but it still does not allow you to compare your skill with others. Am I better or worse skilled than you? That's unknown because you can only see your own MMR.
Ok so this becomes a what if conversation. Well for the first point, this is f**king Internet, where did you ever see that people are not sharing that kind of information ?
After is you wanna play who has the bigger with me, we can just share our mmr. If I don't want that's my problem and I guess you should know how to leave with it (you currently do, if you didn't notice). So that's not a big deal.
Why are you so negative about it ? This should have been added years ago. Complain about the time, not the content, it's actually great.
A few people tried to explain him , but he just refuses to understand , i dont think he even read the examples other people gave, he keeps saying it isnt shown and doesnt seem to understand what does the MMR numbers mean , maybe is too hard for the new kids that never played with MMR , i can see how it can be confusing , as they try to apply it as it were divisinons , or a meaningless numbers , only afer you get stuck in 1400 -1500 for a year you will understand how important that number is , it means you cant ever beat someone above 1500 , which means he is better than you
On June 23 2016 20:27 LDaVinci wrote: After a really short while (few hours ?), it will be know exactly what MMR is required for each league (EDIT : and each tier), so even if the MMR of everyone is not displayed, you'll still have a rough knowledge of your skill according to your MMR.
How will you know? Where will this information come from? It's not given in the game. What if people refuse to share this information?
We know that league boundaries change over time, the percentage of players in each league drifts from the target value, and gets manually fixed by Blizzard when enough people realize and complain. So how do you know this information will be continuously available?
Why isn't this information just given in the game. If points are shown for everyone, why can't MMR be shown too?
And even if the MMR distribution is known, that tells you how your MMR compares to others, but it still does not allow you to compare your skill with others. Am I better or worse skilled than you? That's unknown because you can only see your own MMR.
Ok so this becomes a what if conversation. Well for the first point, this is f**king Internet, where did you ever see that people are not sharing that kind of information ?
After is you wanna play who has the bigger with me, we can just share our mmr. If I don't want that's my problem and I guess you should know how to leave with it (you currently do, if you didn't notice). So that's not a big deal.
Why are you so negative about it ? This should have been added years ago. Complain about the time, not the content, it's actually great.
Points are shown. Why is MMR not shown? No one has given any reason.
Call it what you want, but the fact is there is no guarantee that the MMR distribution will be known, and even if it's estimated, it may not be accurate, it may not be updated over time, and it still does not allow you to compare your skill with another person.
It gives your MMR but does NOT give you the tools necessary to interpret it (the MMR distribution, other people's MMR).
I'm not just being negative, I'm being realistic.
What's the purpose of a ladder system. To accurately rank people according to skill.
This ladder "revamp" does not do that.
It does NOT rank people according to their skill. It does NOT give you the information to tell what your skill is compared to the the playerbase. It does NOT allow people to compare their skill to that of another player.
So why are you accepting a lazy and inadequate ladder "revamp" that can't even fulfill the most basic purpose of a ladder system. It doesn't pass the bare minimum.
This is not asking for much, just the most absolute basic function of a ladder system.
On June 23 2016 20:27 LDaVinci wrote: After a really short while (few hours ?), it will be know exactly what MMR is required for each league (EDIT : and each tier), so even if the MMR of everyone is not displayed, you'll still have a rough knowledge of your skill according to your MMR.
How will you know? Where will this information come from? It's not given in the game. What if people refuse to share this information?
We know that league boundaries change over time, the percentage of players in each league drifts from the target value, and gets manually fixed by Blizzard when enough people realize and complain. So how do you know this information will be continuously available?
Why isn't this information just given in the game. If points are shown for everyone, why can't MMR be shown too?
And even if the MMR distribution is known, that tells you how your MMR compares to others, but it still does not allow you to compare your skill with others. Am I better or worse skilled than you? That's unknown because you can only see your own MMR.
Ok so this becomes a what if conversation. Well for the first point, this is f**king Internet, where did you ever see that people are not sharing that kind of information ?
After is you wanna play who has the bigger with me, we can just share our mmr. If I don't want that's my problem and I guess you should know how to leave with it (you currently do, if you didn't notice). So that's not a big deal.
Why are you so negative about it ? This should have been added years ago. Complain about the time, not the content, it's actually great.
A few people tried to explain him , but he just refuses to understand , i dont think he even read the examples other people gave, he keeps saying it isnt shown and doesnt seem to understand what does the MMR numbers mean , maybe is too hard for the new kids that never played with MMR , i can see how it can be confusing , as they try to apply it as it were divisinons , or a meaningless numbers , only afer you get stuck in 1400 -1500 for a year you will understand how important that number is , it means you cant ever beat someone above 1500 , which means he is better than you
Says the person who claims something about the MMR system, that as I pointed out, is flat out wrong.
100 points difference means alot , because you have to consistently beat people around 2500-2600 you will realise that more often than not you will actually go down in the number.. unless you get better.. because loses count much more in this system , its not like divisions that you GRIND points.. you lose more points than you gain with this.. unless you beat someone with much higher MMR and gain little to nothing against lower MMR
One of us is having problems understanding MMR, and it's not me.
I can't stress enough how I like these changes. However, wouldn't 5 tiers promote a more exciting gain-skill-journey than 3 ones? BTW why masters' border has changed?
And final question - WHEN would the revamp happen?
On June 23 2016 20:27 LDaVinci wrote: After a really short while (few hours ?), it will be know exactly what MMR is required for each league (EDIT : and each tier), so even if the MMR of everyone is not displayed, you'll still have a rough knowledge of your skill according to your MMR.
How will you know? Where will this information come from? It's not given in the game. What if people refuse to share this information?
We know that league boundaries change over time, the percentage of players in each league drifts from the target value, and gets manually fixed by Blizzard when enough people realize and complain. So how do you know this information will be continuously available?
Why isn't this information just given in the game. If points are shown for everyone, why can't MMR be shown too?
And even if the MMR distribution is known, that tells you how your MMR compares to others, but it still does not allow you to compare your skill with others. Am I better or worse skilled than you? That's unknown because you can only see your own MMR.
Ok so this becomes a what if conversation. Well for the first point, this is f**king Internet, where did you ever see that people are not sharing that kind of information ?
After is you wanna play who has the bigger with me, we can just share our mmr. If I don't want that's my problem and I guess you should know how to leave with it (you currently do, if you didn't notice). So that's not a big deal.
Why are you so negative about it ? This should have been added years ago. Complain about the time, not the content, it's actually great.
A few people tried to explain him , but he just refuses to understand , i dont think he even read the examples other people gave, he keeps saying it isnt shown and doesnt seem to understand what does the MMR numbers mean , maybe is too hard for the new kids that never played with MMR , i can see how it can be confusing , as they try to apply it as it were divisinons , or a meaningless numbers , only afer you get stuck in 1400 -1500 for a year you will understand how important that number is , it means you cant ever beat someone above 1500 , which means he is better than you
Says the person who claims something about the MMR system, that as I pointed out, is flat out wrong.
100 points difference means alot , because you have to consistently beat people around 2500-2600 you will realise that more often than not you will actually go down in the number.. unless you get better.. because loses count much more in this system , its not like divisions that you GRIND points.. you lose more points than you gain with this.. unless you beat someone with much higher MMR and gain little to nothing against lower MMR
One of us is having problems understanding MMR, and it's not me.
I played with MMR for 15 years , how much experience do you have with it? are you just making numbers and theories in your head? what distribution are you talking about? its a simple number , someone higher will effectively fuck you constantly , as opposite to current leagues , which means nothing , golds beating diamonds etc .
if you are moving around 1500 - 1600 for over a year... it means a 1700 is better than you how hard is that to understand ? , there will be tresholds someone that is bad just wont be able to achieve.. because eventually they will lose and lose and go down if they are not consistent
this is not a KDA like in league of legends , or a bunch of statistics , its just a number like in bw , chess and many oldschool games , you can literally pick up the best 10 players based in their current MMR, assuming they are all active" and be very accurate , of their level of skill , i saw countless of leagues , and profesional tournaments and it was always accurate.. a 1700 will just never beat a 2000 , not even once , not even with cheese , just out of curiosity have you ever actually seen the system by yourself or are you just speculating ?
its like in tennis , the world rankings , federer ,nadal and stan have around 5000 - 6000 points murray and novak have over 9000 literally lel , meaning they will consistently win against the clearly 5000-6000 lower tier., then there is another 10 stuck in about 2000 points , which often come close each other.. how does the numbers dont mean anything?
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
Maybe when they programmed sc2 they didn't allow themselves enough room for modifications or something. I don't know, maybe, because if not then there is no reason why they took this much time for just a graphical improvement.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
On June 23 2016 04:03 GGzerG wrote: Sweet changes, although it took them way too damn long.
Only 6 years since the game was first launched lol. I thought we were going to get more changes to the ladder but this is great to see nonetheless. Finally I'll know when I'm near a promotion, what my skill is according to MMR and ladder, demotions and promotions to GM.
ya the C&C4 ladder system is way better. so many other companies support their RTS games so much better than Blizzard especially EA. Blizzard provides the worst post sales support for its RTS games.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
I really doubt it would take more than a week. Maybe I am just used to working in smaller organisations but we typically go from customer idea to final delivery in 1-2 weeks for smaller things like these and 2-3 months for a large order.
There is nothing in these changes that are complex, a single programmer and a single designer straight out of university (i.e. very inexperienced) would not take this much time to deliver these changes.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
I really doubt it would take more than a week. Maybe I am just used to working in smaller organisations but we typically go from customer idea to final delivery in 1-2 weeks for smaller things like these and 2-3 months for a large order.
There is nothing in these changes that are complex, a single programmer and a single designer straight out of university (i.e. very inexperienced) would not take this much time to deliver these changes.
For a company as big as Blizzard their QA pipeline and standard are likely significantly higher, and since the ladder system was running on code dated (probably) as old as 2009, there are potentially a lot of hoops and checks to make sure it works as intended.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
I really doubt it would take more than a week. Maybe I am just used to working in smaller organisations but we typically go from customer idea to final delivery in 1-2 weeks for smaller things like these and 2-3 months for a large order.
There is nothing in these changes that are complex, a single programmer and a single designer straight out of university (i.e. very inexperienced) would not take this much time to deliver these changes.
just put an end to the argument and make ur own game. it should take a few weeks.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
I really doubt it would take more than a week. Maybe I am just used to working in smaller organisations but we typically go from customer idea to final delivery in 1-2 weeks for smaller things like these and 2-3 months for a large order.
There is nothing in these changes that are complex, a single programmer and a single designer straight out of university (i.e. very inexperienced) would not take this much time to deliver these changes.
just put an end to the argument and make ur own game. it should take a few weeks.
Yeah, because that is exactly what this update is, a whole new game. Or wait, maybe they are just displaying data they already generated all along?
It took them over three years to implement an almost carbon-copy of League of Legends' matchmaking system, and to actually listen to community feedback on making MMR visible. This, plus the awful balance and design of the latest expansion's multiplayer, doesn't give me any hope for SC2's future.
and since the ladder system was running on code dated (probably) as old as 2009, there are potentially a lot of hoops and checks to make sure it works as intended.
But his has nothing to do with ladder code. It all looks just like a graphical update.
I just hope that the ladder revamp is not as much of an upgrade as their recent "upgrade" to their forums - which is not.
On June 24 2016 05:32 Clbull wrote: It took them over three years to implement an almost carbon-copy of League of Legends' matchmaking system, and to actually listen to community feedback on making MMR visible. This, plus the awful balance and design of the latest expansion's multiplayer, doesn't give me any hope for SC2's future.
1) Where did you find out it took them three years for these changes?
2) MMR being visible wasn't the most requested feature being asked, seperated MMR per race was way more requested.
and since the ladder system was running on code dated (probably) as old as 2009, there are potentially a lot of hoops and checks to make sure it works as intended.
But his has nothing to do with ladder code. It all looks just like a graphical update.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
Where does he say the he was only talking about the graphical side?
Also, why would things like promotion from tiers and a different way of doing GM promotion/demotions not be related to ladder code?
@Paralleluniverse: You keep talking about how you can't see other people's MMR, can you provide a source for this? One thing that was not shown in the video is when you click on somebody's profile and go to his ladder page, would it show the person's MMR like it would like your own?
On June 24 2016 05:32 Clbull wrote: It took them over three years to implement an almost carbon-copy of League of Legends' matchmaking system, and to actually listen to community feedback on making MMR visible. This, plus the awful balance and design of the latest expansion's multiplayer, doesn't give me any hope for SC2's future.
What I like about this is that the number of leagues in a way are increased from 7 to 19.
It may be hard to go from Diamond to Master if you have been in Diamond for several years but it should at least be possible to advance from Diamond 2 to Diamond 1.
Grandmaster League will have daily promotions and demotions
Various visual updates and improvements
Fine. When I first tried SC2 Beta.... was it 2009, I was suggesting most of the changes. There is still hope for Blizzard, we just don't see it happen very fast. Lets blame Q&A for taking so long
One of the things that held me back the most from trying out other races was constant beating after getting an opponent that has the MMR that you had with your main race. Glad they try to fix it finally, although... this is also something that should have been done in 2010, not somewhat 2016. Its maybe never too late, but since only a few are left playing sc2, the numbers on which Blizz is going to "balance" things have drastically changed, therefore aren't that accurate anymore.
