Can someone explain to me how Rank points and MMR are related? I've been playing for a good while but only recently started doing hero league with friends. When we win, they usually get around 150 points while I'm hauling in like 400. Does the stimpack effect this? Why am I getting so much more than them?
Also when I solo queue hero league, I'm getting teamed up and matched against people hovering around rank 10 while I'm like rank 40. It's fine because I feel like their skill level is around mine regardless, but what's up with that? I thought they'd be matching me with people around my rank?
They are not related really in any direct way. It's quite confusing!
MMR is the hidden number the game assigns you based on your win and loss rate, which is determined by who you beat and who you lose to. Based on that number, the game then assigns you a rank that it thinks you should be at.
Until you reach that rank, or until you lose enough games to lower your MMR, you will continue to get hefty huge skill bonuses as the game tries to push you to that rank. For me, once I hit rank 9 I lost my skill bonus - instantly stopped and never came back.
The thing is, MMR changes a *lot* when you first start playing as the system tries to find your real skill number. So if you win your first few matches you'll have an abnormally high MMR which then puts you in teams with people at the same MMR but a much higher rank. When you first start playing you can gain or lose 100 points a match in terms of MMR, whereas after 100 games you're lucky to gain 10 points for a win.
That's why people at rank40 get matched with people at rank 10. It's incredibly annoying for everyone, because there will *always* be people with those abnormally high MMRscores from their first few games because someone has to win their first few games. The system the thinks they are a higher skill than they are, matches them up with people at the same MMR who have played 200 games, and then it's just a shit fest most of the time.
The really annoying and perplexing thing about this is that it's a solved problem - placement matches. Blizzard do it in their other games, but for some reason they don't have them in HoTs. They would go a long way towards stopping this issue occurring.
