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On January 01 2014 11:01 Spirit09 wrote: This seems to have taken me from Diamond (and MMR going up, according to MMR tool) in one season to Silver in the next.
Note that the league distributions have changed as well, so it's not all inactivity delay that took you from Diamond to Silver. Currently, Silver and Bronze make up about the bottom 60% of active players.
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On January 02 2014 02:45 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2014 11:01 Spirit09 wrote:On January 01 2014 06:56 korona wrote: Yes. Many seem to have experienced similar (no MMR reset even if skipped full season in every mode). Also some of these cases seem to have experienced 'chain decay' when they came back. I'm one. I've had at least one season (several I think) where I've not played and then when I've come back in the following season its only been 1 placement match contrary to the stated MMR reset. Not sure what chain decay is, but before this issue was public I had a period where I could only play 2-3 games in a month, which lasted for about 3 months. Now we know about decay it seems this is the absolute worst thing I could have done as I must of triggered several periods of maximum deflation. From my match history I can identify 2 periods of 4 weeks of complete inactivity. This seems to have taken me from Diamond (and MMR going up, according to MMR tool) in one season to Silver in the next. Note that the league distributions have changed as well, so it's not all inactivity delay that took you from Diamond to Silver. Currently, Silver and Bronze make up about the bottom 60% of active players. League offsets and thresholds were changed last time nearly half years ago in start of June.
What he describes sounds valid. He has two longer than 4 weeks inactivity periods. If his MMR originally was in low diamond range, the first max decay would drop his MMR around high gold / low platinum range. The second decay would drop his MMR to ~ mid to high silver MMR range. Of course this presumes he did not play much when he came back before the last inactivity period (his MMR did not increase much from the high gold/low plat range).
Edit: Based on the Blizzard's recent article one could expect that the offsets & thresholds will changed in couple of days when the new season begins. Interesting to see if they are the only changes.
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On January 02 2014 04:08 korona wrote: League offsets and thresholds were changed last time nearly half years ago in start of June.
That may be, but their article strongly implied that today's odd distribution was not primarily due to their inactivity decay change.
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On January 02 2014 09:57 Lysenko wrote: That may be, but their article strongly implied that today's odd distribution was not primarily due to their inactivity decay change. Well, what else do you expect than them playing it down? They can't admit that all this crap is their fault alone, right? The odd distribution is not due to decay directly, that's true. But indirectly it affected thousands of players that got matched against decayed players.
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On January 02 2014 10:05 BurningRanger wrote: Well, what else do you expect than them playing it down? They can't admit that all this crap is their fault alone, right?
Wow, hold up there. I don't see them blaming gremlins or cosmic rays for it. Obviously it's the result of something they changed.
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I just started playing again after a long hiatus and this is frustrating. I was diamond way back in the day, and pretty middle-of-the-road as far as diamond players go. Now I'm in bronze and while my skill has probably legitimately decreased, this is just dumb. I've been 4gating every match (is this still a thing anymore?), winning about 60%, losing my last two against a former masters player. It's so stupid that I can't get out of bronze because whenever I go on a winning streak I play against some former masters player who actually knows their shit and blows me out of the water. ARG
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On January 02 2014 09:57 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On January 02 2014 04:08 korona wrote: League offsets and thresholds were changed last time nearly half years ago in start of June. That may be, but their article strongly implied that today's odd distribution was not primarily due to their inactivity decay change. They have long history of watering down 'negative sounding things' in their articles. Thus their articles should never be taken word for word. E.g. in the same article they claim that the effect of maximum decay would be ~10 times smaller than it actually is: "At its maximum value, the adjustment is small; it’s the equivalent of losing a few games." (there was community speculation did they mean max decay for each day during the 2 to 4 weeks time frame, so their claim would be 'true' if looked at from certain viewpoint)
The actual maximum decay is worth about 20 losses (unless they have changed it silently this season just before the article. I was going to check this via MMR tool data, but its server has been down since Dec 18th and I had not downloaded the most recent data. My old data that was taken 4.5 to 5 weeks after the launch of this season did not contain suitable decayed accounts). This (~20 losses) has been verified via both MMR tool data and even by looking at plain character profiles. For example there are lots of characters out there that have played until they have been promoted (MMR has risen over the threshold). Then they have gone inactive for more than 4 weeks and after the inactivity have played their placements for new season. Their league placement has been 1 to 2 leagues lower just like you would expect (the max decay is little more than MMR range of 1 typical league). Some of these accounts have immediately gone inactive again and once again have dropped 1 to 2 leagues in start of the following season (depending on which league range their MMR has dropped. Size of the MMR range of different leagues differs). If the max decay was only worth of 'few matches', then these character accounts would not have dropped multiple leagues (and such drastic league threshold changes are out of the question). To pass one league MMR range it usually requires ~ 20 wins more than losses (you can find plenty of empirical examples regarding this). That is not 'few matches'.