I do understand implementing an algorithm takes longer then thinking about it in the first place. But 6 yrs since the ppl first mentioned it? Srsly? Some Developers release two or more total AAA games in that time.
On June 26 2016 04:36 darthfoley wrote: Exactly my thoughts! Much more motivational to know how close you are to a promotion
Just cheese one more time and you are a 55 APM Diamond Toss/Terran/Zerg.
Don't get me wrong, this is for sure motivating, but I hope for a system that also awards "proper" (macro) game. No, I don't mind cheese every now and then, but there are these one-trick ponys and they get way too far because of the nature of sc2. I would love an MMR system that awards various openers, especially macro ones, instead of just points for the win.
After nios.kr went down is there any way to tell how many active players SC2 has? To me it seems they're just giving out the things ppl have been asking for years trying to win back their playerbase.
Grandmaster League will have daily promotions and demotions
Various visual updates and improvements
I do understand implementing an algorithm takes longer then thinking about it in the first place. But 6 yrs since the ppl first mentioned it? Srsly? Some Developers release two or more total AAA games in that time.
What makes you they think they have working on this for 6 years?
Here is a quick list of changes they did:
Released 2 expensions
Dozen of new units
Dozens of balance patches
Massive amount changes to existing units
2 complete UI redesigns
An automated tournement system
Mods
A completely different arcade system then from launch
Reworked large parts of their engine
Reworked their chat system
Changes to their public API (I think)
And I would be very, very suprised that any of them took less then a month.
On June 26 2016 16:58 ReaperSC2 wrote: After nios.kr went down is there any way to tell how many active players SC2 has? To me it seems they're just giving out the things ppl have been asking for years trying to win back their playerbase.
Dont get the hype really, these "changes" are like just a graphical display of values which had beeen in place from the start of sc2. I dont know why they even bother to add it now.
This is actually the most important for Bronze 1 & 2, as they now have an even lower class of noobs they can attack and blame for their inability to reach GM.
On June 28 2016 06:14 Naracs_Duc wrote: This is actually the most important for Bronze 1 & 2, as they now have an even lower class of noobs they can attack and blame for their inability to reach GM.
On June 28 2016 06:14 Naracs_Duc wrote: This is actually the most important for Bronze 1 & 2, as they now have an even lower class of noobs they can attack and blame for their inability to reach GM.
They are only in Bronze 2 because their race suck. If the race they play wasn't so horribly designed, they would be in GM by now. Damn Blizzard and their terrible design and balance.
Looks good. I don't mind that they tried another style of ladder and rank presentation first. Of course the argument was made from the start that StarCraft is a competitive game with players who prefer transparency and a focus on progression of skill rather than a vague ranking with types of progression that don't necessarily correlate to skill. And now Blizzard agrees to take it in that direction. But it doesn't mean it was wrong to try the other way. In fact we still can't determine if we would have been better off all along if we always had this system.
I think GM having daily promotions and demotions is something that should have been in from the start. I suppose the idea was to give a strong incentive for everyone to be very active at the beginning of every season but that idea never really caught on and the result was many people occupying GM spots who do not belong. Now players can compete for the top of the ladder even if they didn't reserve a spot in GM at the start of a season.
On June 23 2016 07:09 Charoisaur wrote: this looks great
I wonder what the point of the points is when there is already MMR showed.
The games still must be played. MMR is estimating the skill of each player by estimating the probability of winning against other players, but the games still must be played and there must be an actual winner and loser! The point system is the quantifier that reflects the actual games played for that period of competition.
Imagine Zest played NA for a season and achieved an MMR far higher than anyone else. He isn't the winner of the next season too just because no one is able to reach his MMR.
Imagine the finals of a tournament. One player is heavily favored based on recent tournament results. He'd have the highest MMR if we pretended all tournament games were actually ladder games. He still needs to play the games and win them to be the winner, to be declared the best at that tournament.
It's not enough to say "I have the highest MMR. I am the best." Being the best is something that has to be continually proven. That's why points and actual rank matter more than MMR and that's part of the purpose of bonus pool.
On June 28 2016 09:08 NonY wrote: Looks good. I don't mind that they tried another style of ladder and rank presentation first. Of course the argument was made from the start that StarCraft is a competitive game with players who prefer transparency and a focus on progression of skill rather than a vague ranking with types of progression that don't necessarily correlate to skill. And now Blizzard agrees to take it in that direction. But it doesn't mean it was wrong to try the other way. In fact we still can't determine if we would have been better off all along if we always had this system.
I think GM having daily promotions and demotions is something that should have been in from the start. I suppose the idea was to give a strong incentive for everyone to be very active at the beginning of every season but that idea never really caught on and the result was many people occupying GM spots who do not belong. Now players can compete for the top of the ladder even if they didn't reserve a spot in GM at the start of a season.
I wonder what the point of the points is when there is already MMR showed.
The games still must be played. MMR is estimating the skill of each player by estimating the probability of winning against other players, but the games still must be played and there must be an actual winner and loser! The point system is the quantifier that reflects the actual games played for that period of competition.
Imagine Zest played NA for a season and achieved an MMR far higher than anyone else. He isn't the winner of the next season too just because no one is able to reach his MMR.
Imagine the finals of a tournament. One player is heavily favored based on recent tournament results. He'd have the highest MMR if we pretended all tournament games were actually ladder games. He still needs to play the games and win them to be the winner, to be declared the best at that tournament.
It's not enough to say "I have the highest MMR. I am the best." Being the best is something that has to be continually proven. That's why points and actual rank matter more than MMR and that's part of the purpose of bonus pool.
That's a good point Tyler about activity being a core component. It absolutely needs to be. I don't know if bonus pool is the best way to go about that because it creates a weird moving target depending on when in the season you're talking about (is 500 points "good"? 1000? 2000? it depends on whether you're talking about week 1 or week 10), but everyone is used to what the bonus pool does by now so it's probably fine.
As for the GM league refactor, I know people had a problem with the ranks being locked-in for a full season, but it was also self-correcting to a certain degree in its initial design. The floor for GM was so high that if you were fighting Diamond opponents you would get only 1 point (+1 bonus) for a win, and wins were the only way to spend bonus pool, which meant that you had to win a ton of games just to be able to tread water if you were boosted. It wasn't until they changed bonus pool to absorb losses that it became really exploitable.
There should also be a way for official tournament organizers to have games that affect the MMR, just like in Chess any championship, even the smaller one, changes your elo rank. That way, top players, who mainly play big tournaments on there main account, would have an MMR that means something. This MMR could replace aligulac.
This would also be very interesting for viewers to see the actual MMR of top koreans and top foreigners.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
I really doubt it would take more than a week. Maybe I am just used to working in smaller organisations but we typically go from customer idea to final delivery in 1-2 weeks for smaller things like these and 2-3 months for a large order.
There is nothing in these changes that are complex, a single programmer and a single designer straight out of university (i.e. very inexperienced) would not take this much time to deliver these changes.
First of all we dont know how long it took. But its not the coding which takes time. The design of the model, of math, if it will work as intended and more which takes time. If I had to create such a system, I would easily take 2 month to test everything through if it works as intended and at least 1 month for the basic idea. The good part is that the math and the development of model doesnt cost much. The cost starts with the develpment process, where you have to coordinate a lot of things (as listed above) and different teams for different tasks.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
I really doubt it would take more than a week. Maybe I am just used to working in smaller organisations but we typically go from customer idea to final delivery in 1-2 weeks for smaller things like these and 2-3 months for a large order.
There is nothing in these changes that are complex, a single programmer and a single designer straight out of university (i.e. very inexperienced) would not take this much time to deliver these changes.
just put an end to the argument and make ur own game. it should take a few weeks.
Yeah, because that is exactly what this update is, a whole new game. Or wait, maybe they are just displaying data they already generated all along?
But he isnt false. You say the same stuff, i said, when i was a child (started to code with 7). The development process in a company is big and doesnt compare to a garage project with one or two coders.
On June 28 2016 16:04 nightshade2109 wrote: Would be nice if they could give us an ETA like within a month or within the next three months "Very soon" could mean a lot of things.
WoL was "in the home stretch" according to Browder in February 2009. this quote is burned into my memory.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
Thats great, we just need another 10-15 years for the 'appear offline' option they announced 3 years ago :D
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
Thats great, we just need another 10-15 years for the 'appear offline' option they announced 3 years ago :D
On June 28 2016 09:08 NonY wrote: Looks good. I don't mind that they tried another style of ladder and rank presentation first. Of course the argument was made from the start that StarCraft is a competitive game with players who prefer transparency and a focus on progression of skill rather than a vague ranking with types of progression that don't necessarily correlate to skill. And now Blizzard agrees to take it in that direction. But it doesn't mean it was wrong to try the other way. In fact we still can't determine if we would have been better off all along if we always had this system.
I think GM having daily promotions and demotions is something that should have been in from the start. I suppose the idea was to give a strong incentive for everyone to be very active at the beginning of every season but that idea never really caught on and the result was many people occupying GM spots who do not belong. Now players can compete for the top of the ladder even if they didn't reserve a spot in GM at the start of a season.
On June 23 2016 07:09 Charoisaur wrote: this looks great
On June 23 2016 06:18 Ctone23 wrote:
On June 23 2016 06:06 Legobiten wrote:
On June 23 2016 05:56 JonnySC2 wrote: I don't get why they still need the pointsystem. Just use the MMR instead.
The points displayed are the MMR.
No, there's still points.
Yes, rankings within your division are still based on division points. MMR and division points are not correlated.
I wonder what the point of the points is when there is already MMR showed.
The games still must be played. MMR is estimating the skill of each player by estimating the probability of winning against other players, but the games still must be played and there must be an actual winner and loser! The point system is the quantifier that reflects the actual games played for that period of competition.
Imagine Zest played NA for a season and achieved an MMR far higher than anyone else. He isn't the winner of the next season too just because no one is able to reach his MMR.
Imagine the finals of a tournament. One player is heavily favored based on recent tournament results. He'd have the highest MMR if we pretended all tournament games were actually ladder games. He still needs to play the games and win them to be the winner, to be declared the best at that tournament.
It's not enough to say "I have the highest MMR. I am the best." Being the best is something that has to be continually proven. That's why points and actual rank matter more than MMR and that's part of the purpose of bonus pool.
That's a good point Tyler about activity being a core component. It absolutely needs to be. I don't know if bonus pool is the best way to go about that because it creates a weird moving target depending on when in the season you're talking about (is 500 points "good"? 1000? 2000? it depends on whether you're talking about week 1 or week 10), but everyone is used to what the bonus pool does by now so it's probably fine.
Yeah I think GM players no longer being able to spend bonus pool will be good. I'm interested to see how it'll look but I think it'll be an improvement. I don't think someone will be able to achieve a number of points early in the season that will remain #1 for the whole season so activity (beyond the 10 games every 3 weeks minimum) will still matter.
On June 28 2016 09:08 NonY wrote: Looks good. I don't mind that they tried another style of ladder and rank presentation first. Of course the argument was made from the start that StarCraft is a competitive game with players who prefer transparency and a focus on progression of skill rather than a vague ranking with types of progression that don't necessarily correlate to skill. And now Blizzard agrees to take it in that direction. But it doesn't mean it was wrong to try the other way. In fact we still can't determine if we would have been better off all along if we always had this system.
I think GM having daily promotions and demotions is something that should have been in from the start. I suppose the idea was to give a strong incentive for everyone to be very active at the beginning of every season but that idea never really caught on and the result was many people occupying GM spots who do not belong. Now players can compete for the top of the ladder even if they didn't reserve a spot in GM at the start of a season.
On June 23 2016 07:09 Charoisaur wrote: this looks great
On June 23 2016 06:18 Ctone23 wrote:
On June 23 2016 06:06 Legobiten wrote:
On June 23 2016 05:56 JonnySC2 wrote: I don't get why they still need the pointsystem. Just use the MMR instead.
The points displayed are the MMR.
No, there's still points.
Yes, rankings within your division are still based on division points. MMR and division points are not correlated.
I wonder what the point of the points is when there is already MMR showed.
The games still must be played. MMR is estimating the skill of each player by estimating the probability of winning against other players, but the games still must be played and there must be an actual winner and loser! The point system is the quantifier that reflects the actual games played for that period of competition.
Imagine Zest played NA for a season and achieved an MMR far higher than anyone else. He isn't the winner of the next season too just because no one is able to reach his MMR.
Imagine the finals of a tournament. One player is heavily favored based on recent tournament results. He'd have the highest MMR if we pretended all tournament games were actually ladder games. He still needs to play the games and win them to be the winner, to be declared the best at that tournament.
It's not enough to say "I have the highest MMR. I am the best." Being the best is something that has to be continually proven. That's why points and actual rank matter more than MMR and that's part of the purpose of bonus pool.
That's a good point Tyler about activity being a core component. It absolutely needs to be. I don't know if bonus pool is the best way to go about that because it creates a weird moving target depending on when in the season you're talking about (is 500 points "good"? 1000? 2000? it depends on whether you're talking about week 1 or week 10), but everyone is used to what the bonus pool does by now so it's probably fine.
