I am a fairly new player to the game (started playing towards the end of Season 13), and have noticed something that is puzzling me about Competitive rank progress.
I play with a group that have quite mixed ranks amongst the various roles, and whilst the higher ranked players obviously often play better, it seems they always get more rank progression (whether positive or negative) regardless of actual performance (i.e, this remains true even when lower ranked players in our group outperform the higher ranked player in the same role).
And this happens regardless of whether we win or lose.
Help me make this make sense. I can understand getting more rank progression for performing better than your teammates. But shouldn’t it also account for the relative skill difference between teams?
For example, if a bronze DPS outperforms their silver DPS teammate in a win against an expected loss, shouldn’t the bronze DPS get more rank progression than the silver DPS?
I am sure there’s a lot of hidden detail that goes into calculating this stuff, but it feels… off…
What are we not understanding or are missing about how this all works?
Your rank, division and % will go up and down as you win and lose.
The amount it is goes up and will be adjusted slightly based on your MMR (hidden number that mirrors your rank), your groups average MMR and how they compare against the enemies.
It doesn’t care so much about “performance”, so the stats during the game are pretty meaningless. It’s all about how you work together to complete the objective. (Ie win the game)
Used to be, but now it’s kind of front and center but not the most obvious.
Ok, that makes sense. But presumably the higher ranked players have higher MMR than the lower ranked ones, no?
So, if we win, as a group, against opponents that have an MMR somewhere near our average, shouldn’t our higher ranked players get less increase than our lower ranked players?
Yes. Your MMR is a number from -6 to +6. Where I think they said last season 0 MMR was around Gold 2.
So that MMR goes up and down as you win/lose, that is the number they use to match you. Your visible rank, division and % are nowadays a 1 to 1 representation of that.
The short version though. Just play to have fun with your friends, learn from your mistakes, improve together and you will be winning more than you lose. Eventually you’ll notice your rank is a higher one day.
OK, so say our group has an MMR range of -5 to -3 (I’m sure it’s not that wide, but keeping the numbers simple), and we win a match against a team with an average MMR of -4…
Would you not expect the players with an MMR higher than the match average to get a smaller adjustment than those with a lower than match average MMR?
Hmm… We noticed it because one day one of the lower rank players was like “oh yay, +8%” and a higher ranked player laughed and said “huh, I got 22%” (those were probably not the exact numbers, but in that kind of range). So then we started comparing adjustments across multiple games, over several days. And it was consistent - higher ranked players always got a larger adjustment than the lower ranks.
And whilst we do all solo queue from time to time, we predominantly play as a group, or partial group, I believe.
And it doesn’t matter if we win or lose. The adjustment is always of a larger magnitude for the higher ranked players. Even down to differences in subrank.