So did PVP MMR just explode?

@DAZ0273 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@DAZ0273 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@DAZ0273 said:

@BriMan2222 said:
You also have to take into account that the game can only show you players that are unshielded, so if you join in the last day of the event and everyone the game would consider to be at your level of play is already shielded for the event or at low points, the game has to open up MMR and show you players worth points that are either much higher or much lower than you.

I just climbed over 1000 points in Red Skull and there is only one 550 player around to show me. Every other player it shows me are much lower rosters for like 5 points.

True but I joined day one. I am getting a mixture of players but the amount of 550 has definitely ticked up. That could be my rosters fault of course but I don't think so.

It's possible that there are no longer any ~lvl514 players to show you that are unshielded and worth > 30 points or so. Many players previously in that situation have just spent a few months levelling all their ascended guys up to 550.

If that's the case, matchmaking will widen its scope and look for good fights outside your range, "good" meaning "worth points."

My other matches say otherwise. No. The 550s are the outlier not the 514s. Besides if I am so rare, how are the 550s finding me?!?!? Unshielded could be part of the answer but then again I got hit after 4 fights earlier in the event...

Wait, so you're still seeing what you saw before but now you're seeing more 550s? It's probably because there are a lot more 550 players now?

We've always been able to find you. Matchmaking is about who you see, not who sees you. It's a subtle but important distinction. Under the right conditions you'd always have been visible to us.

Edit: Also I take on board what you say about always being able to find us but for normally pathetic points and not on my climb. Oh well.

This part really depends on conditions and timing too. There's not a specific thing hiding you from us, in the same way that there's not a specific thing hiding us from you. The one restriction is that they can only show you players that currently exist and are unshielded in your time slice.

Matchmaking isn't a set of hard cutoffs, it's a set of preferences, and it always has to give us something, even if it can't find what it prefers.

@entrailbucket said:

@turbomoose said:
I agree, I used to see a few 550 but only after 20 + fights in Simulator

Now I was seeing them from fight 1, my rota hasn’t changed much in the past 6 months as I was trying to keep my characters under 500 for the very reason my roster didn’t feel ready for max 550

If this is the new normal then I may as well favourite those least likely to be nerfed and join the 550 ranks

I think there are just a lot more 550 players now.

Yeah, I already had natural 5* 550's and all the 1a5 at 550 during the broken MMR, but all of my 1a5 duplicates and 2a5's were around the 500 level. During the time MMR was broken and I was getting tons of free covers, I got all the 1 star dupes and 2a5's to 550.

I imagine there were plenty of players who were in a position similar to mine, only without the already existing 550's. They would have jumped from 500 level play to 550 during that time.

@KGB said:
A lot more 550s is relative since obviously 550 players are quite rare overall.

I'm also seeing higher teams in my 370 MMR. It used to be common to see champed 5s of course but now I quite often see L500 plus characters (unboosted) and it's not uncommon now to take hits from 672s WAY before I'd expect to break MMR (like around 300 points).

I wonder if a subtle change was made to first look 'above' your average level before looking below rather than split evenly (what I presume it used to do based on what I'd see).

KGB

It's possible they screwed around with something, but none of this sounds all that crazy to me.

There's some critical information missing from these posts: your score, relative to the other unshielded players in the slice, at that particular time. This can be a little difficult to evaluate, since you can't see all the brackets. You kind of get a sense for it when you play for points/placement over hundreds of events though.

I'm not saying that nothing has changed in matchmaking, but we don't have enough information to say for sure.

@KGB said:

@entrailbucket said:

@KGB said:
A lot more 550s is relative since obviously 550 players are quite rare overall.

I'm also seeing higher teams in my 370 MMR. It used to be common to see champed 5s of course but now I quite often see L500 plus characters (unboosted) and it's not uncommon now to take hits from 672s WAY before I'd expect to break MMR (like around 300 points).

I wonder if a subtle change was made to first look 'above' your average level before looking below rather than split evenly (what I presume it used to do based on what I'd see).

KGB

It's possible they screwed around with something, but none of this sounds all that crazy to me.

There's some critical information missing from these posts: your score, relative to the other unshielded players in the slice, at that particular time. This can be a little difficult to evaluate, since you can't see all the brackets. You kind of get a sense for it when you play for points/placement over hundreds of events though.

I'm not saying that nothing has changed in matchmaking, but we don't have enough information to say for sure.

Here's something else I've noticed. I don't always join my bracket at the same time and I've noticed sometimes I join a reasonably fresh bracket (>75 players). I find that if I play say 6-7 matches and get up to 200-300 points that will put me in the T20 scores. At that point it's like I've broken MMR because that's when I really see those crazy high teams in the L500-672. If I come back hours (or even a day later) and I'm back down into the 100s suddenly I'm seeing teams that are roughly equal to me. Once I get up again close to T20 I'll see the same thing.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me since my bracket is only a tiny part of my whole slice but it seems like it's taking my bracket as the only place it calculates MMR for me and once I reach T20 it thinks I'm some kind of super roster that should see other super rosters.

KGB

It's all about your relative positioning among all the other unshielded teams.

Depending on which end time you've picked and how much time is remaining, top 20 in your bracket might be a very high score at that particular time. It's also worth noting that some end times get very few brackets, so yours may not be a tiny part.

"Breaking MMR" is not really a thing. I've seen people talk about hard breaks at certain point levels, but those breaks can vary wildly between slices and event timings. In general players tend to all play at the same time every event, so it's possible that things like that will be consistent, but the game isn't enforcing them, they're just player patterns.