As for the GM league refactor, I know people had a problem with the ranks being locked-in for a full season, but it was also self-correcting to a certain degree in its initial design. The floor for GM was so high that if you were fighting Diamond opponents you would get only 1 point (+1 bonus) for a win, and wins were the only way to spend bonus pool, which meant that you had to win a ton of games just to be able to tread water if you were boosted. It wasn't until they changed bonus pool to absorb losses that it became really exploitable.
agree about skill needing to be proven again and again. The points system is good.
GM demotions every day. Bonus pool deactivated in GM. League distribution changes: expanded Master, shrinked Bronze, evened out every other league in between.
On June 29 2016 08:04 Shield wrote: Before Blizzard revamp ladder, they need to revamp their servers. Sudden lag and delay of seconds and no announcement?
That's probably because of big Overwatch patch, which brings ranked play.
On June 29 2016 06:45 ejozl wrote: I find league distributions weird, especially 4% Bronze.
While this is pandering to bad players. I think this is a good change. No one wants to believe their the bottom of the barrel. And people want to see progress quickly. Meaning bronze will probably be for players almost entirely new to the game.
Therefore anyone in bronze who gives a moderate effort to get better should be promoted to silver with relative ease, but they won't know that. So that early promotion can spawn, more intrinsic motivation to continue to play and get better.
I think of it like body building. When people go derp around in the gym, and don't see some kind of result to hang their hat on quickly, they'll quit pretty fast. People need that first result to snowball, and continue to eventually be internally motivated.
I actually wouldn't mind if they expanded the leagues at the lower end, adding even a couple other small ranks. So that totally new players could receive multiple promotions easily. (Was copper league a thing in the WOL beta, or is my brain lying to me?)
Really awesome stuff.The only thing I really want now, is I want there to be some type of reward for laddering, both participation and acheiving rank.
I kinda feel thats lacking compared to other games, is that theres no real reward. But hopefully that will change once they have the cosmetic systems implemented, because if they had to do rewards today, odds are we'd be limited by portrait which isnt really motivating.
On June 29 2016 11:13 Cyanocyst wrote:While this is pandering to bad players. I think this is a good change. No one wants to believe their the bottom of the barrel. And people want to see progress quickly. Meaning bronze will probably be for players almost entirely new to the game.
oh you...i guess it's been a while since you were bronze (if you were ever). no, the bronze league is not just for beginners...it's also for trolls who intentionally tank their mmr to beat up on said beginners. sad, but true.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
I really doubt it would take more than a week. Maybe I am just used to working in smaller organisations but we typically go from customer idea to final delivery in 1-2 weeks for smaller things like these and 2-3 months for a large order.
There is nothing in these changes that are complex, a single programmer and a single designer straight out of university (i.e. very inexperienced) would not take this much time to deliver these changes.
just put an end to the argument and make ur own game. it should take a few weeks.
Yeah, because that is exactly what this update is, a whole new game. Or wait, maybe they are just displaying data they already generated all along?
But he isnt false. You say the same stuff, i said, when i was a child (started to code with 7). The development process in a company is big and doesnt compare to a garage project with one or two coders.
I'm not a programmer, I'm pointing out that Blizzard didn't code a new game with this change (contrasting the glorious exaggeration of the previous speaker), but rather finally decided to show some data they obviously already have generated all these years. And yes, I'm fully aware that Blizzard is a big company. In fact, did you know it has a market capitalization of some 24 billion euros atm? Did you know it made a net profit of US$ 336 million the first quarter this year? I'm thinking of buying some stocks, but the price/earnings ratio feels a bit high at the same time as the implementation of simple changes to keep people interest in SC2 feels a bit slow.
Does anyone know (or have a good guess) who would be eligible for Contender Division? Is it the top 200 non-GM players, or some kind of opt-in league made up of Masters players who choose to enter it on that day, or..?
On July 02 2016 00:57 cjb wrote: Does anyone know (or have a good guess) who would be eligible for Contender Division? Is it the top 200 non-GM players, or some kind of opt-in league made up of Masters players who choose to enter it on that day, or..?
Contender league will be the top 200 non-GM players, yes, and 10 of those players will have been demoted from GM (GM spots #191-200). The top 10 will get promoted into GM when the Contender league closes after 3 hours.
I googled pesky things before taking this certain step ("is sc2 dead", "sc2 future", ...) thus coming to the conclusion to order LOTV. Done that I saw this ladder revamp thingy, more than anything it fueled my conviction to have made the right decision. Hoping many many others do think likely.
On July 02 2016 06:17 biomech wrote: I googled pesky things before taking this certain step ("is sc2 dead", "sc2 future", ...) thus coming to the conclusion to order LOTV. Done that I saw this ladder revamp thingy, more than anything it fueled my conviction to have made the right decision. Hoping many many others do think likely.
On July 02 2016 06:17 biomech wrote: I googled pesky things before taking this certain step ("is sc2 dead", "sc2 future", ...) thus coming to the conclusion to order LOTV. Done that I saw this ladder revamp thingy, more than anything it fueled my conviction to have made the right decision. Hoping many many others do think likely.
On July 04 2016 22:51 HelpMeGetBetter wrote: Did they change the date for when the season ends? I thought it was the 11th, now its the 13th. Is this a sign the revamp really is coming "soon"?
The 3 week season is highly unusual and was announced suddenly so that would be my guess, yeah.
On June 24 2016 01:12 MockHamill wrote: I am surprised it took so long.
I work as a programmer and a change like this would only take 1-2 days to program, maybe 2-3 for design and 1-2 days for testing.
Even if you add a few days on brainstorming different ideas I do not understand how it could take so long to develop.
1. Add it to the backlog. 2. Flesh out design with design team. 3. Open meeting to gather feedback. 4. Generate wireframe. 5. Establish acceptance criteria. 6. Have preliminary discussions with the team (Eng, UI, Design, QA, Loc) to determine relative cost/level of effort. 7. Meet with stakeholders to determine business value. 8. Prioritize accordingly against other backlog items based on results from steps 4 and 5. 9. Refine acceptance criteria if necessary and recost. 10. Create sub-tasks. 11. Resolve dependencies and blockers. 12. Full team playtest to record bugs. 13. Resolve bugs. 14. Push to Staging environment to mirror expected Live behavior. 15. Full team playtest to record bugs. 16. Resolve bugs. 17. Send to QA for final approval. 18. Resolve bugs. 19. Schedule final deployment date. 20. Release.
With daily stand-ups and sync meetings, it absolutely makes sense that a feature like this could take weeks or months, even though it's relatively simple.
I really doubt it would take more than a week. Maybe I am just used to working in smaller organisations but we typically go from customer idea to final delivery in 1-2 weeks for smaller things like these and 2-3 months for a large order.
There is nothing in these changes that are complex, a single programmer and a single designer straight out of university (i.e. very inexperienced) would not take this much time to deliver these changes.
just put an end to the argument and make ur own game. it should take a few weeks.
Yeah, because that is exactly what this update is, a whole new game. Or wait, maybe they are just displaying data they already generated all along?
But he isnt false. You say the same stuff, i said, when i was a child (started to code with 7). The development process in a company is big and doesnt compare to a garage project with one or two coders.
I'm not a programmer, I'm pointing out that Blizzard didn't code a new game with this change (contrasting the glorious exaggeration of the previous speaker), but rather finally decided to show some data they obviously already have generated all these years. And yes, I'm fully aware that Blizzard is a big company. In fact, did you know it has a market capitalization of some 24 billion euros atm? Did you know it made a net profit of US$ 336 million the first quarter this year? I'm thinking of buying some stocks, but the price/earnings ratio feels a bit high at the same time as the implementation of simple changes to keep people interest in SC2 feels a bit slow.
This didnt take years, but it wasnt a short process either. It is longer and has more parts than people expect especially people who have coding experience. They see how fast and easy it was to code a checkers game and use that experience to evaluate the work behind this patch. But the amount of work changes with the size, the complexity and the purpose.
Sometimes you see in twitch chat people ask why a pro player hasnt done this or that and other things. But a pro plays a different game. Their skill and their multitasking changes everything. Its so fast, that you have to think about what you want to hotkey in that short period and jump to the next task.
Its similar with development. Size and complexity changes the amount of work and the process.
Reddit had a Live Q&A with the devs about an hour ago. Here are the big takeaways:
- Contender league is a parallel league that is always open, not just for the promotion window times. Players can be in Master league and Contender league at the same time, so it's more of a preview window of who will get into GM. - MMR will not be reset (makes sense, no reason for it, only the presentation is changing) - MMR will be visible on any player's profile in the Division View (e.g., here, in the bottom margin). You will not be able to see other players' MMRs outside of a game without going into their individual profile pages. - The decision to show MMR outweighed the concern of ladder anxiety, so it cannot be hidden by a toggle in the Options menu, for example. However, it is not overly prominent in order to avoid toxic behavior (that's why you have to do some digging before you can find other players' MMRs). - League sizes/population distribution will continue to happen on a seasonal basis, as it always has. - MMRs will still not be comparable across regions (4k on one server may not carry the same meaning as 4k on another). - The activity requirement for GM league changed from 180 bonus pool to 10 games per 3 weeks to allow pro players to travel without jeopardizing their ranking (plus the really good players could have difficulty spending bonus pool fast enough). - The ladder revamp affects all expansion levels (WoL, HotS, LotV). - Divisions were not removed so that the change to a more MMR-focused ladder would be less jarring. Therefore, players who enjoy the division system can still find fun in it. - Demotions outside of GM will continue to be locked during a season. - The rating bar that serves as a promotion indicator will warn you that you may be demoted next season if it goes into the negative. Additionally, hovering over the bar shows the exact MMR requirements to reach the next tier.
1. It's great news that MMR is displayed for everyone, even despite the fact that you have to dig for it because it would supposedly cause ladder anxiety if it were more prominent (lol). It would be preferable to also show percentile, instead of having to work it out and rely on the last season's percentiles on the promotion bar, but unfortunately that's not currently happening.
2. So what we have is effectively Overwatch's system, with less prominence in skill rating because of ladder anxiety. But Overwatch was able to deliver their superior ladder system in 2 months while this has taken 6 years or almost 1 year, depending on when you start the count.
3. We got new information that the Contender List is always active, but that the Contender Ladder at 5PM to 8PM, which as I originally noted was a needlessly bizarre contrivance, is completely pointless, because you don't actually have to play at 5PM to 8PM to get into GM. In fact there's no good reason to demote at 5PM and promote at 8PM, when you can update everything in one go at 8PM. But who cares?
4. The excuse not to replace divisions with league tiers because they don't want to take away from people who enjoy divisions is a complete cop-out. All you have to do is divide the tier rank by the number of people in the tier and then multiply by 100. It's not hard.
I don't know if they answered it somewhere but will it be possible (via API?) to extract all the player MMR's to put them into a single big ranking for a 3rd party site (rankedftw for example)?
On July 08 2016 18:08 flyleaf wrote: I don't know if they answered it somewhere but will it be possible (via API?) to extract all the player MMR's to put them into a single big ranking for a 3rd party site (rankedftw for example)?
Yes, MMR will be part of the API. It will be roughly as expensive as digging through divisions (though I don't know if rankedftw's crawler is as powerful and thorough as sc2ranks' was).
On July 07 2016 14:53 paralleluniverse wrote: 3. We got new information that the Contender List is always active, but that the Contender Ladder at 5PM to 8PM, which as I originally noted was a needlessly bizarre contrivance, is completely pointless, because you don't actually have to play at 5PM to 8PM to get into GM. In fact there's no good reason to demote at 5PM and promote at 8PM, when you can update everything in one go at 8PM. But who cares?
It's not pointless. Why would you say it's pointless? It's pointless for the people who can't play during that time but I'm sure they picked the time based on when most people can/do play. And for those people, staggering it is much better than having it happen all at once.
On July 08 2016 18:08 flyleaf wrote: I don't know if they answered it somewhere but will it be possible (via API?) to extract all the player MMR's to put them into a single big ranking for a 3rd party site (rankedftw for example)?
Not entirely sure what you're trying to say but it's stated above that the MMR on one region =/= MMR of another. So pooling them will not necessarily give anyone an accurate indication of global skill level.
On July 07 2016 14:53 paralleluniverse wrote: 3. We got new information that the Contender List is always active, but that the Contender Ladder at 5PM to 8PM, which as I originally noted was a needlessly bizarre contrivance, is completely pointless, because you don't actually have to play at 5PM to 8PM to get into GM. In fact there's no good reason to demote at 5PM and promote at 8PM, when you can update everything in one go at 8PM. But who cares?
It's not pointless. Why would you say it's pointless? It's pointless for the people who can't play during that time but I'm sure they picked the time based on when most people can/do play. And for those people, staggering it is much better than having it happen all at once.
It's pointless because you always know where your position is as both GM and Contender is always shown and there's nothing special about 5PM to 8PM.
It changes no behavior, a rational player could ignore the demotion at 5PM and that would not change their chances of getting into or staying in GM.
On July 07 2016 14:53 paralleluniverse wrote: 3. We got new information that the Contender List is always active, but that the Contender Ladder at 5PM to 8PM, which as I originally noted was a needlessly bizarre contrivance, is completely pointless, because you don't actually have to play at 5PM to 8PM to get into GM. In fact there's no good reason to demote at 5PM and promote at 8PM, when you can update everything in one go at 8PM. But who cares?
