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Why can't we see MMR?
 

Over the last few days I have played the most SC2 I EVER have and I feel have been improving rapidly.

However what continues to frustrate me is I have no clear idea of where I am apart from 'Platinum Rank 1' and the 'Favoured, Slightly favoured and Teams Even' indication. I went from Gold > Platinum at the start of this season after placement. Ever since then I think I have gone ~50-18 or so in games, with MASSIVE win streaks and one fairly large loss streak. Yet I seem to be placed against golds sometimes where it says teams even... Also when I play Diamonds sometimes I am favoured, clearly ones MMR can very heaps within one league, presuming MMR is what the indication is based off.

Why can't we see it?

In almost every other game you have a clear idea of where you are and where your opponents are and I feel SC2 really needs this. What players gets discouraged after seeing they are say 700 ELO? If they're playing the game for fun they don't care. With only 7 leagues and a HUGE variety of skill there is so much guess work in where you really are. It boggles my brain to know why we can't have a better indication of where you are at...

In games even like CoD on console you can see other people K/D and rank etc and probably gauge someone skill better than on SC2. Especially around Platinum/Gold league where I feel the vareity of skills is largest. I keep feeling like I am so close to that promotion, going on ~8 win streaks only to be tilted by some cheese and engulf myself in an utter rage after seeing that I lost to cheese from a Gold player that said 'Teams even.' Also over the last year I have been playing the game I feel as though not once I have been promoted mid season, do Blizzard want people to lose a sense of reward for playing? Or a paints for ladder that are seemingly meaningless all that matters?

I am almost finding the more I play now the less motivated I am to go back after I stop as there is a complete lack in sense of achievement. You don't unlock anything, you get a mediocre victory screen (at least HotS looks more vibrant and worthwhile) and some points, yippee.

Clearly I am on tilt as I am writing this but I feel as though my points are still valid.

TLDR: Why can't we see MMR, no logical reason. GG.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

Does it actually matter? Knowing you are x amount of wins from promotion doesn't help you get those wins any easier or sooner. All the factors you listed are 100% independent of your actual skill at the game. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet",or, a good player would be a good player, irrespective of league. There's no logical reason to NEED to see it. It's merely so you can say "oh, this guys ELO is lower than mine and I lost to him, he must be shit" etc etc. Keep grindin out them games man and focus on getting better, and you'll get promoted pretty quick

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

I remember DB in an interview saying something to the effect of "The truth is, most people don't really increase in skill, and so to have the MMR visible to you could be depressing", which is the biggest load of bullshit.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

that actually sounds like a pretty legit reason imo

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

"I am almost finding the more I play now the less motivated I am to go back after I stop as there is a complete lack in sense of achievement."

GET DAT SEA GM MEZJIE!!

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

I reckon knowing my MMR would just give me more motivation to improve, rather than being stuck "somewhere" in the middle of some league. LoL players get to see their ELO and it's one of the most popular games online.

(Yeah I know LoL is depressing but I think that's for other reasons)

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

Titan that is mostly my point ><

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

This is probably the reason. They give us bonus pool so even if we arent winning more than 50% of our games our points still slowly increase over the season without us realising that we aren't actually progressing up the ladder.

Edit: I should add that I find the system frustrating as well.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

You can see how many points you're on, how many points the dudes above you have, how is that not motivation enough? To get more points you gotta play/win more games, same as ELO (I think? I actually have very little intricate knowledge of how elo works).
I love ya man, but it sounds like you're looking for excuses as to why you haven't been promoted yet, other than, perhaps you're not good enough/ready, or you just need to play and win a few more games before blizzards system promotes you. I had the same thing happen to me when I was trying to be promoted to GM. I'd get frustrated that I would be beating gm players, then losing to Masters players, but what I didn't realise is, if you're losing to people lower/even with you, even though you might have beaten a few people slightly higher than you in MMR, it still doesn't mean you're ready to be promoted. I've beaten other various top guys in SEA, does that mean I am now a top person in sea? No. I'd need to be beating them at least 50/50 of the time for a while to possibly be considered up there.

Just keep practicing and eventually you'll get there. Nothing worth having comes easy.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

For some people, it might be motivation to improve, while for others it might be a cause for ladder anxiety/cause not to play. Blizzard have opted to hide it to benefit the latter - I guess when it comes down to it, they aren't as worried about your personal improvement as they are about people who might quit playing.

Also, their system isn't straight up Elo, and you don't get auto promoted at a certain benchmark MMR-rating anyway. It's likely to just cause issues when peoople feel they are even more entitled to a promotion.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

The reason is the target base doesn't care about mmr.

We sit here as, compared to the majority of starcraft users, borderline professional players. We are all competitive and want to do well on the ladder and want to see how good we are in comparison to our peers, most of whom are on teams and clans with us. But we are the minority.

Blizzard has leagues and ladders because its a good selling point. They can say to Joe Shmoe on the street that they have a super advanced matchmaking system which puts you in leagues. They can say you can climb the ladder and gain points, and get promoted, because Joe Shmoe the casual gamer and all his casual gamer friends will enjoy that. They will enjoy the sense of achievement when they increase in rank in their ladder, or get promoted from bronze to silver, and it will encourage them and others to buy the game, stick around and eventually pump more money into the game.

Why would Joe Shmoe care about his Elo rating (or what ever the MMR is), thats some useless number that he doesn't care about. So after a win he went from 800 to 808, well thats a tiny change why would he care, but after a win if he goes from rank 25 to rank 19, well damn thats up 5 places over 100 people! He better keep playing.