There is a chance that there could have been very small adjustments regarding the offsets since beginning of June. But they would have been so small that it has not been worth e.g. to adjust MMR tool offsets (larger offset changes are usually almost immediately visible from MMR tool data and user graphs would go erratic). It is likely that there has been no changes since start of June. Of course there are multiple other logically minor things that affect the ladders too, such as player base slowly decreasing, unranked mode, global play (as these accounts are played less, they also more likely face decay), new players, players who faced full MMR reset (did not play for full season), MMR abusers, etc.
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On December 30 2013 01:33 ImperialFist wrote: the mmr decay does not seem to be that huge, I only played one game last season to be placed (in masters), played my placement for this season just now and got masters again, after all I've been hearing I thought I would get plat or something. maybe you really had a huge mmr before ? I was top 25 masters then the next season i played only 1 game and still was masters after that season i did it again only played 1 game and wup plat ! :D
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On January 02 2014 21:45 Mantaza wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2013 01:33 ImperialFist wrote: the mmr decay does not seem to be that huge, I only played one game last season to be placed (in masters), played my placement for this season just now and got masters again, after all I've been hearing I thought I would get plat or something. maybe you really had a huge mmr before ? Master league is indeed huge regarding size of its MMR range compared to other leagues. E.g. MMR range from low border of master to low border of GM fits roughly 2.3 times max decay on EU server and 1.4 times max decay on NA server.
On January 02 2014 21:45 Mantaza wrote: I was top 25 masters then the next season i played only 1 game and still was masters after that season i did it again only played 1 game and wup plat ! :D
Yes. If your MMR was near the low border of master range then max decay would drop it to high platinum range.
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On January 02 2014 11:41 korona wrote: They have long history of watering down 'negative sounding things' in their articles. Thus their articles should never be taken word for word.
I'm not talking about trying to read tea leaves in their tone.
Right before we launched Heart of the Swarm, we announced that we were changing our targets for player distribution across leagues. For various reasons since that announcement, the distribution of players across leagues slowly shifted to no longer match those desired targets. Currently the lower leagues like bronze and silver have a larger percentage of players than desired. Meanwhile the upper leagues like platinum and diamond are under-represented. One of the reasons this occurred is due to the way that we maintain those target percentages.
"The way [we] maintain those target percentages" is almost certainly not a reference to MMR decay, and it's not an oblique language question like whether "a few" means "twenty" either.
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Response to sarcastic remark by Lysenko: + Show Spoiler +On January 02 2014 23:41 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On January 02 2014 11:41 korona wrote: They have long history of watering down 'negative sounding things' in their articles. Thus their articles should never be taken word for word. I'm not talking about trying to read tea leaves in their tone. To 'water down' has nothing to do with tea leaves. Merriam-Webster definition of WATER DOWN: 'to reduce or temper the force or effectiveness of' thefreedictionary.com definition of watered down: 'Diminished in force or effect' I am not a native English speaker. Maybe it means in your slang 'making tea'?
And response more related to the topic:
On January 02 2014 23:41 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote + Right before we launched Heart of the Swarm, we announced that we were changing our targets for player distribution across leagues. For various reasons since that announcement, the distribution of players across leagues slowly shifted to no longer match those desired targets. Currently the lower leagues like bronze and silver have a larger percentage of players than desired. Meanwhile the upper leagues like platinum and diamond are under-represented. One of the reasons this occurred is due to the way that we maintain those target percentages.
"The way [we] maintain those target percentages" is almost certainly not a reference to MMR decay, and it's not an oblique language question like whether "a few" means "twenty" either. Then what do you propose was the reason for distribution changes? The static offsets / thresholds that are used to maintain the league ranges have not changed since June.
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Re-introduce demotions, remove MMR-decay. Problem solved.