It's not pointless. Why would you say it's pointless? It's pointless for the people who can't play during that time but I'm sure they picked the time based on when most people can/do play. And for those people, staggering it is much better than having it happen all at once.
I think he means that it's not the 100-yard-dash that it was initially presented to be, and that's a little disillusioning.
Perception: Players have 3 hours each day to get to the top 10 of this temporary league so they can get promoted into GM!
Reality: The league is permanent and parallel. As long as you are in the top 10 by 8pm local time, you get into GM.
I don't know if I'd go as far as to say it's pointless since there still is some potential for excitement there, but it's definitely dialed down from the original expectation.
On July 07 2016 14:53 paralleluniverse wrote: 3. We got new information that the Contender List is always active, but that the Contender Ladder at 5PM to 8PM, which as I originally noted was a needlessly bizarre contrivance, is completely pointless, because you don't actually have to play at 5PM to 8PM to get into GM. In fact there's no good reason to demote at 5PM and promote at 8PM, when you can update everything in one go at 8PM. But who cares?
It's not pointless. Why would you say it's pointless? It's pointless for the people who can't play during that time but I'm sure they picked the time based on when most people can/do play. And for those people, staggering it is much better than having it happen all at once.
I think he means that it's not the 100-yard-dash that it was initially presented to be, and that's a little disillusioning.
Perception: Players have 3 hours each day to get to the top 10 of this temporary league so they can get promoted into GM!
Reality: The league is permanent and parallel. As long as you are in the top 10 by 8pm local time, you get into GM.
I don't know if I'd go as far as to say it's pointless since there still is some potential for excitement there, but it's definitely dialed down from the original expectation.
I'm not disillusioned, I'm glad it's not the 3 hour dash (but that was the initial impression). That would be crazy. What happens if you can't play during those 3 hours, or if the timezone is bad?
I'm just saying there would be no difference between what is proposed and updating everything at 8PM, under both systems, the behavior of rational players and the information shown would be equivalent. So why demote at 5PM instead of just updating everything at 8PM?
On July 07 2016 14:53 paralleluniverse wrote: 3. We got new information that the Contender List is always active, but that the Contender Ladder at 5PM to 8PM, which as I originally noted was a needlessly bizarre contrivance, is completely pointless, because you don't actually have to play at 5PM to 8PM to get into GM. In fact there's no good reason to demote at 5PM and promote at 8PM, when you can update everything in one go at 8PM. But who cares?
It's not pointless. Why would you say it's pointless? It's pointless for the people who can't play during that time but I'm sure they picked the time based on when most people can/do play. And for those people, staggering it is much better than having it happen all at once.
I think he means that it's not the 100-yard-dash that it was initially presented to be, and that's a little disillusioning.
Perception: Players have 3 hours each day to get to the top 10 of this temporary league so they can get promoted into GM!
Reality: The league is permanent and parallel. As long as you are in the top 10 by 8pm local time, you get into GM.
I don't know if I'd go as far as to say it's pointless since there still is some potential for excitement there, but it's definitely dialed down from the original expectation.
I'm not disillusioned, I'm glad it's not the 3 hour dash (but that was the initial impression). That would be crazy. What happens if you can't play during those 3 hours, or if the timezone is bad?
I'm just saying there would be no difference between what is proposed and updating everything at 8PM, under both systems, the behavior of rational players would be equivalent. So why demote at 5PM instead of just updating everything at 8PM?
Why have a ladder display at all? Record everyone's games for all of SC2's life and on the last day before it shuts down, publish the ranking. The rational player is not going to do anything differently. Winning as many games as you can is always the best thing to do.
I can't fathom how you can't see the difference. You're in a thread about the ladder, the thing that tracks your progress in real time game-by-game, and you're saying that you don't see the point in its fundamental purpose. I'm not even sure how to explain what the purpose of the ladder is, or how the stagger represents a microcosm of what the ladder is. If you find ranking as trivial information to your rational mind, then don't worry about it.
On July 09 2016 11:02 paralleluniverse wrote: It's pointless because you always know where your position is as both GM and Contender is always shown and there's nothing special about 5PM to 8PM.
And this is just false... IDK what you think it is. Maybe it's your misunderstanding of it that is confusing you about its purpose.
The Contender List is a real-time reflection of the highest rated players who aren't currently in Grandmaster. It is constantly updating throughout the day, not just during the promotion window. At 5pm, the bottom 5% of Grandmaster are moved from Grandmaster to Masters. Those players will show up on the Contender List as long as they are within the top 200 non-GM players.
This is what Chris Lee wrote which is what we're all discussing right? It's the only source of this info afaik so I don't think there's any confusion about it. At 5pm, 10 players from GM get demoted to Masters. For simplicity, let's just assume they've performed well enough to make the Contender List. So GM now has 190 players and 10 new players have suddenly appeared on the Contender List. The recently demoted players want to know if they're in a position to defend their spot and get back into GM in 3 hours. The Masters players get to see the full ranking now with the new demotions included. A period of heightened competition commences, for anyone who cares about it. The system at least displays the info and gives people the knowledge required to enjoy that extra dimension of their performance. I guess if you don't care about it then you don't care but like I said, why are you interested in the ladder at all then? That's all it is is stuff like this.
Keeping the system the same but having 5pm and 8pm happen simultaneously instead would just be weird, as Contender players and the bottom 5% GM players never know where they stand, and some GM players would appear to not get demoted at all, as they may instantly re-promote if they place in top 10 Contender. If you just demote the bottom 5% no matter what, so they're out of GM for 24 hours at least, then that's really weird. Cuz what if those players really are the 191st-200th best players in the region? They share GM with the 201st-210th every other day? I think what Blizzard has done is a nice solution to the inherent roughness of promoting and demoting from GM, because they solve that problem while also creating a fun new aspect of the ladder that didn't exist before. Some players may ignore it, but some players get to indulge in the type of fun that ladder qualifiers provide, like regional challenger WCS.
On July 07 2016 14:53 paralleluniverse wrote: 3. We got new information that the Contender List is always active, but that the Contender Ladder at 5PM to 8PM, which as I originally noted was a needlessly bizarre contrivance, is completely pointless, because you don't actually have to play at 5PM to 8PM to get into GM. In fact there's no good reason to demote at 5PM and promote at 8PM, when you can update everything in one go at 8PM. But who cares?
It's not pointless. Why would you say it's pointless? It's pointless for the people who can't play during that time but I'm sure they picked the time based on when most people can/do play. And for those people, staggering it is much better than having it happen all at once.
I think he means that it's not the 100-yard-dash that it was initially presented to be, and that's a little disillusioning.
Perception: Players have 3 hours each day to get to the top 10 of this temporary league so they can get promoted into GM!
Reality: The league is permanent and parallel. As long as you are in the top 10 by 8pm local time, you get into GM.
I don't know if I'd go as far as to say it's pointless since there still is some potential for excitement there, but it's definitely dialed down from the original expectation.
I'm not disillusioned, I'm glad it's not the 3 hour dash (but that was the initial impression). That would be crazy. What happens if you can't play during those 3 hours, or if the timezone is bad?
I'm just saying there would be no difference between what is proposed and updating everything at 8PM, under both systems, the behavior of rational players would be equivalent. So why demote at 5PM instead of just updating everything at 8PM?
Why have a ladder display at all? Record everyone's games for all of SC2's life and on the last day before it shuts down, publish the ranking. The rational player is not going to do anything differently. Winning as many games as you can is always the best thing to do.
I can't fathom how you can't see the difference. You're in a thread about the ladder, the thing that tracks your progress in real time game-by-game, and you're saying that you don't see the point in its fundamental purpose. I'm not even sure how to explain what the purpose of the ladder is, or how the stagger represents a microcosm of what the ladder is. If you find ranking as trivial information to your rational mind, then don't worry about it.
On July 09 2016 11:02 paralleluniverse wrote: It's pointless because you always know where your position is as both GM and Contender is always shown and there's nothing special about 5PM to 8PM.
And this is just false... IDK what you think it is. Maybe it's your misunderstanding of it that is confusing you about its purpose.
The Contender List is a real-time reflection of the highest rated players who aren't currently in Grandmaster. It is constantly updating throughout the day, not just during the promotion window. At 5pm, the bottom 5% of Grandmaster are moved from Grandmaster to Masters. Those players will show up on the Contender List as long as they are within the top 200 non-GM players.
This is what Chris Lee wrote which is what we're all discussing right? It's the only source of this info afaik so I don't think there's any confusion about it. At 5pm, 10 players from GM get demoted to Masters. For simplicity, let's just assume they've performed well enough to make the Contender List. So GM now has 190 players and 10 new players have suddenly appeared on the Contender List. The recently demoted players want to know if they're in a position to defend their spot and get back into GM in 3 hours. The Masters players get to see the full ranking now with the new demotions included. A period of heightened competition commences, for anyone who cares about it. The system at least displays the info and gives people the knowledge required to enjoy that extra dimension of their performance. I guess if you don't care about it then you don't care but like I said, why are you interested in the ladder at all then? That's all it is is stuff like this.
Keeping the system the same but having 5pm and 8pm happen simultaneously instead would just be weird, as Contender players and the bottom 5% GM players never know where they stand, and some GM players would appear to not get demoted at all, as they may instantly re-promote if they place in top 10 Contender. If you just demote the bottom 5% no matter what, so they're out of GM for 24 hours at least, then that's really weird. Cuz what if those players really are the 191st-200th best players in the region? They share GM with the 201st-210th every other day? I think what Blizzard has done is a nice solution to the inherent roughness of promoting and demoting from GM, because they solve that problem while also creating a fun new aspect of the ladder that didn't exist before. Some players may ignore it, but some players get to indulge in the type of fun that ladder qualifiers provide, like regional challenger WCS.
The purpose of a ladder system is to rank players accurately.
The recently demoted players want to know if they're in a position to defend their spot and get back into GM in 3 hours.
They always know this. Both GM and Contender are always shown.
The Masters players get to see the full ranking now with the new demotions included.
They always know this. Both GM and Contender are always shown.
A period of heightened competition commences, for anyone who cares about it. The system at least displays the info and gives people the knowledge required to enjoy that extra dimension of their performance. I guess if you don't care about it then you don't care but like I said, why are you interested in the ladder at all then? That's all it is is stuff like this.
There is nothing "extra". Everything is already known, regardless of the demotion at 5PM.
Keeping the system the same but having 5pm and 8pm happen simultaneously instead would just be weird, as Contender players and the bottom 5% GM players never know where they stand, and some GM players would appear to not get demoted at all, as they may instantly re-promote if they place in top 10 Contender.
They always know this. Both GM and Contender are always shown.
So in conclusion, there's nothing gained from demoting at 5PM and promoting at 8PM. There is no new information, and there's nothing special about playing at 5PM to 8PM. And what if the top 11 in Contender gets a higher MMR than the 190th player in GM. Will the 190th player be demoted at 8PM (as he should be) because he's not in the top 200 anymore. If he remains, then preventing this inaccurate ranking is another reason to do everything in 1 go.
Bottom GM players have two ways to defend their spot: Before 5pm, they can fight to gain a higher spot in GM so that they reach the top 190 and aren't at risk. After 5pm, they can compete on the Contender List. They don't know their spot on the Contender List until 5pm. What does it matter if both GM and Contender are always shown if GM players can't be on the Contender List? They may as well be on different regions. You don't know how 191st-200th GM will place on the Contender List until they get placed on it. They simply don't "always know this" as you keep saying. There's no way to know this. How do they know this? The only thing I can imagine is that if the Contender List ranking is based on MMR and some third party tool keeps track of everyone's MMR and displays it on a web site. Or players can get an idea by looking up other players' profiles one at a time. But that's not what you're imagining though because you think it's enough that "both GM and Contender are always shown."
The Contender List is a real-time reflection of the highest rated players who aren't currently in Grandmaster.
This is the thing we're reading for a third time now and I still don't see how it's ambiguous and yet we each think it's totally obvious that it means something different. 4:59pm there are 200 GM players who are currently in GM, therefore there is no real-time reflection of any of them on the Contender List. At 5pm, 10 players get booted out and are now among the "highest rated players who aren't currently in GM" and so "the Contender List is a real-time reflection" of them. Players who were never in GM were on the Contender List the whole time and were probably paying attention to it, but the list was not complete until 5pm. Then they have until 8pm to enjoy competing with full information. The new information consists of the placement of each recently demoted player. 5pm-8pm is special because it's the only time the full list can be seen.
If the 11th best non-GM is better than the 190th GM, that is a totally separate issue from the 5pm-8pm thing. That is solved by demoting more people at 5pm. If you did it all in one go, you'd still have to decide how many can be demoted, just like the designers of this system decided on 10. Your suggestion is that the number of people demoted should be determined by the number of GM players with a lower MMR than Masters players, yeah? The 5pm-8pm system could do that just the same as a simultaneous system. Whether that's a good idea is its own discussion.
Some of the Master players already had MMRs higher than the bottom 10 GMs so it should require no extra effort for them to get promoted unless they happen to get passed up by multiple people. The 191-192 spots in this example are still in the top 10 of Contender, but it's really close, so they'll probably have to do some work to secure their spots in the 3 hours before the promotions happen. The 194-200 spots are gonna be pretty fiercely competitive because they're interwoven pretty tightly with Master players.