Blizzard don't show mmr because leagues and ladders sell better. They dont show it along side the leagues and ladders because it trivializes the league system and reveals to new users the fact that they aren't really improving that much, even if they think they are, scaring them away from the game.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

Kez makes a good point. The points are pretty much why they don't show your actual MMR. Points ARE, as far as you should be concerned, your MMR. Or at least a representation of it.

Another reason Blizzard would not implement a visible MMR number is because that kind of thing is complex (see: TL threads on the matter). There is a bit involved in understanding how MMR gets calculated, and therefore even if you could see the number (which can sometimes take a long time to even out like when you're stuck in a league for a while) it's possible that it won't really mean much.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

The people who casually and only to have fun shouldn't care about MMR and if you get ladder anxiety yet not care about your MMR I actually have no idea why you are even playing the game...

I also fail to see who plays the game if they don't play to improve or to have fun and muck around? Do these people really exist?

You can still have the exact same ladder system with showing MMR and market it that way too, you can't say MMR will detract the average Joe if you say make it optional or don't market it as the ranking, look at LoL it has way more average Joe's playing and it uses ELO straight up, that argument hardly works.

@Paro I just got it but the fact we have to use a thir party tool that isn't 100% accurate is just stupid.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

Slightly unrelated, but LoL is actually changing to a 'league style', much like Blizzards current SC2 ladders. Riot claims that showing ELO to their players make them feel like they're not achieving much at all, whereas the league style 'apparently' is more attractive to most of their customers. Just some food for thought...

I would rather see ELO, that way I can set goals for where I want to be in 'x' amount of time and know how close (or far away) I am to my goal. You can always use the MMR Rating Tool in SC2Gears though, if you're interested?

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

The new LoL system does clearly show your progression between leagues though.

Edit: I'm not trying to say your point is invalid or anything. Just trying to add to the infomation available for people not familair with LoL.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

To be honest, I've only heard about it so I'm not sure of the specifics. Riot is certainly doing a far better job than Blizzard though in terms of looking after their players.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

Points are a pretty accurate measure at any given time (assuming you're comparing people who have all spent their bonus pool), but their dependence on the time in the given season is super annoying. If someone tells me they are 1000 points on NA, I have no idea what that actually means unless I'm currently playing enough on NA to spend my own bonus pool (and even then it's just a ballpark "worse than me/better than me/is actually jaedong". Being able to see MMR would solve this problem.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

I feel this is actually quite accurate. Blizzard trialed the concept of standardising all ladders, a process which made the start of the ladder season it occurred in murderously difficult as all ladders were based off of a single tier rather than a 4 or 5 tier system of MMR.

While I am not sure if Blizzard actually rescinded this system, it made for an interesting and more challenging ladder experience that both frustrated, and gave a greater feeling of improvement. Some arbitrary representation of you MMR (ladder points and/or the league of the opponents you face) generally should suffice for the real figure.

Assuming they do not correlate to MMR however, points (and by proxy, the inflated bonus pool) allows for higher level, and lower level players to have the illusion of progress whether they are advancing or not, and gives Blizzard a MUCH easier way to qualitatively represent people's standings in a league table.

I played vs Titan on ladder the other week for example, (and got destroyed) and that was maybe a day after my promotion to diamond. Simply, if you are playing well and your MMR is higher, you will play versus better opponents. If you are regularly playing versus people in a higher league, and beating them, then there is a good chance that you will get a promotion.

In the mean time, patience is worth using. If someone as terrible as me can make diamond, anyone can!

Promotions aside, MMR is a number that most (casual) players would not understand if they saw it, so it could be possible for Blizzard to implement a system that allows you to see your MMR on your Bnet profile page, however, given how much work they need to put into other things it's not something important enough to imagine being implemented in the near future.

All the best with your laddering though. Keep hitting that button!

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

There is a way to see your MMR using a mod for sc2gears.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/view...opic_id=334561

The tool has just been taken over by new people, and they have had to make a lot of changes to coincide with the new Diamond and Masters threshold so I don't know if its 100% accurate yet (it was working great previous seasons) but it will still give a pretty close ballpark MMR figure as well as the thresholds for each league.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

I love this. Everyone says this about their own league haha and how the hardest skill jump is whatever league they're in right now :P

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

I gave up with random assumptions on my climb to diamond,
The pattern that I found in Platinum-Diamond promotions is that promotions were rapidly handed out to active players and rank1
I was rank 2 for 3 days beating masters and nothing.
Got rank 1 and won two games - Promotion.
Sorry if it's not what you were after, but rank 1 is your best chance amigo :/

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

It does make sense that people would think that as their current league is the league they have the greatest understanding of at that time. It's also what gives them the most difficulty.

On a side note, I like the look of SC2gears. I might have to try it out later myself.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

The problem with points is that its not an accurate measure of how close you are to a promotion. On SEA especially, where the player base is low and the points in top 8 are far lesser than on NA its difficult to gauge where exactly you are at. I can say on NA im 1000 points and I'd be mid master, but on SEA you'd be by far rank 1. It's not so much for top end players that you need an MMR calculator, but in the lower leagues it is something which would be interesting to look at and accurately decipher your skill level.

Re: Why can't we see MMR?
 

On NA currently I am at 402 points, the next closest is 293 and I am rank one . Went form like 41-6 yesterday to 63-25 at the end of today... Still no promotion and it is killing me on the inside T_T Most my loses were to plats though from memory I beat every Diamond so far bar one.