MMR System Issue – Stuck at Rank After Hundreds of Games

qephire.qephire

New member
Hi everyone,

I’d like to bring up an issue about how it currently feels impossible to climb in ranked once your account gets stuck at a very low rank after many games. I’m definitely not the only one — there are plenty of players in the same situation, and most of them just end up creating new accounts to escape this frustrating experience.

I have over 800 hours and more than 1100 games played. Before the rank icon changes, I was Seeker I, and now I’m Arcanist 6, but nothing has really changed — I’m still completely stuck, regardless of my personal performance.

I’ll admit I used to play quite poorly, but I’ve done a lot to improve: I’ve watched many streams and VODs, analyzed my own matches and those of top players, and even took coaching from tournament participants. I give my best effort in every game, trying to communicate and make good calls for the team — but none of it has made any difference, neither in rank progress nor in match quality.

For example, I had to win five or more games in a row just to reach Ritualist I, and as always, after a few wins I suddenly get teammates that make winning literally impossible (I belive there’s some hidden mechanism keeping winrate around 50%). Then, just like that, my rank drops again.

Here’s one example match – #44759270 (I am Victor):
1760269810280.png
two players went AFK one after another, one kept feeding, and when I politely asked him not to push deep into the enemy jungle for no reason, he started throwing insults instead.

After experiences like this, it’s really hard to stay motivated to keep playing or improving — I hope you can understand that.

P.S. One streamer from the top 100 of leaderboard even tried to rank up on a similar low-rated account as a challenge. He lost only 1 out of 70 games before finally managing to climb a single rank tier. That made me realize I’m not crazy — there’s clearly something off with how the system works.
 
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First, one correction:
The rank "Ritualist" which your recent / current matches being played on are certainly not "low-rank" but actually only slightly below the "half", the 5th out of 11.

Your match history according to your info given (the Victor):
https://statlocker.gg/profile/131437360/matches
https://deadlock-api.com/player/?pd-picker-tab=patch&steam_id=131437360

It'll most certainly take more than just 24-hours of matches to recalibrate system,
If everything goes as "planned", the amount of Ritualist-matches should overtake "Initiate-1" eventually (again):
https://statlocker.gg/rank-distribution

Of course, for those of who are not too obsessed into "ranks" itself, hopefully the matchmaking will become more "skill"-based eventually
( E.G. "fodders / players with no self-presevation intentions" are matchmade with each other and so on, even with the risk of "stat-padding" or other matchmaking-manipulation tactics ).


Posteriority-section
Featured Match-ID: 44759270
https://statlocker.gg/match/44759270/summary
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If I understood the essence of the latest update correctly, neither the MMR or the way it’s calculated has actually changed. The fact that my profile now shows the “mid-rank” badge Ritualist 1 just means that about half of the player base has managed to climb above one of the ranks the system considers “low-rank” — Seeker 1.
But someone has climbed higher! Many players have reached Ethernus, yet those same people wouldn’t be able to do the same on my account — you see what I mean?

A good ranking system should reward good performance by moving players into tougher lobbies, not punish them for winning by giving them worse teammates.

I also noticed that there are now report options for smurfing, which probably means the developers are planning to tackle that issue. Well, if the ranking system worked the way I’m describing — not keeping you at your initial calibration level, but instead rewarding strong play (and punishing weak performance) — smurfing would lose its purpose.
Ethernus players wouldn’t bother making smurfs, since they’d quickly end up back at their natural level. People wouldn’t pay for “boosting” either, because once they got their accounts back, they’d drop right down again.
 
This, after all, is early beta, its possible that Valve is doing social experiments to gather data on various algorithms. Like intentionally placing people in bizarre combinations to see how it affects matchmaker and then datamines the results.

All data can be good, however smurfing and cheating poisons this data, unless they have gigabrain and have some algorithm plan for this contingency.
 
And also I never checked it before, how can it be possible?
I won at least half of games, with nice stats, but only went down
1760301622825.png

upd: I won more than half, the win/loss graph is completely opposite.
1760354862502.png
 
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