So if you're in the bottom 10 spots of GM, you would already be able to see where you would land when the demotions happen and what the likelihood is that you'll be able to keep your spot. If I'm #194 in GM and have 5490 MMR then I'd look at Contender and say to myself "5490... 5490... where would that put me... oh, #9, that's not good, I'm gonna get knocked out unless I win at least one more game" because I would know that I still had 3 players above me who were also facing demotions that day.
does this mean there are no seasons anymore? aka if i make it to gm once and then get demoted a few days later or so, will gm still appear in my highest achieved league?
Whoa, thanks paralleluniverse and NonY (and Excalibur_Z ) for bringing attention to this teeny tiny super cool bit. The various changes to my laddering experience in *cough* lower leagues sound nice and all but I didn't really pay attention to the daily master/GM contender thing.
I wonder if we have the technology or voodoo to have TL tag any bottom GM and contender streamers at the relevant hours... That would be truly lovely, as top master (contenders) and low GM league will be quite interesting to follow in the afternoon/evenings.
Well I guess I shouldn't get TOO carried away. Getting GM will maybe be less of a momentous thing with the daily chance of promotion and risk of demotion but this new way will make more immediate sense to us scrub viewers than the previous "No open slots" and MMR guesstimates and unknown promotion scheme.
On July 10 2016 02:33 The_Red_Viper wrote: It should just be updated live, i doubt that anyone will truly give a damn about that little tension in the time frame anyway (at least after a while)
The bottom 10-20 spots would have so much overlap with Master league that they'd be constantly changing, and that ends up being a lot less cool than it sounds. You'd look at GM league every couple minutes and wonder "what happened to Player A? oh, must have gotten demoted..." and it would be really hard to track individual players, not to mention it would be pretty lame to be in GM league for the span of a few seconds.
On July 10 2016 02:33 The_Red_Viper wrote: It should just be updated live, i doubt that anyone will truly give a damn about that little tension in the time frame anyway (at least after a while)
The bottom 10-20 spots would have so much overlap with Master league that they'd be constantly changing, and that ends up being a lot less cool than it sounds. You'd look at GM league every couple minutes and wonder "what happened to Player A? oh, must have gotten demoted..." and it would be really hard to track individual players, not to mention it would be pretty lame to be in GM league for the span of a few seconds.
Personally i wouldn't have a problem with that tbh, but i also would prefer a simple ranking based on mmr place 1 to 300000 :D
While this is cool, I just wonder how much of an effect it'll really have on playerbase and viewership? I'm gonna play the game as much as I have and I don't think any of my friends who have quit are gonna come back long term for something like this. Gotta wonder what the future for SC is in Blizzard's plans
On July 10 2016 02:33 The_Red_Viper wrote: It should just be updated live, i doubt that anyone will truly give a damn about that little tension in the time frame anyway (at least after a while)
The bottom 10-20 spots would have so much overlap with Master league that they'd be constantly changing, and that ends up being a lot less cool than it sounds. You'd look at GM league every couple minutes and wonder "what happened to Player A? oh, must have gotten demoted..." and it would be really hard to track individual players, not to mention it would be pretty lame to be in GM league for the span of a few seconds.
That's actually how Heroes of the Storm is right now. You do placements and get put into Diamond 3 (highest possible). You gain or lose ~200 points per game and get a promotion match at 1000 points. Win promo and you're D2. Do it again for D1. Do it again for Masters. Once in Masters, there are no more promotion matches. You just accumulate points. When you have enough points to be in the top 500, you are GM. If you lose the next game and you're not top 500 anymore, you're Masters. Lots of people hovering on the edge.
On July 10 2016 02:33 The_Red_Viper wrote: It should just be updated live, i doubt that anyone will truly give a damn about that little tension in the time frame anyway (at least after a while)
The bottom 10-20 spots would have so much overlap with Master league that they'd be constantly changing, and that ends up being a lot less cool than it sounds. You'd look at GM league every couple minutes and wonder "what happened to Player A? oh, must have gotten demoted..." and it would be really hard to track individual players, not to mention it would be pretty lame to be in GM league for the span of a few seconds.
That's actually how Heroes of the Storm is right now. You do placements and get put into Diamond 3 (highest possible). You gain or lose ~200 points per game and get a promotion match at 1000 points. Win promo and you're D2. Do it again for D1. Do it again for Masters. Once in Masters, there are no more promotion matches. You just accumulate points. When you have enough points to be in the top 500, you are GM. If you lose the next game and you're not top 500 anymore, you're Masters. Lots of people hovering on the edge.
Do people complain about that? Because to me this looks totally fine and i personally would prefer it that way tbh
On July 10 2016 02:33 The_Red_Viper wrote: It should just be updated live, i doubt that anyone will truly give a damn about that little tension in the time frame anyway (at least after a while)
The bottom 10-20 spots would have so much overlap with Master league that they'd be constantly changing, and that ends up being a lot less cool than it sounds. You'd look at GM league every couple minutes and wonder "what happened to Player A? oh, must have gotten demoted..." and it would be really hard to track individual players, not to mention it would be pretty lame to be in GM league for the span of a few seconds.
That's actually how Heroes of the Storm is right now. You do placements and get put into Diamond 3 (highest possible). You gain or lose ~200 points per game and get a promotion match at 1000 points. Win promo and you're D2. Do it again for D1. Do it again for Masters. Once in Masters, there are no more promotion matches. You just accumulate points. When you have enough points to be in the top 500, you are GM. If you lose the next game and you're not top 500 anymore, you're Masters. Lots of people hovering on the edge.
Do people complain about that? Because to me this looks totally fine and i personally would prefer it that way tbh
I haven't heard reactions but it's a pretty different situation from SC2. It certainly lacks stability. The way it works now, there are a ton of players within a few games of each other. Like winning three games in a row could get you from #500 to #250. There aren't enough players who can win a lot more than 50% of their games playing a ton of games to fill out all these ranks and make it stable. So people are kinda hovering, all slightly going up with inflation, but their current exact rank is more based on recent variance than it is reflective of skill. So the exact rankings are basically meaningless outside of the top. I think it would actually work better for SC2. When ladder reform was a topic of discussion, I advocated expanding GM beyond 200 people and having promotions/demotions more fluid.
I think what it really comes down to is whether you're trying to create a really special moment when getting into GM. People who have never played on a system that does a good job of creating that special moment won't know what they're missing. The more fluid it is, the less meaningful it is. With all the churn, the well-defined "I'm GM and he's not" is completely lost. I think what GM is supposed to be in SC2 is the last momentous occasion a player can have on the ladder until they're faced with just the cold hard numbers and ranking player-by-player, trying to climb to #1.
I grew up competing on ladders that were just the numbers, and common goals were top 1000, then top 500, then top 100, etc, until you're vying for #1. You had to make up the significance for yourself, and people in the community had an idea of what each meant. Modern ladders just replaced these numbers with other designations, which have context built-in so they're easier to understand. Anyway, there was never a time in SC2 when getting GM was significant to me. I've only been annoyed about not being able to get in when it's already full. So I can't speak to its value personally. But I definitely like the idea of GM like this for other people: it's a clear goal with a well-defined designation and once you achieve it you can then proceed to enjoy having an exact ranking to climb among the most skilled and competitive players. The Heroes of the Storm system has failed at that on both counts.
So now I'm against having it really fluid. I like it more meaningful. Players 201+ can deal with not knowing their rank. Getting into GM with this system will be a good goal for them.
On July 10 2016 22:05 `dunedain wrote: My bet is next season. So maybe some time next week? Fingers crossed.
the week after next week in fact because usually if they say that the season ends on 13 that means bonus pool won't keep growing but next season normally really begins the following week
On July 10 2016 22:05 `dunedain wrote: My bet is next season. So maybe some time next week? Fingers crossed.
Ladder lock was on the 10th
On July 11 2016 00:02 SirPirate wrote:
On July 10 2016 21:33 aLt)nirvana wrote: Any update on when this will be implemented?
It was confirmed it would be next Wednesday when the season changes (I believe in both a b.net blog post and on the Reddit Q&A thread last week).
Any link to this? I think they just said "very very soon" - still hoping for this week as I have no work this week .
In the map pool announcement it says that the new maps would come along with the ladder revamp.
Map pool announcement makes it sound like it won't be at the start of the season. It's just sometime during the season. Revamp will hit and when the revamp hits, those new maps "become" new season maps.
On July 10 2016 22:05 `dunedain wrote: My bet is next season. So maybe some time next week? Fingers crossed.
Ladder lock was on the 10th
On July 11 2016 00:02 SirPirate wrote:
On July 10 2016 21:33 aLt)nirvana wrote: Any update on when this will be implemented?
It was confirmed it would be next Wednesday when the season changes (I believe in both a b.net blog post and on the Reddit Q&A thread last week).
Any link to this? I think they just said "very very soon" - still hoping for this week as I have no work this week .
In the map pool announcement it says that the new maps would come along with the ladder revamp.
Map pool announcement makes it sound like it won't be at the start of the season. It's just sometime during the season. Revamp will hit and when the revamp hits, those new maps "become" new season maps.
On July 10 2016 22:05 `dunedain wrote: My bet is next season. So maybe some time next week? Fingers crossed.
Ladder lock was on the 10th
On July 11 2016 00:02 SirPirate wrote:
On July 10 2016 21:33 aLt)nirvana wrote: Any update on when this will be implemented?
It was confirmed it would be next Wednesday when the season changes (I believe in both a b.net blog post and on the Reddit Q&A thread last week).
Any link to this? I think they just said "very very soon" - still hoping for this week as I have no work this week .
In the map pool announcement it says that the new maps would come along with the ladder revamp.
Map pool announcement makes it sound like it won't be at the start of the season. It's just sometime during the season. Revamp will hit and when the revamp hits, those new maps "become" new season maps.
On July 10 2016 22:05 `dunedain wrote: My bet is next season. So maybe some time next week? Fingers crossed.
Ladder lock was on the 10th
On July 11 2016 00:02 SirPirate wrote:
On July 10 2016 21:33 aLt)nirvana wrote: Any update on when this will be implemented?
It was confirmed it would be next Wednesday when the season changes (I believe in both a b.net blog post and on the Reddit Q&A thread last week).
Any link to this? I think they just said "very very soon" - still hoping for this week as I have no work this week .
In the map pool announcement it says that the new maps would come along with the ladder revamp.
Map pool announcement makes it sound like it won't be at the start of the season. It's just sometime during the season. Revamp will hit and when the revamp hits, those new maps "become" new season maps.
The upcoming Ladder Revamp will bring with it a series of new maps. These will become the new map pools for Season 3.
does not sound like the way you'd write it if it was all simultaneous with new season. emphasizes simultaneity with the revamp, not the season. but ofc it could all be together
On July 10 2016 22:05 `dunedain wrote: My bet is next season. So maybe some time next week? Fingers crossed.
Ladder lock was on the 10th
On July 11 2016 00:02 SirPirate wrote:
On July 10 2016 21:33 aLt)nirvana wrote: Any update on when this will be implemented?
It was confirmed it would be next Wednesday when the season changes (I believe in both a b.net blog post and on the Reddit Q&A thread last week).
Any link to this? I think they just said "very very soon" - still hoping for this week as I have no work this week .
In the map pool announcement it says that the new maps would come along with the ladder revamp.
Map pool announcement makes it sound like it won't be at the start of the season. It's just sometime during the season. Revamp will hit and when the revamp hits, those new maps "become" new season maps.
The upcoming Ladder Revamp will bring with it a series of new maps. These will become the new map pools for Season 3.
does not sound like the way you'd write it if it was all simultaneous with new season. emphasizes simultaneity with the revamp, not the season. but ofc it could all be together
Seems like the Patch is live on Southeast Asia (Update instead of Play-Button) - so it will most likely come very soon to NA.
On July 10 2016 22:05 `dunedain wrote: My bet is next season. So maybe some time next week? Fingers crossed.
Ladder lock was on the 10th
On July 11 2016 00:02 SirPirate wrote:
On July 10 2016 21:33 aLt)nirvana wrote: Any update on when this will be implemented?
It was confirmed it would be next Wednesday when the season changes (I believe in both a b.net blog post and on the Reddit Q&A thread last week).
Any link to this? I think they just said "very very soon" - still hoping for this week as I have no work this week .
In the map pool announcement it says that the new maps would come along with the ladder revamp.
Map pool announcement makes it sound like it won't be at the start of the season. It's just sometime during the season. Revamp will hit and when the revamp hits, those new maps "become" new season maps.
The upcoming Ladder Revamp will bring with it a series of new maps. These will become the new map pools for Season 3.
does not sound like the way you'd write it if it was all simultaneous with new season. emphasizes simultaneity with the revamp, not the season. but ofc it could all be together
The patch is (going) live in SEA atm.
Regarding the wording, it's probably just poor phrasing, the new ladder season starts this week also, so it is rather simultaneous (if not completely).
I think that everyone will love the new ladder system until they realize that they are just as stuck as before. Everyone around you improves their skill just as fast as you do, so your MMR will not increase at all, it will just fluctuate up and down.
This is not an RPG where you will level up, it is like real life where you have to fight just to avoid leveling down.
I just played a game, where can I see my mmr? Or will it actually be live in the new season?
On July 12 2016 18:52 MockHamill wrote: I think that everyone will love the new ladder system until they realize that they are just as stuck as before. Everyone around you improves their skill just as fast as you do, so your MMR will not increase at all, it will just fluctuate up and down.
