I know few silvers very well, it’s mostly not possible. Few soloq games here and there - sure, but only soloq games? Nope. High vg bronze and vg silver are filled with duo, trio, full party and a lot of times with voice comm + playing only with few players so they know each other really good.
I had a VG player in my friends list that was so-so, but boy oh boy, he reached T10 2 days after patch released. I play every day for like 2h and sadly this is not much nowdays as I spend 40m from them waiting for a match start (either que, or dodging, or not accepting, etc). So, I check stats and… well, I had 6 wins (from 8 games at the time I checked) and he got 50 wins (and as I said, he is not that great so I would say it’s at most 50-60% win rate). Imagine how much time he spend on the game… lol, literally 12h per day or more, insane. Clearly a kid with a lot of free time, but I digress.
My point is, grinding is real. For VG silver is not enough tho, as if you play soloq only the MM will f you up good and you will end up playing with poa bronze in your team vs 2450+ elo T10 full team and/or trioq VG silvers or at best duoq VG silvers = you will start to lose a lot. Maybe few of the “pros” can do it soloq, but won’t be a fun ride and I am still doubtful. Known enough silvers to know how it rolls. They play soloq (well, some of them) ofc, but most of their games is in a party. 
P.S. Sorry for the 3 subsequent posts.
Yep, they “hard ported” the game from mobile to PC and didn’t include anything PC related to make the game feel better on it. On top of that while doing so the mobile version got a lot worse, buggy, lags, loading screen time is also longer, balance problems with some heroes a lot powerful on X platform vs another one, and what not.
No one knows the exact method SEMC uses to calculate the MMR, but the most well-known systems simply use wins and losses. KDA (which is really \frac{K+A}{D} (or K+A if D=0) doesn’t really correlate well with player performance, so it’s not used per se in ranking systems.
Back when VainSocial was around, they calculated a score for VG players using Microsoft’s TrueSkill algorithm. By calculating TS scores for each player in a match, it was possible to calculate the “quality” of that match. The majority of VG matches had high “quality” scores, suggesting that the VG MMR algorithm was based on something similar to TrueSkill. And TrueSkill only uses wins and losses.
1 Like
Yeah, the TrueSkill rating was really interesting, and it identified smurfs really quickly, if I’m remembering right.
3 Likes
Yep, also there is ver. 2.0. Sadly, they should pay money to MS to use the exact trueskill in commercial product, so not sure if it’s exactly trueskill or something based on it.
There are publicly available implementations of the original TrueSkill algorithm available for research and non-commercial use (the way VainSocial was using it), but Microsoft only permits TrueSkill to be used commercially for XBox Live games.
TrueSkill 2.0 is completely proprietary, and the algorithm isn’t available outside of Microsoft itself.
1 Like
As a soloq player I don’t think k/d/a is important because I play a lot of the time against well coordinated teams and they punish anything you do , and I played with other players in parties and sometimes I don’t die , like if Iam playing jungle in 5v5 and wanted to gank top lane , and while I was attacking the laner boom I find 3 players joining from his team and kill me and the my laner and push the lane while the rest of our team has no idea what is happening , there is op doesn’t make sense rotations in 5v5 , the problem is you see this op rotations while your team has no counter for that , they pushed our lane someone push one of their lanes , nope , nothing happened from my team .
So to get a good k/d/a you need to play like the coward ringo I got in soloq , he was spamming ringo cp and just stay in bushes and when fights starts 2v3 , he waits until enemy get low health then hit them with the ult and then finish kill them and we ended up losing the game I died a lot and my teammate died a lot and this ringo has zero death and 7kills or something , and he actually added me after and told me Iam bad because I died a lot while he didn’t die , he can’t even read the fights , if he participated in any fights we would get ace every time and 0 deaths .
I was talking about SEMC using the trueskill won’t be legal, vainsocial is totally legal to use it. Forgot that MS won’t give the trueskill to someone even if paid, so 10x for the refresh. 
As someone who solely plays ranked 5v5 unless I’m with friends, the game has been very enjoyable for me 4.0 - 4.1 for a few reasons.
-
The core gameplay is better than its ever been, 5v5 metagame is healthy and fairly diverse, and most roles and heroes function how or close to how they should.
