[2021] Can we stop talking about individual skill?

TECHNICALLY if you wanted to try to calculate missed or faked ability usage:

You could bounce a couple traces around corners, or check to see if an ability was in the eyesight of an enemy player(so they looked at the ability means it effected their judgement), then look to see if they moved from that spot, were dealt damage, etc. There are some other ways as well, but our system does not take into account fake abilities because there would probably be a large false positive % to them.

All hypothetical, but it probably isn't worth the work in the long run to determine fake or missed abilities.

As for a system that can determine ability usage, that's pretty easy and our system does do this. You could look at any ability, how many people it hits, what it is doing, etc. and figure out its impact. I'm not going to talk about how we do this, or how the systems evaluate abilities, but every ability could technically have a measurable % it helps win a round or get a kill if you set up your data correctly.

You could also measure how often a bomb plant, or defuse, happens after abilities etc. It's fascinating how much you can get from data if you really tried. Honestly at this point it's less about being able to measure or get the data and more about setting the right goals and ensuring you are measuring the right thing.

This is a super interesting conversation, but yes our system does look at ability usage, kills, assists, and various other stats to determine part of your MMR(Performance MMR). The other part of your MMR is based on winning or losing games.

If you have good data scientists, and know the goals of what your system is supposed to do, it isn't too complicated. We have people who have dedicated their careers to match making and rating systems, or people who are just amazing mathematicians. Games have been working on match making for a while now, and you have systems like True Skill 2 which can detect way more than players even realize. Highly suggest watching a GDC talk by Josh Menke to learn more about this space if it interests you.

You can see a comment I made on this deeper in the thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/ocovb9/can_we_stop_talking_about_individual_skill/h3z7yoh/

Any system is just trying to measure your skill against someone else, because the first step of creating a match is being able to find two similar skilled opponents/teams. There are lots of systems that actually don't look at Win/Loss and only care about performance like KDA(just depends on the game).

A Matchmaker's goal is to find a way to measure player skill and ensure fair matchmaking. You do this by figuring out how to measure players(This is MMR in most systems), then have the match maker guess the outcome of a match(the higher MMR team should win). It doesn't matter if MMR is based on performance, or win/loss, or even total money earned, etc. You want to find the thing that will predict player skill, or the match outcome, the best.

If you were to just measure win/loss, and create a win/loss MMR, then you go back and check at how often a team with a higher Win/Loss MMR actually wins, this is how to measure if your MMR system is working. If you make a system where you are measuring players, you want to make sure that measurement is accurate otherwise it's meaningless. So if for some reason you did make a win/loss MMR, then turned around and made a Kill based MMR, you could test which one is more accurate by putting them against each other. Just look at a bunch of matches, see how many matches teams should have won using the win/loss MMR vs the KDA MMR. Whichever is more accurate is probably a better way to measure skill in your game(or you have some bad math and need to redo that MMR system).

If your matchmaker puts two teams together, and can accurately predict who will win, then you found an accurate way to measure player skill.

Now no matchmaker, unless teams are really unfair, will hit 100% match prediction(and that's good, it might feel bad to be a player and feel like every match is pre-determined before you even start playing). Also because you are matchmaking based on MMR, and if your MMR is accurate, you are actually trying to make matches where there is almost a 50% chance of win/loss. That way the match is fair, and the skill of both teams is as close as possible.

I'm getting a little in the weeds, but there are systems that are not based on win/loss at all and others that are. You just have to find out the best metric to measure for, then track if that metric can accurately predict match outcome. I time stamped a brief example of what I'm talking about from this GDC talk: https://youtu.be/-pglxege-gU?t=526

I highly recommend watching the whole thing if you have time, or checking out some of Josh's other GDC talks. Hope that helps!

(All of this context is not talking about how we do it in Valorant, just how I've seen it done in various games or titles in the industry)