This is not an RPG where you will level up, it is like real life where you have to fight just to avoid levelling down.
At least you can actually see your "level". For competitive players that's way more convenient than the points and bonus pool system in combination with hidden mmr. This means that progress is way easier to track and because of that it comes closer to "levelling up". But you're right, it's not some linear process now.
On July 12 2016 18:52 MockHamill wrote: I think that everyone will love the new ladder system until they realize that they are just as stuck as before. Everyone around you improves their skill just as fast as you do, so your MMR will not increase at all, it will just fluctuate up and down.
This is not an RPG where you will level up, it is like real life where you have to fight just to avoid levelling down.
At least you can actually see your "level". For competitive players that's way more convenient than the points and bonus pool system in combination with hidden mmr. This means that progress is way easier to track and because of that it comes closer to "levelling up". But you're right, it's not some linear process now.
honestly I've been having no problems with the current system since I was masters. When you're not masters the unspent bonus pool is deceptive, sometimes you can be first in your gold division and not even being close to plat promotion. On the contrary when you're masters people are usually more active so it's not as deceptive except for very good masters with high winrates. Otherwise you just take their points and add their bonus pool to it to have a rough estimation of their "MMR".
That being said this change makes me happy, it'll be far easier to really assess your level in a given region.
On July 12 2016 18:54 Bojas wrote: I just played a game, where can I see my mmr? Or will it actually be live in the new season?
On July 12 2016 18:52 MockHamill wrote: I think that everyone will love the new ladder system until they realize that they are just as stuck as before. Everyone around you improves their skill just as fast as you do, so your MMR will not increase at all, it will just fluctuate up and down.
This is not an RPG where you will level up, it is like real life where you have to fight just to avoid levelling down.
At least you can actually see your "level". For competitive players that's way more convenient than the points and bonus pool system in combination with hidden mmr. This means that progress is way easier to track and because of that it comes closer to "levelling up". But you're right, it's not some linear process now.
honestly I've been having no problems with the current system since I was masters. When you're not masters the unspent bonus pool is deceptive, sometimes you can be first in your gold division and not even being close to plat promotion. On the contrary when you're masters people are usually more active so it's not as deceptive except for very good masters with high winrates. Otherwise you just take their points and add their bonus pool to it to have a rough estimation of their "MMR".
That being said this change makes me happy, it'll be far easier to really assess your level in a given region.
Yeah, you can quite easily judge your mmr by looking at your points and accounting for bonus pool. But honestly playing for points when it's mmr that matters makes no sense to me, so I generally rarely deplete my bonus pool.
Once you're higher on the masters ladder people generally have points beyond their bonus pool because it inflates over the season. So someone in top 8 could have a 50% winrate, but points that are greater than 100% of their bonus pool. Generally ranging between 100%-150%. Then again, that happens because they have higher mmr. But it just seems like a needlessly complicated system to me.
But I don't understand, is the patch live on EU? I saw a post on Reddit by Excalibur_Z and it looked live there, but I don't have a post-match screen that looks like that? (http://i.imgur.com/UPrb8y3.jpg)
On July 12 2016 18:54 Bojas wrote: I just played a game, where can I see my mmr? Or will it actually be live in the new season?
On July 12 2016 18:52 MockHamill wrote: I think that everyone will love the new ladder system until they realize that they are just as stuck as before. Everyone around you improves their skill just as fast as you do, so your MMR will not increase at all, it will just fluctuate up and down.
This is not an RPG where you will level up, it is like real life where you have to fight just to avoid levelling down.
At least you can actually see your "level". For competitive players that's way more convenient than the points and bonus pool system in combination with hidden mmr. This means that progress is way easier to track and because of that it comes closer to "levelling up". But you're right, it's not some linear process now.
honestly I've been having no problems with the current system since I was masters. When you're not masters the unspent bonus pool is deceptive, sometimes you can be first in your gold division and not even being close to plat promotion. On the contrary when you're masters people are usually more active so it's not as deceptive except for very good masters with high winrates. Otherwise you just take their points and add their bonus pool to it to have a rough estimation of their "MMR".
That being said this change makes me happy, it'll be far easier to really assess your level in a given region.
Yeah, you can quite easily judge your mmr by looking at your points and accounting for bonus pool. But honestly playing for points when it's mmr that matters makes no sense to me, so I generally rarely deplete my bonus pool.
Once you're higher on the masters ladder people generally have points beyond their bonus pool because it inflates over the season. So someone in top 8 could have a 50% winrate, but points that are greater than 100% of their bonus pool. Generally ranging between 100%-150%. Then again, that happens because they have higher mmr. But it just seems like a needlessly complicated system to me.
But I don't understand, is the patch live on EU? I saw a post on Reddit by Excalibur_Z and it looked live there, but I don't have a post-match screen that looks like that? (http://i.imgur.com/UPrb8y3.jpg)
It's live on SEA. Should go live on EU after maintenance tomorrow.
meh, the new league distribution is kind of lame. i've been placed into tier 3 diamond...i've only been in diamond once in the entire time (since wol) of playing sc2. i'm usually gold / plat. it kind of makes being in diamond seem less...notable. i mean, this was the highest league back in wol before master / grandmaster was a thing. got matched with someone in diamond and left right off the bat, as that would've otherwise meant a player two leagues above me (and way too strong an opponent). lol fml...
I'm not sure why the game does not just re-include demotions. If a player's MMR is visible, at least they know where they are and if they are on the cusp of demotion, which I believe would be a motivational tool to play harder to avoid demotion. Players who get lucky and place in divisions higher than their actual skill and being stuck in that division the entire season is demotivating for both the player stuck in the higher division, but also any player who plays them thinking that "divisions mean nothing". Every other relevant and large-scale multiplayer competitive game has demotions and that has not effected their player base.
It's just funny that SC2 has an extremely forgiving and misleading ranked system, while Overwatch has one of the most brutal and unforgiving ones. Great job blizz!
On July 13 2016 05:34 vult wrote: I'm not sure why the game does not just re-include demotions. If a player's MMR is visible, at least they know where they are and if they are on the cusp of demotion, which I believe would be a motivational tool to play harder to avoid demotion. Players who get lucky and place in divisions higher than their actual skill and being stuck in that division the entire season is demotivating for both the player stuck in the higher division, but also any player who plays them thinking that "divisions mean nothing". Every other relevant and large-scale multiplayer competitive game has demotions and that has not effected their player base.
It's just funny that SC2 has an extremely forgiving and misleading ranked system, while Overwatch has one of the most brutal and unforgiving ones. Great job blizz!
well, it could provoke ladder anxiety. for the allmighty gold tier 1 pro, his division is everything. when he sees "oh, i might be 1 or 2 losses away from demotion to tier 2" he could tell himself "nah, i dont wanna play ladder anymore, because i dont want to fall to tier 2."
i would also be happy about demotions, but i guess its the only way to avoid such situations.
On July 13 2016 05:34 vult wrote: I'm not sure why the game does not just re-include demotions. If a player's MMR is visible, at least they know where they are and if they are on the cusp of demotion, which I believe would be a motivational tool to play harder to avoid demotion. Players who get lucky and place in divisions higher than their actual skill and being stuck in that division the entire season is demotivating for both the player stuck in the higher division, but also any player who plays them thinking that "divisions mean nothing". Every other relevant and large-scale multiplayer competitive game has demotions and that has not effected their player base.
It's just funny that SC2 has an extremely forgiving and misleading ranked system, while Overwatch has one of the most brutal and unforgiving ones. Great job blizz!
well, it could provoke ladder anxiety. for the allmighty gold tier 1 pro, his division is everything. when he sees "oh, i might be 1 or 2 losses away from demotion to tier 2" he could tell himself "nah, i dont wanna play ladder anymore, because i dont want to fall to tier 2."
i would also be happy about demotions, but i guess its the only way to avoid such situations.
Ladder anxiety shouldn't be an excuse to not make a cohesive system that makes sense. Ladder anxiety is such a silly concept
On July 13 2016 05:17 GGzerG wrote: All I am curious is how Contender league filled up on NA in like 30 minutes, and now it is impossible to get into as well? lol
You just need to beat the MMR of place 200 and you are in - really nice system.
On July 13 2016 05:34 vult wrote: I'm not sure why the game does not just re-include demotions. If a player's MMR is visible, at least they know where they are and if they are on the cusp of demotion, which I believe would be a motivational tool to play harder to avoid demotion. Players who get lucky and place in divisions higher than their actual skill and being stuck in that division the entire season is demotivating for both the player stuck in the higher division, but also any player who plays them thinking that "divisions mean nothing". Every other relevant and large-scale multiplayer competitive game has demotions and that has not effected their player base.
It's just funny that SC2 has an extremely forgiving and misleading ranked system, while Overwatch has one of the most brutal and unforgiving ones. Great job blizz!
well, it could provoke ladder anxiety. for the allmighty gold tier 1 pro, his division is everything. when he sees "oh, i might be 1 or 2 losses away from demotion to tier 2" he could tell himself "nah, i dont wanna play ladder anymore, because i dont want to fall to tier 2."
i would also be happy about demotions, but i guess its the only way to avoid such situations.
Ladder anxiety shouldn't be an excuse to not make a cohesive system that makes sense. Ladder anxiety is such a silly concept
yeah true. but without such casuals, sc2 wouldnt have a player base and the casual HATES demotions ^^ and blizz dont want them to leave the game cuz of anxiety.
On July 13 2016 05:34 vult wrote: I'm not sure why the game does not just re-include demotions. If a player's MMR is visible, at least they know where they are and if they are on the cusp of demotion, which I believe would be a motivational tool to play harder to avoid demotion. Players who get lucky and place in divisions higher than their actual skill and being stuck in that division the entire season is demotivating for both the player stuck in the higher division, but also any player who plays them thinking that "divisions mean nothing". Every other relevant and large-scale multiplayer competitive game has demotions and that has not effected their player base.
It's just funny that SC2 has an extremely forgiving and misleading ranked system, while Overwatch has one of the most brutal and unforgiving ones. Great job blizz!
well, it could provoke ladder anxiety. for the allmighty gold tier 1 pro, his division is everything. when he sees "oh, i might be 1 or 2 losses away from demotion to tier 2" he could tell himself "nah, i dont wanna play ladder anymore, because i dont want to fall to tier 2."
i would also be happy about demotions, but i guess its the only way to avoid such situations.
Ladder anxiety shouldn't be an excuse to not make a cohesive system that makes sense. Ladder anxiety is such a silly concept
yeah true. but without such casuals, sc2 wouldnt have a player base and the casual HATES demotions ^^ and blizz dont want them to leave the game cuz of anxiety.
On July 02 2016 02:27 Xialos wrote: That's pretty nice, I have not played sc2 for 2 years but this change makes me want to buy legacy of the void and play again. That 2010 feeling
Agreed. Finally bought LotV this morning just to vote for a sensible ladder with my wallet.
On July 13 2016 07:52 [PkF] Wire wrote: MMR seems quite buggy to me. When I want to see it on my ladder profile it says 16
It is (as you can see in my second screenshot with "-7 MMR"). I didn't try relogging but that might fix it. It definitely fixes itself after that profile gets updated with another game.
MMR appears to be all over the place. People in the same division can have MMR as varied as 3000, 100, -10. People with a very small number of games seem to have anomalously low MMR. Is there a bug?
On July 13 2016 14:12 paralleluniverse wrote: MMR appears to be all over the place. People in the same division can have MMR as varied as 3000, 100, -10. People with a very small number of games seem to have anomalously low MMR. Is there a bug?
It's a display bug that fixes itself when that profile plays another game.
On July 13 2016 14:12 paralleluniverse wrote: MMR appears to be all over the place. People in the same division can have MMR as varied as 3000, 100, -10. People with a very small number of games seem to have anomalously low MMR. Is there a bug?
It's a display bug that fixes itself when that profile plays another game.
So it is a bug.
New – Viewing other people's MMR through the division page in the profile shows incorrectly scaled MMR if they've only played one game.
Interestingly, assuming a normal distribution, the median of the curve is slightly to the left of the Gold/Plat boundary, and despite Plat and Gold being 23%, Plat's rating range is 40 more than Gold. You would think Silver and Diamond would theoretically also be equidistant from the origin, yet Diamond's rating range is 240 more than Silver.
I assume we have enough data here to extrapolate the remaining Bronze X-coordinates AND identify the population breakdown of each tier (they're not equal), but I'm not familiar enough with cumulative distribution functions to be able to solve them.
So, according to the reddit link this means that the ranges overlap by one point, i.e. the end of B1 is 2600 and the start of S3is also 2600? Or are the reddit guys just sloppy?
Let's be real. This "Ladder Revamp" just scrapes past the bare minimum. But thankfully, it does pass. Not really a revamp, it is merely 3 changes: 1. displaying MMR, 2. splitting leagues into 3, 3. GM updates daily.
From a design point of view, it makes little sense. It looks like a system designed by committee in a fight over keeping the old progression system and skill-based ranking. Just look at the score screen. The whole system is obsessed with meaningless division ranks—it's everywhere—yet the points that determine division rank are nowhere to be found on this screen, instead MMR and a MMR bar is prominently displayed. Once you're off this screen, the MMR bar cannot be viewed and MMR is only found at the bottom corner of the division page, tucked far away, and division points again become prominent. What's with the contradictory emphasis?