Might be due to a lot of players leaving. Forcing a tighter mmr. Not that I'm seeing any change from before. Same players hitting me as before, same frequency, same float point.

@Read_Only said:
Might be due to a lot of players leaving. Forcing a tighter mmr. Not that I'm seeing any change from before. Same players hitting me as before, same frequency, same float point.

Are you a 550 player by any chance?

I also haven't changed how I play PvP and yet my Season placing is waaaay down. So I guess it could be an expanded 550 set of players who are now pushing harder/scoring higher than they were before? Anyway, I doubt the Devs are going to shed any enlightenment on things so possibly I and the others have just lost the plot and nothing has changed!

@DAZ0273 said:

@Read_Only said:
Might be due to a lot of players leaving. Forcing a tighter mmr. Not that I'm seeing any change from before. Same players hitting me as before, same frequency, same float point.

Are you a 550 player by any chance?

I also haven't changed how I play PvP and yet my Season placing is waaaay down. So I guess it could be an expanded 550 set of players who are now pushing harder/scoring higher than they were before? Anyway, I doubt the Devs are going to shed any enlightenment on things so possibly I and the others have just lost the plot and nothing has changed!

It's absolutely possible that they broke something here. Given that, like, everything else is broken, it might even be likely!

I tend to treat "matchmaking is broken" reports with skepticism by default, because most of the players here don't play tons of PvP, and matchmaking can act very differently based on external factors that they don't understand. It makes sense intuitively when you spend hours upon hours trying to exploit the smallest details of how it works, but it's still really fundamentally weird.

You said you joined the last event early, maybe join at your usual time and see if you're having the same experience.

@JoeHandle said:

@DAZ0273 said:
On another note - I seem to remember that there was an argument for the 1* to keep their competitive regular weekly boost as a reward for paying players who spent the $20 bucks to buy to win. Does this still hold up now that thanks to it having rained covers lots of the FTP players have now caught up and are having the same advantage with an often zero spend? In other words - should 1* maybe now have longer periods between being boosted?

Maybe only having 1 boosted at a time might work?

This would hurt low-level players, too.

I think the reason it stayed was because changing it means more work.

Not going to be apriority until there's a compelling reason to take on that work.

And what's wrong with it anyway? More boosted = more variety in viable teams. Boosting fewer characters, of any tier, would suck.

I don't mind the boosting but the near constant 1a5 on boost lists compared to other tiers regularity is a bit much when you don't have them! Sure I guess that is a selfish take but nobody said we can't have self interest, right?

@entrailbucket said:

@DAZ0273 said:

@JoeHandle said:

@DAZ0273 said:
On another note - I seem to remember that there was an argument for the 1* to keep their competitive regular weekly boost as a reward for paying players who spent the $20 bucks to buy to win. Does this still hold up now that thanks to it having rained covers lots of the FTP players have now caught up and are having the same advantage with an often zero spend? In other words - should 1* maybe now have longer periods between being boosted?

Maybe only having 1 boosted at a time might work?

This would hurt low-level players, too.

I think the reason it stayed was because changing it means more work.

Not going to be apriority until there's a compelling reason to take on that work.

And what's wrong with it anyway? More boosted = more variety in viable teams. Boosting fewer characters, of any tier, would suck.

I don't mind the boosting but the near constant 1a5 on boost lists compared to other tiers regularity is a bit much when you don't have them! Sure I guess that is a selfish take but nobody said we can't have self interest, right?

Sounds like you've fallen behind. They're currently selling an ascended 1* Hawkeye that might help you catch up quicker!

Ha ha, no I know how this goes with you. I don't really see it that way, I was progressing and continue to do so and the Devs changed the rules with ascension and may have done so again with MMR. It's OK though, keep on truckin'.

@entrailbucket said:

@DAZ0273 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@DAZ0273 said:

@JoeHandle said:

@DAZ0273 said:
On another note - I seem to remember that there was an argument for the 1* to keep their competitive regular weekly boost as a reward for paying players who spent the $20 bucks to buy to win. Does this still hold up now that thanks to it having rained covers lots of the FTP players have now caught up and are having the same advantage with an often zero spend? In other words - should 1* maybe now have longer periods between being boosted?

Maybe only having 1 boosted at a time might work?

This would hurt low-level players, too.

I think the reason it stayed was because changing it means more work.

Not going to be apriority until there's a compelling reason to take on that work.

And what's wrong with it anyway? More boosted = more variety in viable teams. Boosting fewer characters, of any tier, would suck.

I don't mind the boosting but the near constant 1a5 on boost lists compared to other tiers regularity is a bit much when you don't have them! Sure I guess that is a selfish take but nobody said we can't have self interest, right?

Sounds like you've fallen behind. They're currently selling an ascended 1* Hawkeye that might help you catch up quicker!

Ha ha, no I know how this goes with you. I don't really see it that way, I was progressing and continue to do so and the Devs changed the rules with ascension and may have done so again with MMR. It's OK though, keep on truckin'.

I don't really want to get into it either, but...it's their game. They can (and frequently do) change the rules anytime they want, for any reason or no reason at all.

Those of us who've been around the top for a long time (like you are now, Mr. 514!) have seen tons of "rules changes" that have screwed up our progress over and over again. It's part of this game and always has been.

Of course but much like your wish to kill the meta that advantages you over others, we can all hope the Devs will swing things our way.