EvrMoar

I love ranked gun buddies, I'm not sure if they will change or how they will evolve in the future. But rewards for ranked, and being able to immortalize your achievement is definitely important to us.

We are looking at how to do a team competitive mode at some point this year, we are still looking over are options and how we want to do it! What that looks like is still up in the air.

We've answer this in a few places, so this answer may be shorter.

The community as a whole gets better at the game, a silver player now is better then a silver player in beta/alpha. Soft resets helps ensure that players don't get to a rank and just kind of idle at that rank. It also reinforces the legitmacy of ranks.

Something I like to say, and it may sound harsh but it's completely valid, "If you can't earn that rank in the current season, do you deserve it?" - We let you keep your hidden MMR, which is what influences your Ranked Rating gain. So realistically, as long as you can maintain a 50:50 win rate you will get back to your rank because you belong there. But if you start to slip, and can't prove you belong there, then you may find your hidden MMR dropping and it may be harder to climb ranked.

Also, it helps get boosted players out of higher ranks again maintaining ranked legitimacy. But honestly this is such a tiny factor it's not the main reason we ...

I use Elo/MMR interchangeably here, they mean the same thing.

You have two MMR's, one for wins and one for skill. Skill is calculated on a ton of factors, based on ability usage, if you should be winning a 1v1, if your smoke helped take a bomb site, entry fragging, etc. Your win MMR is more straight forward, win games it goes up.

Lower ranks your skill MMR matters more, if you perform better it will up your Skill MMR which will make your wins reward more Ranked Rating. As you get into higher ranks your Win MMR will start to take over. Until Immortal+ where it is exclusively Win MMR.

So, in short, everything is important. I would focus less on what matters and focus on getting consistent at the game. Being consistent, able to play well on a couple of agents and all maps, will help you climb the fastest. Good luck!

The leaderboard was a big push to use your leaderboard as a standing. We will be calling out your leaderboard standing on your act rank badge as well. We could reinstate Immortal 1, 2, 3, etc. But players will definitely focus on their leaderboard standing/number, and if they are immortal 1, 2, 3 as an after thought.

That being said I think there is value in chase goals. So maybe they return, or we find a different way to call out leaderboard standing. We are having a lot of discussions right now and trying to nail down what our next steps/improvements to ranked are.

Yup, we have something in the works that should be hitting next Tuesday!

Your MMR should determine match, not your rank. The soft reset happens for various reasons, but is for the most part important for healthy resets of the ranked que(I know there are debates and opinions about this).

Being this our first big overhaul of the ranked system, as well as lots of new things happening, we are monitoring and already planning fixes/changes to various things about the system. We definitely wanted this system to come online for the new episode, so we pushed to get this out to the community. Now we have to look at how to improve it, and make sure the math is right now that we have the system is in players hands.

We are looking into what some team competitive modes/features would look like and want to do something this year.

The hardest part about these systems is a team MMR system is alot of work and why alot of games struggle with healthy team ranked ques. Another issue is match making gets very messy, because it gets harder to pair pre-made's against each other since we can't move people around to get more equal MMR's.

Not saying anything is off the table, I just wanted to call out the problems these systems face and that it requires some extra time and effort to make sure we do it right.

This will not be penalizing your MMR only your Ranked Rating. I definitely understand there will be games you want to dodge, just because the chat is toxic, maybe something comes up, life happens, etc.

What we think is unhealthy is people trying to dodge to manipulate que to possibly win trade, get certain teammates, etc. So this will probably have some form of tiny almost negligible penalty for first dodge, increasing for consecutive dodges. But we are still talking about how to implement this.

I'm trying to go back and answer questions through the day. Next time I'll see if we can get a better time for EU!

We are talking about what we are seeing, with 5 stacks being popular to try and get to leaderboard quick. No solution, or anything we want to do yet, but we are aware and it's on the list to talk about!

Something we've talked about. We have a handful of solutions or changes we could do, we are talking them over.

The one concern I have about this is that we are just setting a time limit which will punish our most dedicated players that are willing to grind and do work. It goes both ways, do we reward players for grinding matches and climbing fast beginning of the season? Or do we just say "no" and reward the players that were already high rank in the previous season but won't be grinding as fast.

I think we can hit a good middle ground. It's on the list!

You're still matched based on your MMR, the games are still fair. The match maker isn't using your rank to match you. Then you gain more, or lose more, ranked rating if your Rank is far from your actual MMR. So as long as you go 50:50 in your matches you will climb to the rank you belong in.

If you can't go 50:50 in the rank you belong in, you probably don't deserve to be at that rank. And if you don't go 50:50 your MMR will drop, and you will get to the rank you belong in.