What's an ordinary player not following the details of ladder design that have been scattered across the internet suppose to make of this? The score screen shows MMR, so that's what I should care about. But the division page shows points and ranks using points, so I should care about that instead? Even the Match History shows the change in points not MMR. And what has this MMR thing got to do with skill? It's called the "matchmaking rating" not the "skill rating"!
Objectively, it is a great mess.
For a person that knows MMR is skill, the next step is compiling MMR boundaries and the MMR distribution so that MMR can be interpreted as a percentile. This should have just been shown.
As for GM and Contender, they are correctly ranked by MMR, but no other league is. And we can again confirm that the 5PM to 8PM demotion/promotion window is, at best, pointless, because we publicly know at all times where everyone on GM and Contender stands, regardless of the 5PM demotion, and at worst, harmful to accuracy, if it turns out that more than 10 demotions/promotions are needed to make GM the top 200. Instead of very simply taking the top 200 active players ranked by MMR at 8PM and putting them in GM, this is yet another example of the strange contrivance that is everywhere in this ladder system.
It is extremely unlikely that any of these problems will ever change as it would require re-doing most of the UI, and these 3 changes that constitute the "revamp" has already taken a year. At best, the most that can be hoped for is displaying more information: displaying MMR percentile and having a ranking by MMR for everyone instead of having to rely on third parties for this information.
Finally, there's no reason why seasons can't be shorter. Given that Contender is up on day 1 and returning players only need to play 1 placement match, a 1 month or 4 week season is perfectly fine, and it's a good way of flushing inactive players off the ladder.
On July 13 2016 16:23 Mendelfist wrote: So, according to the reddit link this means that the ranges overlap by one point, i.e. the end of B1 is 2600 and the start of S3is also 2600? Or are the reddit guys just sloppy?
The values actually go into the decimals, they're just truncated in the client. There's probably not a single round value in the bunch =)
On July 13 2016 16:23 Mendelfist wrote: So, according to the reddit link this means that the ranges overlap by one point, i.e. the end of B1 is 2600 and the start of S3is also 2600? Or are the reddit guys just sloppy?
The values actually go into the decimals, they're just truncated in the client. There's probably not a single round value in the bunch =)
On July 13 2016 16:23 Mendelfist wrote: So, according to the reddit link this means that the ranges overlap by one point, i.e. the end of B1 is 2600 and the start of S3is also 2600? Or are the reddit guys just sloppy?
The values actually go into the decimals, they're just truncated in the client. There's probably not a single round value in the bunch =)
... How did you know that? :-)
Someone long ago told me something back when we were trying to figure out league and division tier offsets and I rolled my eyes and laughed at the reality.
Like how the Master offset from one season was 125.55. Or how the GM offset from that same season was 463.8375. Come on... really?? I really wish I was making this up.
On July 13 2016 16:23 Mendelfist wrote: So, according to the reddit link this means that the ranges overlap by one point, i.e. the end of B1 is 2600 and the start of S3is also 2600? Or are the reddit guys just sloppy?
The values actually go into the decimals, they're just truncated in the client. There's probably not a single round value in the bunch =)
... How did you know that? :-)
Someone long ago told me something back when we were trying to figure out league and division tier offsets and I rolled my eyes and laughed at the reality.
Like how the Master offset from one season was 125.55. Or how the GM offset from that same season was 463.8375. Come on... really?? I really wish I was making this up.
This offends my sense of elegance. There is still hidden information here. We have to start a project of calculating the exact boundaries immediately.
So the actual spans for the leagues total round numbers: Silver 560, Gold 320, Plat 360, Diamond 800. Since it seems they're trying to make each tier equal in rating range, the "186 187 187" for Silver probably ends up being "0-186.66 (truncated diff 186), 186.67-373.33 (truncated diff 187), 373.34-560 (truncated diff 187)". The actual offset for the league itself could be anywhere from 2973.00001 to 2973.99999.
Interestingly, assuming a normal distribution, the median of the curve is slightly to the left of the Gold/Plat boundary, and despite Plat and Gold being 23%, Plat's rating range is 40 more than Gold. You would think Silver and Diamond would theoretically also be equidistant from the origin, yet Diamond's rating range is 240 more than Silver.
I assume we have enough data here to extrapolate the remaining Bronze X-coordinates AND identify the population breakdown of each tier (they're not equal), but I'm not familiar enough with cumulative distribution functions to be able to solve them.
Tried to fit a normal to it, it's not a good fit. The normal that minimizes the square difference between the theoretical and observed cumulative probabilities has mean 3502.7961 and sd 614.2385, which gives predictions that are too low at the tails and too high in the middle. Definitely not normal.
so I haven't been following SC2 at all for a few month now but this ladder revamp looks just too good to not play again at least a little bit.
Got one question though: did Blizzard say anything about updating the automated tournament system in the recent weeks/months? I just checked and still seems to be the same 3-round 1v1 bo1s throughout that it was when I left. I would really love to see bigger automated tourneys with more rounds that also allow bo3 and bo5, so any news on that?
I have to work a shit ton today, but the SC2 icon on my desktop is staring at me. I've always enjoyed grinding games, but now I seriously fear that the addiction might come back once I click on "find match" for the first time. The criticism stated towards the revamped system is valid, but at least we FINALLY have a system that shows exactly where you're at.
On July 13 2016 20:24 Yello wrote: Got one question though: did Blizzard say anything about updating the automated tournament system in the recent weeks/months? I just checked and still seems to be the same 3-round 1v1 bo1s throughout that it was when I left. I would really love to see bigger automated tourneys with more rounds that also allow bo3 and bo5, so any news on that?
There are 6 round tourneys on fridays to sundays with groupstages, but apart from trophy toppings idk if they added more stuff.
how big is the mmr decay? i was curious my mmr so i lost a game and ended up with 4350, but my last game was in december. do we know if its like -100 a month, if there's a cap on how much mmr you lose, capped on your original league etc?
On July 14 2016 01:11 rauk wrote: how big is the mmr decay? i was curious my mmr so i lost a game and ended up with 4350, but my last game was in december. do we know if its like -100 a month, if there's a cap on how much mmr you lose, capped on your original league etc?
On July 14 2016 01:11 rauk wrote: how big is the mmr decay? i was curious my mmr so i lost a game and ended up with 4350, but my last game was in december. do we know if its like -100 a month, if there's a cap on how much mmr you lose, capped on your original league etc?
Since this new ladder change, almost all my wins give me less than 10 points (against equal MMR) and I lose tons (-20), so I'm stuck at 13 points with a 13-8 winrate. My MMR should be closer to Master 2 (4800), but I'm stuck at super low Masters 3. What is this all about?
On July 14 2016 01:51 JayuSC2 wrote: Since this new ladder change, almost all my wins give me less than 10 points (against equal MMR) and I lose tons (-20), so I'm stuck at 13 points with a 13-8 winrate. My MMR should be closer to Master 2 (4800), but I'm stuck at super low Masters 3. What is this all about?
I assume you're talking about +10/-20 ladder points? Those are derived from the gap between your current non-bonus-pool points and your opponent's MMR, NOT your MMR vs his MMR. If you're facing same-MMR opponents and only earning +10/-20 then it means that your points are higher than your MMR for your particular tier, so they will gradually adjust downward to reflect that.
You're saying you have 4800 MMR and 13 points? How does that compare to others in your division and how much they're earning and losing per game?
On July 14 2016 01:51 JayuSC2 wrote: Since this new ladder change, almost all my wins give me less than 10 points (against equal MMR) and I lose tons (-20), so I'm stuck at 13 points with a 13-8 winrate. My MMR should be closer to Master 2 (4800), but I'm stuck at super low Masters 3. What is this all about?
I assume you're talking about +10/-20 ladder points? Those are derived from the gap between your current non-bonus-pool points and your opponent's MMR, NOT your MMR vs his MMR. If you're facing same-MMR opponents and only earning +10/-20 then it means that your points are higher than your MMR for your particular tier, so they will gradually adjust downward to reflect that.
You're saying you have 4800 MMR and 13 points? How does that compare to others in your division and how much they're earning and losing per game?
Yea, I should've mentioned that, cause that's the thing that makes no sense at all. Most people are way below my MMR, even the rank 1 in my division (has less than 100 MMR than me, but at the same time has over 100 points, with less games). There are a few others though, who seem to have the same issue as I do (high MMR, very low points with a decent win rate).
wow I actually struggled like a noob to get master 3. It's strange since I've been easily master for seasons, so I should have been in m3 without question since master league is bigger. I admit I even expected to be master 2.
On July 14 2016 03:07 [PkF] Wire wrote: wow I actually struggled like a noob to get master 3. It's strange since I've been easily master for seasons, so I should have been in m3 without question since master league is bigger. I admit I even expected to be master 2.
didn't master actually get smaller now? wasn't it like 7-8%?
On July 14 2016 03:07 [PkF] Wire wrote: wow I actually struggled like a noob to get master 3. It's strange since I've been easily master for seasons, so I should have been in m3 without question since master league is bigger. I admit I even expected to be master 2.
didn't master actually get smaller now? wasn't it like 7-8%?
On July 14 2016 03:07 [PkF] Wire wrote: wow I actually struggled like a noob to get master 3. It's strange since I've been easily master for seasons, so I should have been in m3 without question since master league is bigger. I admit I even expected to be master 2.
didn't master actually get smaller now? wasn't it like 7-8%?
On July 14 2016 03:07 [PkF] Wire wrote: wow I actually struggled like a noob to get master 3. It's strange since I've been easily master for seasons, so I should have been in m3 without question since master league is bigger. I admit I even expected to be master 2.
didn't master actually get smaller now? wasn't it like 7-8%?
So it is possible to be promoted under provisional MMR.
I had been on Silver 3 with a full bar for a while and got promoted to Silver 2, while still under provisional MMR. The promotion is not immediate upon reaching full bar.
But you don't get promoted to where you should be, which according to my non-provisional MMR is Gold 1.
Seems like it wants to be extra extra cautious when you have a provisional rating. That's good info, thanks. What was your provisional MMR when you finally did get promoted? What was the buffer?
On July 15 2016 17:10 Excalibur_Z wrote: Seems like it wants to be extra extra cautious when you have a provisional rating. That's good info, thanks. What was your provisional MMR when you finally did get promoted? What was the buffer?
Before promotion: MMR: 3361 Provisional MMR: 2778
After promotion: MMR: 3425 Provisional MMR: 2841
Silver Tier 2 to Tier 3 boundary: 2786
Note that passing the boundary with provisional MMR doesn't ensure promotion, as I've had a full bar 2 or 3 times before.
My MMR stop being provisional after 24 games, then I got promoted to Gold 1.
Provisional MMR does not converge to true MMR. But it should.
The game before promotion I was Silver 2, with provisional MMR 2768 and true MMR 3352, a big gap. After the promotion game, my true MMR was 3396. In fact, from the start, my provisional MMR was 2705, and it never really changed much despite the gap.
Provisional MMR doesn't make much sense.
One would expect that the correct way to do provisional MMR is MMR-k*sigma, where k starts off at 2 and decreases to 0 over 25 games, allowing for promotion along the way depending on provisional MMR.
So before promotion the MMR gap between actual and provisional was 583, and after it was 584. There's probably some rounding there which means it actually stayed the same. On SEA, my actual-provisional gap was 513 (3740-3227). Maybe the gap stays at 2 standard deviations? It would make more sense to me if it gradually converged toward your actual MMR, but expressing confidence in stdev terms also seems reasonable (if a bit more jarring for the player).
On July 14 2016 03:07 [PkF] Wire wrote: wow I actually struggled like a noob to get master 3. It's strange since I've been easily master for seasons, so I should have been in m3 without question since master league is bigger. I admit I even expected to be master 2.
didn't master actually get smaller now? wasn't it like 7-8%?
wasn't that only how Blizz wanted it to be, but the real distribution was different? uhh, I'm not sure anymore
Rankedftw had it at 8%, since basically the release of LotV. If it's actually 4% currently like they said it should be, then it makes sense that it's harder now.
One small rant I'd like to make is that I actually tried for the first time to get back into 1v1. But the truth as far as I can see is that the new system sucks.
Basically what happened is that I got stuck in gold 1 with 4k mmr. I had easily 60%+ win loss ratio vs my diamond opponents and after 20+ games of that I was still stuck in gold 1 with that mmr. It's super weird because appearantly gold 1 stops at 3200'ish but i was at 4k blank and no promotion to plat 3 at all.
I also don't like the fact that if i lose 1 single game then my promotion bar goes all the way down and I need like 5-6 wins in a row to get anything done.
It says in the ? button popup that you have a provisional MMR, which can delay your promotions. The provisional state lasts for about 25 games. After that, your real MMR takes over.
Yeah, Jan1997, it just would have taken playing a little more in your case I think. If you were winning even 50% versus Diamond, or even being placed against them, it's probably just needing some more games to "validate" statistically its sense of your ranking. So probably not that much different than before except actually showing numbers in this system.
Is it possible to get demoted to a lower tier within a league during a season? Like from Gold 1 to Gold 2?