-
Despite your claims of tier 10 bronze + players getting the short end of the matchmaker, I’ve been very impressed with the competency of most players at my tier, and the reliability of the matchmaker to put me with those players. More so than any time since probably early 2017 I feel like I’m playing in a real competitive environment with other like minded players.
-
Balancing and hero diversity has been quite high these past 2 patches, there is certainly still a bias away from proper warrior bruisers but you still have a good set of choices for each role.
[Mod edit: fixed image gallery]
1 Like
Thought this was funny enough to comment on - every time I don’t see a 5v5 badge, I immediately think it’s a smurf. Funnier part is that 9 times out of 10, I’m right.
Disclaimer- I play 95% rank
2 Likes
And the higher you are the more chances it’s a smurf. Currently high players tend to have multiple smurfs (for example L3oN had ~20 smurfs).
1 Like
And what about that LiuLiu guy? I just wish there was a bit more dev moderation on this kind of thing. I’m one of the few that doesn’t have a 5v5 badge nor is a Smurf.
I’m not in NA, so I can only talk about EU. They don’t make them to destroy worse players. There is another reason:
This is the reason. According to L3oN, he has to make those accounts to have a mid quality match. That’s also the reason why he no longer grinds elo, and the same reason why Hundor once he has enough glory for the next hero and it’s VG gold he stops playing in his main account.
LuluXiu has 6 accounts at VG Gold LMFAO. The guys actually a legend and basically gets detected by the smurf system so he ends up skipping all the way to hotness and gets the Elo boost the only time. As well as pure SoloQ.
That makes sense. All I can say is I give a lot of props and respect to the folks who stick with one account.
Given that not doing so at those levels means he will be destroying worse players, i prefer them to make smurfs to fight those of their elo. In fact, i have more respect for those who do It due to the dedication It takes to make over 20 accounts just to make better the experience of both them and the worse players.
1 Like
This is not true, they will destroy a lot of games till they get up to VG silver. Then it will be 50/50 if they will get another silver/high bronze player in the enemy team for their spot. After that they will abandon and again destroy a lot of games for a lot of players (every match with such a player is 9 people ruined one. Enemy team feels useless when 1 enemy player 1vs5 them, his team feels useless too as they can stop playing and still win).
Edit: Silvers/golds complain as they are paired with us “the t10 bronze noobs” and they count the 2550 elo ones as “no names” too.
No, there is an anti smurf system, smurfs will climb a lot faster than a normal one, and what they dont want is to reach silver as they would face the same problem. Doing smurfs they will destroy worse players for… 5-6 matches? Not doing that would destroy them every time they play, and given that some of them play for +6 hours a day, destroying 6 matches is better.
Your logic is flawed. Firstly, it will be not 5-6, it will be 20+ matches and guess what will happen when then? Then will play 2 good matches and create a new account as “it’s not fun anymore”.
The only solution is in SEMC hands, not the players. Players that are a lot better than the rest exist and will exist in any game, even the dumbest/simplest ones. Those players will always destroy and I can’t see how it’s more fun to play with t5 players vs 2550 elo t10 players, that ofc for the silvers/golds are noobs, ofc and really are next to them. Not because they are weak, but because those X players are that much better than the rest. As they will play some t10 games and again need to create a new account anyway. I guarantee you that when you sum it up, they destroy a lot more matches and worse - few for starting players and I can tell you (as I was one of them in the past) - it’s not fun to get a smurf in your game and you “curse” him. 1vs3 when you are t8 and back in the 3vs3 days that was more than most of the VG bronze nowdays - this is no fun or balanced, it’s frustrating someone to shred your whole team in ranked game.
Other way is forcing more casual games till the rank is calculated and then slap those smurfs directly into the t10 silver/gold with more aggressive +/- elo to drop them fast if the system is wrong. That would need a lot bigger player base tho.
It doesnt take as much matches. Last time i created a smurf, It took me 3 matches to start being paired with VG players.
They will play a lot more, as the MMR wont scale as much.
Not in my experience, and clearly not in theirs as It would make no sense to do It otherwise as they get bored of fighting worse players.
I agree, ive suffered that too, but the matches they destroy with smurfs are less than with their main.