[2021] The State Of Grandmaster Right Now

/u/Visv1m is correct. VP gains and losses are based on where your MMR ranks compared to the rest of your tier. If they are net negative, it means your MMR is lower than the MMR of the players on the bottom of GM. Since you are matchmade on MMR, this also means your opponents average below GM MMRs as well, and so you are playing against players that aren't as good as your average GM, hence you get less VP.

Likewise, if your MMR was higher than the top of GM, you would net positive.

However, if you maintain a win percentage over 50% after getting to GM, your MMR will go up, and so will your VP gains, and you will only need to go 50/50. But you may not grind enough MMR to do this if you don't stick with the account.

It's partly because Rank sometimes goes up faster than MMR at that part of the curve. So you need to wait for the MMR to catch up to prove to the system you are GM or Challenger.

Ranked MMR runs very similar to Elo's system, but with some more advanced math behind it. Which means, it doesn't use winrate, nor other factors, but instead has a number that goes up or down based on how hard the match was.

Match difficulty is based on how far apart your team's average MMR is from the other team. In fact, a good MMR system should tell you how often team A will beat team B given those two numbers (e.g. 3 of 4, or 90%, etc).

So just win/loss right now. The system has no idea what your winrate is since winrate can be affected by too many other factors. It only cares about did you win, and how hard was it to win.

That said, we do reserve the right to incorporate other variables down the road, but only if they result in the system being more accurate at predicting who WINS.

We would not include other stats just because it sounds good, we would only include them if they actually improve our ability to predict who WINS a match.

Basically, we would first test adding other variables using historical data (which we have a lot of) and see if adding them is better or worse, and only keep ones that are good.

Our current philosophy is still that helping your team win is more important than the other stats.

This is correct. If you have a high win%, then your Rank can outpace your MMR, meaning your MMR has stayed low and your opponents have had lower MMR than most players at each rank.

Win% is super misleading in the presence of matchmaking. Unless you are one of the best players in the entire system, a high win% usually just means the MMR system is a little too slow, and therefore you have been playing easy opponents. Whereas if your MMR had been high enough, you would have been playing GM and Challenger opponents, and you would also have been getting, e.g., +/- 15.

In fact, you know your MMR is synching with your Rank when you see near equal gains and losses.

So if you keep playing on that account, and stay at that win%, or at least at positive win%, your MMR will catch up over time and your gains will slowly increase until you hit +/-15, and your matches will get harder and harder. If you keep winning, it'll continue up to +15/-10, or even +20/-10.

But if you re-roll, you will always have a low MMR and be "stuck" with low LP gains until you play enough for your MMR to catch up.