MMR Issues: Aliases and Matchmaking

[ogron]

1. Aliasing

Aliasers are starting to enter MMR games with reset 3000 MMR rating and impacting matchmaking. Why is this allowed? Multiple players have complained.

Play MMR on your main name or don't play. Simple.

Unless you want people with 500 MMR just changing names and getting 3000 MMR on a new name and making matchmaking worse than it already is.

2. Matchmaking

Matchmaking is beyond horrendous. These are the worst teams anyone has ever seen.

There should be 2 MMRs:

A) Current MMR based on wins/losses that is on the ladder
B) Hidden 'Matchmaking MMR' based on our thousands of hours of play against each other and manually giving people ballpark MMRs based on TWDT star ratings

Yes, MMR will eventually work itself out... in 2024. There's no reason for everyone to suffer for two years while elo comes to its conclusions.

Have a hidden matchmaking MMR that degrades in influence the more games you play until 300gp or something when your current, public-facing ladder MMR simply becomes your matchmaking MMR.

Example:



Thank you.

[Grasps]

Sup Clause, I strongly agree with you about aliasing but I don't agree about TWDT ratings and feel like the whole point of MMR is to use UNBIASED algorithms for matchmaking. I just think it needs more policing on aliasing and more data on players for it to work right even if it takes awhile. Just need patience.

Biggest problem I think is as you said, new players get a high rating. So when teams are formed, they are treated as that of top tier players that are ranked already, which kills matches if they are average or below. I think the opposite should go into effect, having players start with a very low rating, like 500-1000 MMR. That way they won't screw up matchmakings too badly and just like if they when they were rated high, it would eventually even out as games get played. All without fucking matchmaking if the new players aren't godlike, top 15 players.

And to have hidden ratings? I'm just going to say I'd be against that just because I don't like the idea that someone could go behind my back and mess with my ratings to screw up my matches. I know this most likely is never going to happen but I don't want that notion to enter into my head if I get a run of bad matchups. Maybe we could start unranked players off with their DT ratings but even then I do think this whole thing should have as less human input as possible because we all know that DT ratings are by no means accurate. They work sometimes, they are broken at other times. MMR should in theory be perfect all the time once its flushed out.

From the 20+ games of MMR I played against the probably 30-40 I did in TSL, MMR is still miles ahead in terms of team creation in my opinion. And TSL was strictly using DT ratings, so I think we should give MMR more time before we drop the nuke on it.

Anyways! I was just randomly checking over SS and saw this response, thought I'd chime in my 2C. Take it easy my man.

[banzi fuq]

I'm assuming by worst teams you mean lopsided shitty games. Anyone able to share a common sample for the average score differentials in MMR, TWD, DT, and TWL?

[Rab]

Awesome post.

It really does suck that people start with 3000 rating regardless of whether we know they're shit or not. Most of my losses are from shitty drafts rather than my gameplay.

I would expect it's possible to use TWD name checking for alias-prevention.

[qan]

We'll definitely need to deal with aliasing, yes. Keep in mind that we're still in testing and are working out issues. We don't even have a way to handle subs yet, or basing, and if players are added after the game starts it throws off the algorithm. It's very rudimentary, what I could put together at the end of summer before work half-buried me again. We may look at disallowing aliasing if a player has already established a rating on another name. Currently it's just checking for active TWD registration. If we see more people doing this, some kind of makeshift policy to prevent it from happening may be necessary. All, please call out aliasers when you see them and make it clear that it's totally against the spirit of the system. We do have a system set up to alias-check people, and I can re-enable this if there are enough league ops willing to take it on. (That's another feature disabled before starting testing.)


In most games, qualification matches are used to quickly place a player in a general tier (and whether or not they say they're doing this, it still happens). This is only possible when you have a large enough playerbase. We'd planned on doing this, too, but quickly scrapped it after realizing there's no way we could get enough players to have separate qualification and standard matches. So the entire system is set up for running separate qualification matches, which we don't do, and we haven't come up with a solution for it.

3000 should still be the average rating over time, statistically. Starting players off at a lower rating is mathematically dubious, but if we found a reasonable way to map players based on past performance, it could be done. This could be as simple as having known players start with slightly more rating at the start of a season, and unknowns with a good bit less. Players would need to be alias-checked before they could play, though, as there would be a big temptation to alias to start with a low rating and smurf for a while. Players would also need to be season-locked to a name.

We've also briefly discussed penalizing the worst player on a losing team with a bit more of a ratings tank (possible as we're not dealing with a true zero-sum system), and reducing the loss penalty of a carrying player on a losing team.