General DiscussionServer Size and MMR

MMR circulates globally. Because EUwest has decent pings for players from NA, SA, EU, and Rus it has the largest community and its MMR is worth the most. But the difference is tiny for nearly all players.

Playing occasionally on the weaker servers harvests excess MMR from weak servers and brings it to the stronger servers. The objective of the MMR system is not to perfectly define the top 0.00001% of players. Pro LAN tournaments do that, not practice sessions in pub solo que.

The MMR system is for the vast majority of players to get basically fair games no matter where they live and it succeeds in doing that quite well.

You have to remember that solo que games are inherently a poor way to rank players of a 5 v 5 team game. Team MMR scores are really the only thing that is a true measure of how good you are at Dota, everything else is just playing around for fun. Anyone who is a real pro player knows that pub MMRs are not a real measure of skill, and never will be no matter what Valve does. The differences between players skills from one hero to the next are enormous - easily more than 1k MMR and often 2k MMR between best and worst heroes.

Because of these facts someone in your game can always play up 1k MMR or down 1k MMR depending on picks so you can't match games any more fairly than they already are doing it.

You are correct, I myself don't think solo mmr correlates with skill as much as most people seem to think, but it irks me that high MMR people who queue on large servers like EU West and China have to play against decent opposition almost every game while that isn't the case for dead-end servers. Basically, the high MMR players on dead-end servers (assuming they aren't cheating) almost exclusively spam heroes like Storm Spirit, Templar Assassin, Shadow Fiend, Ember Spirit, Invoker, etc. while you have greater variety of roles at high MMRs for large servers.

I think its just a matter of personal choice of what you want to do. Do you really want a high MMR number? Then spam your best heroes. Do you want games you can win with wide range of heroes? Then play whatever you like.

You will get the consequences of your own choices in this. If you spam your best two heroes, then you will lose most of the time picking anything else.

If you really want to go to the extreme faking the highest MMR possible, then stack with smurfs on Australia in low priority, requiring Portuguese language and win all games. Of course as soon as you take that account to a normal situation you will lose. But its not possible to reach the highest MMRs this way anyway, because you run out of MMRs lower on the server pyramid from which to harvest points.

Anyone who is near the very top had to beat the best players to get there. If you stack up a team of 6k players and beat a team of 5k because of matching restrictions you don't gain MMMR (maybe 1 point). And if you try to do this and lose, you can lose 40 points in one game.

I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that MMR circulates globally. That would suggest there is a finite amount of MMR.
The MMR range is subject to the amount of users playing.
So that means that with more people actively playing on particular servers, the more diluted MMR becomes. This translates to a higher possible MMR on high population servers.
Switching between servers, you will see some disparity in skill due to the sheer number of players participating. This just explains correlations in server size and MMR. Also with a larger pool of concurrent players, the top end MMR players will become better and better due to the larger numbers and increased competition.
Edit: The disparity in skill should be mostly seen in the middle percentiles of players and taper off in the high and low ends.
Edit 2: MMR points awarded is a progressive system relative to the opposing teams overall MMR which you seem to forget and is not a static given amount. (Which follows my previous point in which with the existence of a larger proportion players allows for higher MMR)

There IS a finite amount of MMR. And it does circulate globally because players play on various servers and trade MMR between them.

Adding a player does add MMR, but it does not add MMR available to all players. A new player at 2,250 MMR will immediately lose points during anti-smurf and end up in sub 1k MMR having given up maybe 150 points to 2k level players... those players in turn will give a smaller fraction of the points to 2.5k level players, who will in turn hand over almost no points at all to 3k level players.

You can't have a 7k MMR player unless there are plenty of 6k players to defeat and take their points.

There is a static amount of MMR points per # of players. MMR is not produced by better play. It is only traded with no net gain or loss of points for the system. This is not strictly, mathematically true... but its practically true, because the available points from a new player to a top player are infinitesimal.

I did not want to discuss semantics but the amount of MMR available is infinite to each player as long as there is someone to play against. As the disparity in MMR increases, so too will the amount awarded. Eg. Dividing a number constantly - it will approach zero but never reach it. I am speaking from a statistical and practical stand point. That is to say if a computer was somehow programmed to always win at Dota, the MMR it would gain would be infinite.

You confuse my statement about infinity - I regard it as tending towards it.
MMR cannot reach a negative sum and the highest MMR achievable is reliant on the player pool.
Edit: I recommend reading on material regarding ELO, the chess system.
Another example. If Dota could somehow facilitate only 2 players, with one winning 100% of the time. The loser would not receive negative MMR, the winner however would probably have an MMR that would plateau at around 4000-5000 and would require an excessive amount of games to increase in MMR. This can be seen in how Dota streamers climb to 7k and gain very few points.

Actually, to be precise, the sum of global MMR would steadily drop if there were no new players joining.

No, the amount is finite. It is large (about 12.6 trillion MMR points currently). And it is increasing, but it is not infinite.

This is not a matter of semantics, it is an important mathematical fact that has a deciding influence on the behavior of the system.

Also, you are incorrect that the amount of MMR collected for a win will not reach zero. It does. In fact the difference between team averages to reach zero is only several hundred points. I don't remember exactly, 500ish.