That being said we have identified key issues we want to solve. It's a huge rework to the ranked system that we really wanted to get out to the community. Even if the soft reset was a little chaotic, overall I believe the system improved the things we wanted and has been seen as a positive change. Sometimes these things take time and we are already planning our next steps to improve ranked.

We are talking about how the 3 rank difference has been effecting que and looking at some data points. Who knows, ranked will always be evolving and trying to get better!

It's actually kind of a hard problem to solve. We are talking about how to handle it.

So think of it this way, if Radiant was, before, the top MMR players that climbed there. Technically the first players to get to upper immortal 3 turned to Radiant because they were the highest players there. So this was a problem last season, because players would have gotten to Radiant just because they grinded out ranked faster and got there first(not because after the ranks normalized they actually belonged there in the long run). Eventually those players fell out, back into immortal.

The new system is more visible, and obviously we just don't have that buffer of immortal 1,2,3 before Radiant. I really enjoy rewarding people who grind really hard and fast and get to the leaderboards. I think the excitement of saying "I got to the top 500 of the leaderboard because I got there first" is kinda cool. If I can figure out a way to keep that feeling, but through the season the correc...

Decay is hard because you have to start thinking of how much decay, what is a fair amount of time, how long it takes to decay out of X rank, etc. We have a decay style system in place, but it's more on the confidence in your MMR so it kind of does this already.(we don't decay your rank at all, just to clarify)

I believe there is also something to the perception and excitement of a new season. In game design players will just leave if they don't have goals; I don't like this answer as a reason why you should drop players even if psychologically it makes sense. I do not like letting players ride their rank, because it gives them a sense that they are entitled to their rank just for getting it once and riding it out. Who knows how new balance, maps, characters, etc. will effect your MMR. Maybe a new map gets in the rotation and you never learn it. How does that effect your rank? As long as it's not an insane reset and it is sensible I think it's okay. Realistically if you real...

A little hectic, trying to gather as much info on how ranked is doing. How it feels, and analyze if what we may need to improve on!

I have a 9 month old boxer puppy, who needs to go out way to often. Other then that pretty good!

I definitely understand the frustrations and concerns about not being able to get to the leaderboard due to prior rank/MMR. Remember your leaderboard position at the end of the act will be what is displayed on your act rank. While these players are being rewarded for getting their quickly now, the players that end up at the top at the end of the season are what matter in terms of your act rank.

We are definitely talking about this and trying to figure out what is healthy and enjoyable. I definitely hear the feedback about finding matches, 5 stacks, and the speed at which some players are getting on the leaderboard and getting radiant. There are things we can't fix right now, but we will be looking to improve in future acts/episodes.

I think we will always have some sort of soft reset. I really like how we soft reset rank, but kept MMR. If you have a higher hidden MMR you will climb quickly, but because your MMR is the same everyone is getting fair matches. You may have a 50% win/loss rate, because we are trying to get you fair matches. But because you have a higher hidden MMR you are winning more ranked rating and losing less. There is a chance you fall below 50% win rate and you start to even at the rank we placed you in, and given the same reasons /u/RiotVanCoder9 listed above, soft resets are healthy for ranked.

edit: Not resetting MMR also makes it so you don't have radiant players stomping bronze's, there is still legitimacy in the match making in trying to create fair matches.

Every single season of ranked players...

You have two MMR's, one for skill and one based on wins. In lower ranks skill MMR matters more, in determining your true hidden MMR. As you climb winning becomes more important.

When you get into a match, we know every players hidden MMR and used that to put you in that match. The match maker has a level of confidence in how it thinks you will perform. If you are one of the higher MMR players in the game, you probably should perform better then others in that match. But if you have the lowest MMR, you probably should be lower in performance.

If you exceed the expectation we reward you a few extra ranked rating points. Eventually I'd like to tell you when you had a stellar performance.

Also the system looks at a ton, more so then I think players realize. Things like healing, ability usage, 1v1's, being an entry fragger, setting up teammates, etc. So it's not only about topping the leaderboard, it's about using your agent effectively to help your team win.

Yea, exactly!

There are also concerns in lots of systems that people focus really hard on MMR without fully understand all the match and calculations going on to determine it. We have to set the bar for what MMR means. If I told you your MMR was 1534, what would that mean to you? If I told you that your MMR is 1534, and 1500-1600 is gold, you would then be like "Oh I'm gold". It makes it more palatable.

There is an interesting balance with saying "This MMR is gold or this MMR is Diamond." - because you want to make sure that those MMR's FEEL like they are actually that rank. If there are too many players in a rank, then it's hard to see a players skill and for the community to say "That player is diamond, that was a diamond play" and instead turns into "I have no idea what level of play, or skill, this reddit clip was."

So not only does it help you understand where your skill is, in terms of a given rank name like Gold, Plat, Diamond. It also gives you an id...