General DiscussionNew Distribution of Skill Brackets?

And i am still on normal bracket. Cool.

Well, that may explain my current loss-streak. I beleive I was in the lower end of VH and the Higher end of High bracket. So I'm either playing in the new VH against people significantly more skilled than me or I'm playing in High bracket with the inclusion of people who would've been in Normal bracket before but are in the now larger High bracket and are dragging down my team...either way it is the MM telling me to get better quickly or I'll be royally screwed.

Or I am in the new normal? I never really payed much attention to the brackets :(

I am not certain precisely what it means...it just seems that something has changed. It could be that the MMR calculation was significantly altered...or it could be that they just changed the cut-off for definition of the brackets.

The skill brackets were always fluid categories anyway. When a game is designated "High" it just meant that the average MMR of the players was above some number and below some other number. It may be that they just changed the MMR numbers that defined those brackets.

TMM games count as normal bracket.

This actually sounds logical to me. Although I almost always play on very high lately I get way worse players than I used to get. Maybe it's because the overall "very high" bracket isn't that high anymore.

I wonder how much of an impact this has had on Solo-queue vs Group-queue. I've noticed soloing has taken a severe tank in terms of quality of opponents/allies, where as my stack games have gotten harder if anything.

Or maybe more people started to play "unknown" heroes instead of their best heroes?

New bracket distribution does not mean that Match-maker got any worse or better. just some high bracket players are now called very high, and some normal bracket players will be in high. this doesn't mean that you will be matched with any better or worse players, because this change appears to be for everyone.

that just means now u can get matched with players rated even 2000mmr below you faster than before or maybe more
do you remember that video took by Blunt where dendi played very high game with player that had 0 wins and 2 losses? and he was soloing LOL

Well, I can definetly confirm that some games are extremly unbalanced. Like, i get people with 53% soloq and in team is also guy with 47.5%. Apsurdic.

^ As I remember, that guy was in party with apathy so...

ofc he wasnt

yeah probably true, look at my last 3 games, dont need more proof than that

they don't want front pagers being solo queues and they don't want stacks facing pubs. most games i solo queue into now are usually stacks of 4 or straight pubs and i can assume the same for the other team (confidentially.) the variance in skill lvl now is probably overall higher because they want ppl to group and that in turn raises mmr. some cases

How to create unplayable game for solo players by Eric Tams (updated by Fletcher)

No idea, been playing between page 10-20 mostly but sometimes like every 10th game maybe I can get this guy with 1-10wins on my team that ruins everything, idk what is up with that.

i think they're recalibrating how skill brackets work

eg : level 1 , very high
then u sort of "upgrade" to level 2 "normal"

levels as in your dota level
idk

@coroner I know what you are talking about.

Look at this game I had the day before yesterday http://dotabuff.com/matches/340402013 And look at the winrates...what was that Qop doing there? I mean, it's a good experience playing against people better than you, but he was definitely leagues above us (and his team was an obvious hindrance to his play).

Ok, looking back, maybe that Zeus and Tiny had something to do to make it possible to include him.

thats jsut dota 2 match maker for you imagine if he randomed or picked support that game

Lag reduced enough for me to search games today. The sample was very odd. Of 200 games played from 17:57-18:27...

44% were Very High, 19% were High, 37% were Normal.

This was also a very low rate of games played compared to what I normally see...something is wrong.

Well, all I can say is that I went down from 51,5%->50% in about a day and the amount of morons in these games (example 4 ppl pick a carry) or 4 ppl picked (we lacked a support) and he picked timbersaw. I also got some real pubstomps like 36-4 and I have played a couple of games with people who were much better than me. Dunno whats going on but I dont like it.

PS. I think I was in lower end of high bracket and now shit aint cash

I lurk mostly in the shadows on this forum as i didnt bother to post. However i will make an exception to say that i think you are on to something Relentless! The recent games i played made no sense as i seem to only get grouped with people that are completely incompetent. I know this is something dota is known for but the last days i almost wanted to uninstall (last couple of games, no courier no wards and blatant feed).

It seems to me that is easier to climb skill brackets, that would most certainly explain the sudden growth in really bad games.

PS: Even my only won game today, my team fed like crazy and again no wards no courier, supp storm spirit with 47% winrate
http://dotabuff.com/matches/351556173

Next sample was 24% Very High, 27% High, 49% Normal.