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Im starting to wonder if Blizzard gives a flying fuck about this game... I mean really,how long does it take to solve one problem? And its not the firs time they took so long to fix things that are unrelated to balance. Maybe they will start to do their jobs when we start to pay money for each month to play SC2,oh wait,there are free games to play. Wake the fuck up Blizzard!
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On January 03 2014 01:20 Firkraag8 wrote: Re-introduce demotions, remove MMR-decay. Problem solved. Ideally they will do that, but knowing how they have handled things in the past, they will do 4-5 spectacularly dumb changes before finally admitting defeat and simply going back to the old system or listening to the community. It's the Blizzard way.
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On January 07 2014 22:12 Liman wrote: Im starting to wonder if Blizzard gives a flying fuck about this game... I mean really,how long does it take to solve one problem? And its not the firs time they took so long to fix things that are unrelated to balance. Maybe they will start to do their jobs when we start to pay money for each month to play SC2,oh wait,there are free games to play. Wake the fuck up Blizzard!
Blizzard is slow with every patch, change, and response. This shouldn't be news to you.
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On January 03 2014 01:20 Firkraag8 wrote: Re-introduce demotions, remove MMR-decay. Problem solved.
Demotions still exist.. I tested this theory a few days ago to see how MMR was being calculated. I was in Gold league (been diamond/platinum since season 1). I intentionally lost games until I was demoted to Bronze.. from that point, I reset my record and started playing. I am 25-1 right now and only starting to play gold level players again but have already been promoted to silver. So demotions/promotions exist..
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Now, 6 weeks is pretty generous when you're talking about someone being an active player, so it's a pretty safe bet that the actual activity metric is below this. The fact that only 22% of Bronze players meet this criteria means that if you're playing at a Bronze level, 22% of the time your random opponent may be actual Bronze-level, while 60% or more of the time it may be an inactive Silver. Bronze league has the biggest margin between the top and the bottom, probably as big as 1000 MMR. Assuming the distribution is proportional, 70% of those in Bronze have a really low chance to play a decayed Silver (only if he was low Silver and will be favoured, and only for those top of the 70%). So 60% chance to meet Silver is a huge overkill. The logic applies only to high-Bronze. Because of a range of factors (no demotion, MMR decay, more populated Silver than Bronze, big difference in MMR between Bronze, more active Silver players) high-Bronze players will be very likely to play Silvers, probably even more likely than 60% of the time.
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United States12181 Posts
On January 08 2014 03:34 bri9and wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2014 01:20 Firkraag8 wrote: Re-introduce demotions, remove MMR-decay. Problem solved. Demotions still exist.. I tested this theory a few days ago to see how MMR was being calculated. I was in Gold league (been diamond/platinum since season 1). I intentionally lost games until I was demoted to Bronze.. from that point, I reset my record and started playing. I am 25-1 right now and only starting to play gold level players again but have already been promoted to silver. So demotions/promotions exist..
The season just rolled over so that's why you were demoted to Bronze. When people say "demotions don't exist" they mean mid-season demotions, like actual demotions as in "after this game you moved from your current league to this lower league", not re-placing into a lower league.
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It's really quite simple, in my opinion it's demoralizing. The explanations, graphs, all the justification, seem way inadequate.
The goal for me, and other players I have talked to who also got demoted, is to someday break masters league (or diamond, whatever) and it's SO demoralizing to get demoted at the beginning of a season. I and other players have been active the whole time, so decay explains nothing. Why demote players down a league? Makes no sense and it sucks because I really want more people to play the game.
Edit: I have seen Painuser get demoted mid season from Diamond to Plat on one of his marathon streams with no sleep, so yea, they exist still.
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On January 08 2014 04:22 Ctone23 wrote: It's really quite simple, in my opinion it's demoralizing. The explanations, graphs, all the justification, seem way inadequate.
The goal for me, and other players I have talked to who also got demoted, is to someday break masters league (or diamond, whatever) and it's SO demoralizing to get demoted at the beginning of a season. I and other players have been active the whole time, so decay explains nothing. Why demote players down a league? Makes no sense and it sucks because I really want more people to play the game.
In order to stay at the same level in rankings you need to be constantly improving to compensate for: 1) other players improving, 2) lower level players giving up on the game faster than hardcore gamers, so better ranked players take their spots in lower leagues, while their spots are taken by others and so on. This is how competition works, take it or leave it.
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