On July 18 2016 02:44 LordYama wrote: Yeah, Jan1997, it just would have taken playing a little more in your case I think. If you were winning even 50% versus Diamond, or even being placed against them, it's probably just needing some more games to "validate" statistically its sense of your ranking. So probably not that much different than before except actually showing numbers in this system.
Is it possible to get demoted to a lower tier within a league during a season? Like from Gold 1 to Gold 2?
On July 18 2016 02:44 LordYama wrote: Yeah, Jan1997, it just would have taken playing a little more in your case I think. If you were winning even 50% versus Diamond, or even being placed against them, it's probably just needing some more games to "validate" statistically its sense of your ranking. So probably not that much different than before except actually showing numbers in this system.
Is it possible to get demoted to a lower tier within a league during a season? Like from Gold 1 to Gold 2?
No, demotions are still disabled.
I wish they brought it back... Having MMR shown means nothing if you can't get demoted.
On July 18 2016 02:44 LordYama wrote: Yeah, Jan1997, it just would have taken playing a little more in your case I think. If you were winning even 50% versus Diamond, or even being placed against them, it's probably just needing some more games to "validate" statistically its sense of your ranking. So probably not that much different than before except actually showing numbers in this system.
Is it possible to get demoted to a lower tier within a league during a season? Like from Gold 1 to Gold 2?
No, demotions are still disabled.
I wish they brought it back... Having MMR shown means nothing if you can't get demoted.
It's probably fine honestly. People will memorize the MMR min and max for their tier and you'll instantly recognize whether your opponent was a "real" same/next-leaguer or whether they're below the MMR floor. If it's the latter then they get demoted next season anyway.
I really have to resist the urge to just post "too little, too late".
The screwed up ladder-system is - in my opinion - one of the main reasons why the SC2-community has deteriorated as it did. The Warcraft 3 system was much better. And the Hearthstone system IS currently much better. It is both easier to understand, unforgiving in its own way (you can lose ranks rather quickly if you're on a bad streak) but also motivating to push for "legend".
I never got the concept of random divisions that say nothing about your skill or the skill of the people that you are ranked with. Division rank has always been completely irrelevant. They should have reworked this in early days of WoL.
On July 16 2016 01:16 Excalibur_Z wrote: So before promotion the MMR gap between actual and provisional was 583, and after it was 584. There's probably some rounding there which means it actually stayed the same. On SEA, my actual-provisional gap was 513 (3740-3227). Maybe the gap stays at 2 standard deviations? It would make more sense to me if it gradually converged toward your actual MMR, but expressing confidence in stdev terms also seems reasonable (if a bit more jarring for the player).
Yes. I just checked by screenshots, the gap between provisional MMR and true MMR is always 583 and 584 for me, so I think you're correct about how it's working. Still, it should converge.
i always thought all the "window dressing" around the Ladder had no impact on my fun level. Therefore, i believed this whole Ladder revamp thing would have no effect on me. I always thought that as long as i get a steady stream of similarly matched opponents when pressing the "Find Match" button that that is all i really needed.
i was wrong. the game is more fun with this new ladder system. i'm in Diamond tier 2 and in the top 8 i play as Random. Protoss is my worst race. I matched up against the guy who is #1 in my Diamond Tier2 division. he plays Zerg. I'm 0-2 against this guy. I drew Protoss. he fast expanded.. and i 4-gated him and won.
the new ladder system gave more meaning and context to the game. i never thought i'd be the type of guy to fall for this Ladder Season window dressing crap.
i'd like to grudgingly congratulate David Kim and the Blizzard team for improving the ladder.
On July 19 2016 00:16 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i always thought all the "window dressing" around the Ladder had no impact on my fun level. Therefore, i believed this whole Ladder revamp thing would have no effect on me. I always thought that as long as i get a steady stream of similarly matched opponents when pressing the "Find Match" button that that is all i really needed.
i was wrong. the game is more fun with this new ladder system. i'm in Diamond tier 2 and in the top 8 i play as Random. Protoss is my worst race. I matched up against the guy who is #1 in my Diamond Tier2 division. he plays Zerg. I'm 0-2 against this guy. I drew Protoss. he fast expanded.. and i 4-gated him and won.
the new ladder system gave more meaning and context to the game. i never thought i'd be the type of guy to fall for this Ladder Season window dressing crap.
i'd like to grudgingly congratulate David Kim and the Blizzard team for improving the ladder.
Yes the ladder revamp turned out better then I thought. It is great that such a small change can improve the enjoyment so much.
Now I just hope the will change Tempest supply to 6.
I realy like the new update for me it brought back a sense of progression to the game. Once I hit masters back in wol things slowed down for me somewhat. I've never been good enough to reach gm so I've just floated around in masters. Now with the new tier system I can shoot to reach masters 1. I have a goal agian.😃
The leagues are confusing. But now, compared to before, you can just ignore it and focus and the MMR which is the thing that really matters.
However i think that the MMR gains and losses are a little wacky. With 5000 MMR i played guys with like 5300 MMR and still lost like 15 MMR points, even if the guy obviously was much stronger than i was
If you play opponents who're playing unranked - their MMR can have crazy shifts. I don't know if it's a bug, or intentional or what else. Friend was doing a bronze 3 to masters 1 stream and some pretty wonky numbers came up.
I have another screenshot of him in silver where he definitely didn't have provisional MMR anymore.
Umm, against other opponents who played ranked, even while provisional MMR was still active, the changes were normal (in the twenties, thirties range), but victories against players who played unranked showed the drastic change for them as pictured above.
Someone who is online during the upcoming GM update should look into what happens when more than 10 players from Contender are in the top 200 MMR. Do more than 10 promotions into GM happen, or do only the top 10 get promoted even if other should be too?
On July 20 2016 01:30 pundurs wrote: I have another screenshot of him in silver where he definitely didn't have provisional MMR anymore.
Umm, against other opponents who played ranked, even while provisional MMR was still active, the changes were normal (in the twenties, thirties range), but victories against players who played unranked showed the drastic change for them as pictured above.
That's very interesting. Thanks! I really like following Bronze to Master journeys since it helps to get a good idea of the speed of progression.
On July 20 2016 01:33 paralleluniverse wrote: Someone who is online during the upcoming GM update should look into what happens when more than 10 players from Contender are in the top 200 MMR. Do more than 10 promotions into GM happen, or do only the top 10 get promoted even if other should be too?
My prediction is that a max of 10 GMs get demoted and then replaced by Contenders, meaning after that 3-hour window there could still be that #11 Contender with higher MMR than the #190 GM.
On July 20 2016 02:13 Excalibur_Z wrote: That's very interesting. Thanks! I really like following Bronze to Master journeys since it helps to get a good idea of the speed of progression.
It took an absurd amount of games. The score was like 140-11 and ~23 hours. Here's the VOD if you wanna skim over it.
On July 20 2016 02:51 LordOfDabu wrote: You see this if the opponent is doing placements (presumably not their last placement):
I haven't figured out how random team games work yet. Does it take a straight average of the team?
Yeah their final placement shows their new MMR and the MMR change for that game. I've been watching the VOD off and on today and for that -450 game, it was that player's second game of the season (which means it had to be unranked or else he would have seen a screenshot like the above). Really weird, because the math is probably right for a provisional state, but the fact that a 2499 was matched with a 3600 is crazy to me (that has to translate to 100% win probability).
For Random Teams, the matching uses your team's average against the enemy team's average (so 3000+3500 vs 3100+3400) but the rating change is applied individually against the other team's average (so for you it would be 3000 vs 3250 and for your teammate it would be 3500 vs 3250).
On July 20 2016 02:13 Excalibur_Z wrote: That's very interesting. Thanks! I really like following Bronze to Master journeys since it helps to get a good idea of the speed of progression.
It took an absurd amount of games. The score was like 140-11 and ~23 hours. Here's the VOD if you wanna skim over it.
As we can see here, the closer the MMR values of both players, the closer the rating change for that game gets to 21-23. The outliers from games with unranked opponents also show an MMR gain of 46 (for 1101 and 835 rating difference games), which must be the maximum (the minimum being 0).
There's probably a lot more to be gleaned from this dataset, such as learning the relative trends of system confidence (you can see in the second chart that the rating difference gradually closes).
This is pretty fun and cool stuff. Thanks again for sharing!
You can see that at the time of promotion, there are people on Contender with MMR more than enough to be promoted, who meet the activity requirement (10 games in 3 weeks) that don't get promoted into GM, but people below them do.
On July 20 2016 02:13 Excalibur_Z wrote: That's very interesting. Thanks! I really like following Bronze to Master journeys since it helps to get a good idea of the speed of progression.
It took an absurd amount of games. The score was like 140-11 and ~23 hours. Here's the VOD if you wanna skim over it.
As we can see here, the closer the MMR values of both players, the closer the rating change for that game gets to 21-23. The outliers from games with unranked opponents also show an MMR gain of 46 (for 1101 and 835 rating difference games), which must be the maximum (the minimum being 0).
There's probably a lot more to be gleaned from this dataset, such as learning the relative trends of system confidence (you can see in the second chart that the rating difference gradually closes).
This is pretty fun and cool stuff. Thanks again for sharing!
From what I can tell it looks like (approximately):
Change in MMR = +/- 22 + 0.025x(opponent's MMR less your MMR))
obviously '+' if you win and '-' if you lose.
The data doesn't fit perfectly.
So if you play someone with 100 MMR more than you and you win you should get 22 + 0.025*100 = 24.5 increase in your MMR (maybe rounded up to 25). Your opponent's MMR falls by -22+0.025x-100=-24.5.
Data fits much better the more games that are played. Where there are large outliers it's in the first half of the dataset mostly.
Interesting that it takes over 140 games to get to 5000 MMR which is probably below this person's true level. And it takes 80 games to get to 4000 MMR (my level) which is way below this person's level.
MMR doesn't use rounding. All those decimal values are preserved internally (you can tell because the tiers cover equal MMR ranges but some tiers are off by one, so Gold being 3160, 3266, 3373, 3480 has a gap of 106, 107, 107 but are actually 3160-3266.66, 3266.66-3373.33, 3373.33-3480 for 106.66 each) even though the whole numbers shown on the client are truncated. So, decimal values for MMR gains are very possible and very important when deducing exact rating calculations.
The formula itself would have to be exponential. Something like 46 * (1 / (1 + (10^(-(rating_diff)/800)))) where going from rating_diff 100 to 200 has a bigger impact than going from 600 to 700.
The 140 games to 5k MMR (this account reached Grandmaster after the final game, if you were wondering) was only because it was a borrowed account that started from 2k MMR, below the Bronze floor. Placement matches swing your MMR pretty widely, probably 100-150 per match, which never puts you that far away from either end of the spectrum if you're starting a new account, since the seed MMR is around 3200-3300.
Under TrueSkill, your change in MMR depends on your MMR uncertainty as well as the difference between the 2 players MMRs.
And the relationship between the change in MMR and the difference between the 2 players MMRs is nonlinear, but approximately linear as long as the winner does not have significantly larger MMR than the loser.
Yeah it's a result of that bug where the league boundaries shifted way way up for a few hours (Gold 3 going up to 5000 or so). In order to fix them, rather than rolling back to the old values, they just recalculated. It's going to make that page a little inaccurate since it means replacing filled cells, which isn't going to get quite as much crowdsourcing support as if those cells were empty at the start of the season.
Hey Excalibur, do you have current ranges of the leagues based on population?
They said they were increasing the size of masters.. doubling it from 2 to 4% But myself and several others I know who were low masters are now tier 1 diamonds.. I'm personally a long way from masters where as prior to the ladder reset I was masters the previous 5 or 6 seasons
I'm not upset or anything.. just wondering if it's actually 4% now or if it's the 2% claim that was inaccurate
On August 03 2016 01:13 paralleluniverse wrote: What bug? How does something like that happen?
It almost seemed like someone pushed the recalculation button but only for the top 1% or so of players. Master 1 changed to 6500-6611, Master 3 was 6280-6390, Diamond 2 was 5746-5973 (NA) 5760-5933 (EU). Then apparently it was erroneously pushed to the live servers. This happened on Friday afternoon and lasted for about 2-3 hours.
On August 03 2016 01:40 Ignorant prodigy wrote: Hey Excalibur, do you have current ranges of the leagues based on population?
They said they were increasing the size of masters.. doubling it from 2 to 4% But myself and several others I know who were low masters are now tier 1 diamonds.. I'm personally a long way from masters where as prior to the ladder reset I was masters the previous 5 or 6 seasons
I'm not upset or anything.. just wondering if it's actually 4% now or if it's the 2% claim that was inaccurate
The targets are 4/23/23/23/23/4. What that means is that the 96th percentile of users last season had an MMR of 4640 or higher, so that's the new boundary for Master 3.
One thing they mentioned in some Q&As is that they were messing with the percentiles for Master league during HotS/LotV without revealing their new target. They tried 6%, they tried 8%, but we continued to operate on the assumption that it was 2% the entire time because we didn't have any updated information and the community's existing tracking methods weren't aligned with what they use internally, so we didn't know how close we were. We don't know what the target was before the ladder revamp, but we know what it is now.
i'm playing 2v2s on WoL with a customer of mine as my team mate. and we get matched up with people in our tier and division all the time. it has created several rivalries with other teams. Kramerica Industries and Ball0 are in a war to end all wars.
i'm trying to get her to play HotS or LotV but she says its too complicated.