Is Matchmaking Rigged? Max McCall Explains the Hearthstone Matchmaker
Max returns to the forums, this time to discuss MMR in Hearthstone.
- Skill rating, or MMR, is the only variable that determines who your opponent will be.
- MMR is a formula that looks at your wins, losses, current rating, opponent's rating, and your rating history.
- Casual and Legend gamemodes use MMR to determine who you will fight.
- Ranked players below Legend don't use MMR. Instead, it's only based off your current rank number and stars.
- If no other players near your ranking or rating are available to battle, they widen the range of acceptable opponents every few seconds.
Quote from Max McCallI know that its not rigged, but its really hard to think it isnt sometimes. [...] How does it always seem that when you switch decks to counter what you are facing, you literally stop facing those decks??? I just dont get it sometimes.I saw this post last week, but didn’t have time to respond to it. I’ll do that now: when you go into a game, the only variable that affects who your opponent will be is your skill rating.
Matchmaking works as follows:
We use a formula to assess player skill. After every game, the formula looks at if you won or lost and uses your current rating, your opponent’s rating, and your rating history to generate your new rating. We call this rating MMR for short. In casual and at Legend rank, we pair players with similar MMRs. In Ranked below legend, we pair people with similar star ranks instead of similar MMRs. Your rating is the only input that the matchmaker receives. It doesn’t know what deck you’re playing, what deck you just played with or against, or anything else, except for your rating.
When you press ‘play’ you enter a queue for your chosen game mode. The matchmaker looks at your MMR and compares it to the MMR of everyone else in the queue. If it finds someone else with the same MMR as you, it pairs you into a game. If it doesn’t, it will wait a few seconds and look again. The second time, it doesn’t look just for someone with your MMR; it will also look for someone with an MMR that’s almost the same as yours. If it still doesn’t find a match, it waits another few seconds and looks again. The bound for what MMRs are considered a good match keep widening the longer you’re in the queue; this is to ensure that you don’t have to wait too long to play. Usually a match is found so quickly that the widening bounds never really matter. After the game, your rating is updated, and the process is repeated the next time you queue up.
Being killed on turn 4 has little to do with player skill...
Because you are the only one who thinks of it when as you said 90% of all decks contains secrets. Others do so too and then the meta can quickly turn over.
When i ever change decks i get placed against other decks that i am weak against, i don't think its rigged i think its just bad timming
This honestly is dumb -.-
I can assure you that 70% of that rank is aggro always
You teched VS miracle/aggro......... Renolock is bad vs miracle, dont tech it for that.
Also 53 games, rank 15 to 13....... that honestly isnt rigged. Thats just you.
I can face counter decks all the time at those ranks and climb easily.
Didn't read all of it as it kept getting worse and worse.
No, you don't. That's a rule you just made up to convince yourself, because this is a textbook case of confirmation bias. The fact that you didn't start tracking anything until you'd already made up your mind what was happening is a pretty good indication of that. What you need to do is track every match over 6 months, or acquire unaltered data from many, many different people.
Any deck-tracker out there already has this information. Don't you think they would report on it if there was such an obvious pattern across all of their thousands of users?
Honestly when I read this all I'm seeing is you played 53 games and 29 were against aggro and 24 were against control. That sounds about right. The patterns you're seeing with small tech choices are likely coincidental. Even with a tech change that won't affect your win percent by that much. If we say your deck in general was favored in control matches you were still getting favorable matches a little under half of the time.
It's sad that a Blizzard employee had to answer a question as to whether or not they analyse the decks of all people in the queue, categorise them into archetypes, maintain an up-to-date database of which archetypes are favoured over which others, and then deliberately give you personally a bad matchup because.... reasons.
I hope i am wrong but this smells like bullshit to me.I have terrible winratio on casual because i always play yolo and hipster decks there even for quests.I literally have below 40% win ratio so if this was true i would play with other dudes like me but i face only tier 1 net decks after 3 seconds of waiting at most.It takes no more time to find a casual game(horrible winratio) than ranked(good winratio).
As for the legend ranks,i have no reason to doubt them.
Well that would make sense,thx i haven't considered it.Their wording is ambiguous.
Well i play hearthstone for 3 years and i play joke decks on casual for almost 2 years,i am sure my casual mmr has to be really low by now but i am still playing against tier 1 meta decks .If what they say is true the only explanation i have is my opponents have the same mmr with me while playing meta decks. XD
Of course that it isn't rigged! :P
Players that cry ''rigged'' are usually just bad but it is easier to blame the game and the matchmaker instead of themselves.
Even Legend top 100 guys say it's rigged btw.
They do? Prove it with a source.
if its not rigged ,why don't we matchmake first , then choose the deck ?
Because then it would take even longer to start playing a game.
It is totally rigged for ranked players. How so ? When I am playing with renolock I always play against high tier decks but when I start to play Hunter deck I just play against non tier decks. I think it is rigged to favor diversity but after legendary it is decided by MMR
This has generated a bit more curiosity for me! I always assumed that you had a separate casual MMR for each of Wild and Standard modes.
This explanation makes it sound as though you have a single background MMR value for determining your pairings for casual and legend mode play, and that every single constructed game you play affects that MMR (so, e.g. mucking about with a nonsense wild deck and losing a few games to secret pala will make your standard casual games easier)
No, Casual has its own MMR. Your Legend rank will not affect your Casual MMR.