[2021] Riot matchmaking what is this?

Okay! So we were concerned when we saw this match, because this is a little extreme for what we expect from the matchmaker. I think this match deserved a little explanation, after we investigated and found out why this occurred.

In short, Hamtaro was in a four stack and was Immortal last time they played ranked(September of last year). When Hamtaro queued with the four stack, the match maker had a couple options to handle this, but ultimately it landed on the edge case of trying to balance the skill indifference with one high skilled player.

This was worsened by the fact that we do not have MMR decay, but a confidence "loosening" when you don't play the game for an extended period of time. We don't know if you've been playing other shooters, and increasing in skill since you've been gone, or not playing shooters at all. So we widen the gap of where we think you could belong, and that allows the match maker to test you and adjust your MMR if you came back and decreased in skill.

Based on the match results Hamtaro has had some skill atrophy since playing Valorant last. This was also Hamtaro's third match back, the two matches prior Hamtaro won. So the system tested Hamtaro lower and they won, but when being tested closer to their old MMR they underperformed. Their MMR ultimately was on a downtrend after this match.

That being said, this is kind of a perfect storm with a player coming back that was high MMR, loosening of confidence, stacking up in a 4 stack, and the match maker not having a good pool of players to match the 4 stack against.

This is a good example of an edge case that we need to solve for. Due to how complex match making systems are these fixes take time, and lots of simulations/data to get right. Yes, edge cases happen in all systems but our goal is to try and make the best matchmaker we possibly can - so we will always be trying to improve it and reduce these types of issues.

I'm sorry you ran into this issue - it's very hard to determine a returning players skill and this is an example of a player that returned to the game a little rusty.

Huge shoutout to u/RiotSouthKorea - one of our insight analyst's that got me this info and broke it down to understand what was occurring!

I think, the thing to remember, is no game puts you at the rank you belong when you start playing. And almost every big game uses an MMR system.

All ranking systems require you to play lots of games, to truly figure out where you belong. There is no system that can perfectly "guess" where you belong after 5-10 matches. The ELO system requires thousands of games to find true rank.

I think we can definitely do better with messaging, or this issue where you can group a little wider while in placements, and a handful of other things to make this experience just "better".

Ranked isn't the only thing the competitive team works on, and Valorant has been out for less than a year. There are so many things we want to do, it just takes a lot of time and making sure things don't create worse issues/bugs. We make one mistake and it breaks match making, which breaks the game for everyone. Hopefully you'll see some changes you like :)