Back up to 9.4 games/min also, maybe that last sample was just unusual. But either way this still indicates a large change in the definition of the skill brackets. There seems to be a lot more variabliity as well. I remember getting fairly consistent numbers with a sample size of 200 games pre-first blood patch.

I get constant 4 win followed by 4 lose streak from retarded team
Seems fishy

Interesting find, I think they are still tuning the brackets.

P.S. whats with all the morons talking about how they are getting worse teammates now ? brackets =/= MMR, your MMR didn't change, the only thing changed was how it is called now (high/normal/vhigh)

next sample 22% Very High, 17% High, 61% Normal

First sample for the new patch

27% Very High 27% High 46% Normal

so average after 1000 games is 50.2% Normal, 22.6% High, 27.2% Very High

Maybe they changed it to something simple like 25/25/50? 1000 games is still not that many compared to several million total.

@Relentless
How can you check which bracket you played?
I though valve just hidden it.

Interesting distribution.
They probably normalized it, because 3/12/85 is too much of a jump.
Baddies should get boost to ELO, good players should be fine, since they raised average from normal bracket mostly.

How exactly do you check which bracket you're in?

You look at recent games and sort by skill bracket. Then you have to find your game.

Do an average by region, u can probably find out more.

What I am doing will not sort by region.

Next sample 21% Very High 34% High 45% Normal

It's interesting to see this shift. The games do feel closer, but it is hard to tell yet if this was a combination of fluke and patch changes.

I have lost my last 5 games in a row (two of which were since the new patch), so I am not sure if the MM is getting better.

It's nice that we can see who the stacks are now, as that may reduce some of the confirmation bias.

the reason why you bounce around so much early is because if you make a smurf account and you dominate your game then it automatically assumes you are way out of bracket so it throws you up against decent ppl to see if you are still unstoppable in that bracket as well. mmr isn't retarded its the ppl that think they are beyond baddies. i know im bad and i try to improve i take certain flaming as constructive criticism.

Next sample 20% Very High 23% High 57% Normal

Im getting 100% LPQ

Next sample 20% Very High 30% High 50% Normal

Relentless my bro <3

Would you be up for sharing your code for pulling this data? I'm a programmer and I would like to play around with some data mining. Having a place to start would be very helpful and time saving =P

Its not a code. I'm just manually checking the recent games tab...that's why its so limited...can't sort regions or check many games.

Next sample 24% Very High 20% High 56% Normal.

what's this sample thingy?

It makes sense though doesn't it? There is a rating system in place, wouldn't you expect for more players, particularly for those that continue to play this game to reach the VH bracket? So the bunch of scrubs that were new to dota 2 and played in the normal bracket are now in the VH bracket.

The key assumptions:
-players from the OLD SAMPLE
>average rating higher as players got better over time
-players that won more and improved continued to play, while those that picked up the game for a while, got sick of the learning curve and gave up left. I'm not saying this represents every normal bracket player, but it would result in a higher average rating

As I understand it Very High, High, and Normal are just classifications of games. They decide somewhere to say "games above XXXX MMR score are Very High and games below XXXX MMR score are normal. Before the First Blood patch this put about 3% of games in Very High, and 85% in Normal. Then when they hid the skill bracket from API they changed it a lot. I just take a short time that will have about 200 games completed and see how many are in each category now using the recent games tab...its the only thing that still shows the skill brackets.

Next sample 18% Very High, 22% High, 60% Normal.

Total is up to 2000 games now. 23.8% Very High 24.2% High 51.9% Normal. It seems likely that the new skill bracket distribution is something like below average= Normal and top 25% is Very High.

The old skill brackets (pre-first-blood patch) Very High was above 4400 MMR. And Normal was below 3800 MMR. Now it seems to be something like Very High = above 3500 MMR and Normal is below 3000 MMR. So people who were near the top of Normal before the First Blood patch are now in Very High.

i'm glad you started playing dota 2 again~

Thank you. Yes my local internet was fixed.

^how did you conclude 4400mmr for vh?

It used to be approximately that...if you assume tMMR represents a similar distribution to MMR. It was probably really a bit lower because the best players tend to make teams more. But everyone does make teams. There are huge numbers of low MMR teams.

top 25% of tMMR is currently 3500+ and appears to be 25% in Very High. 50% of tMMR is above 3000 and 50% below. Normal appears to be about the bottom 50%. That's how I make those guesses.

How do you even check for skill bracket? It's not in the previous matches tab or anything.

FUCK MACHING SYSTEM FUCK VALVE!