Not only is MMR not infinite, it is also not tending toward infinity. The growth is limited. The rate is limited.

If a perfect Bot was made that won all games it would still not go to infinite MMR. It would be limited to something less than 2500 MMR above the 2nd highest score in the world... in practicality of matching against players it probably would not go 1k MMR above the 2nd highest score.

Your last statement is correct. "MMR cannot reach a negative sum and the highest MMR achievable is reliant on the player pool."
But it does not imply or support any of the earlier statements.

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And your edit is also right. A player who always wins will max out their score for lack of appropriate opponents. It will not become infinite.

When I say infinite I do not mean 100,000 MMR. What I mean is that it will tend towards infinity, and presumably the smallest amount of MMR awarded is +1 after a win, it will therefore tend to infinity. Your statements regarding limited growth and rate hold true and support my argument.
As long as you can play a game of Dota, and hypothetically win every game, it will tend towards infinity. This assumes you gain MMR every time you win.

No, you will win games and gain zero. I've done it. Valve just truncates those fractions, you don't accumulate tiny fractions of MMR for extremely easy wins.

Actually for a while they had a bug that made it possible to win games and lose mmr.

I guess theoretically you could have two teams with an avg. mmr of 1 play against each other to create an inflation of MMR. Since you can not drop below 1 the winning team would bring 125 extra MMR into the pool. I don't think there are any equivalent MMR sinks so this could be exploited but who cares.

you cann't win less than 5 point currently, so a perfect bot that win all game, could actually be as high as we want to.
especially considering that people with 0 mmr are creating mmr when they lose.

Also Relentless are you sure? That was the case previously but nowadays I doubt you can go below +5. An avg. advantage of like 1200+ MMR gives you the same +MMR as a win with 400 avg. MMR advantage.

jussi - yes there is - everytime someone abandons and their team wins 50MMR disappears forever and a kitten dies.

well if it was a +25/-25 game anyway

ah yeah I forgot about that

So Valve has changed their algorithm? Or do they just not make matches with large enough avg MMR differences that you would not gain points?

What's the biggest average MMR difference you have seen recently?

The hero difference in play level is very clear. I have tested that directly - playing heroes to gain or lose 1k MMR easily. Most recently I had to drop from 3550 to 2800 before I could win games on drow.

Dreamland it's obvious that your Tinker is vastly superior to your Windranger. That's probably at least a 1k MMR delta. Or consider what would your MMR be for your 20% winrate Legion Commander with 1.4 KDA? You would have to drop a ton of games before you got that up to the stats you have on Tinker (69% win, 4.7 KDA). There is a level where you would dominate with LC, but its a far, far lower MMR.

You are wrong Dreamland. Why don't you prove you are right? Play the next ten games Legion Commander solo que ranked and see what happens. I know you will lose over half of them even if you try as hard as you can. As you go on you will improve, but it will take a lot of games... maybe 100? before you get to 50% win for LC.

And that's not even going to be your truly "worst" hero. It's going to be one of those you have no played even once on this account that really stinks.

No, its just that YOU can't do it.

Plenty of people play legion and maintain 6k MMR +. You are just bad at LC, or at least currently bad at it. You could eventually practice it up to your current MMR level. But it would take a lot of work.

You always get +5 and there doesn't seem to be a limit. If you search long enough I guess you will always find a match, idk.
This is a pretty recent match I had which was +5.

I don't 5 stack that much so I don't experience this that often but I guess this should be quite common if you have high avg. party mmr.

i'm pretty sure kitrak is correct about his figures, i mean bogidota is borderline 5k and there are thousands of people like him running around demanding safelane in 70% of matches

ecks dee

as for mmr inflation, new accounts getting into the pool add to the number of available points. account selling is also a factor, if a 3k player buys a 5k or 6k account, that's easily 500-1500 points distributed to the pool of higher rated players.

Ppl who say party MMR>solo MMR aren't very good in dota...to increase party mmr just stack with 4 other ppl and win games easily whereas in solo que you get matched with 4 random ppl and actually have to pay attention to mini map,skill of a your teammate and all sorts of stuff

lol how'd you find the thread about ritsu queuing against his friend in -cm mode, it got buried in downvotes (presumably by ritsu's own brigade xD)

i'm pretty sure a lot of high mmr players have dabbled in abuse of some kind at some point (@kong, guanzo, patsoul, etc. just to name a few, i've also run into many bad 6k chink players on us west and they're all terrible) and yes it needs to be addressed

Just like when 5000 MMR US player moved to China with his family and dropped down to 3200 MMR.

no, that wasn't me, i think that was wave

ritsu doto best doto

Slightly off topic, but I find those numbers interesting from a South African Perspective
South Africa is a pretty low populated server but as we are isolated completely from the world it is pretty necessary (most have extreme lag on EU servers --> I even have 300-600 ping)

BUT in the last 6 months we have had a huge amount of russians playing on our servers, pretty much abusing it and annoying the hell out of South Africans (who only speak english or afrikaans)

I think DOTA is a pretty big scene in South Africa per population, considering only South Africans join the SA server (same in Australia) --> While a server in EU will have many countries

Also something to note: South Africa is a very bad country in terms of wealth, you have many millions in townships who will have no access to computers and fast enough internet, then you have the cities which are more first world then cities in most first world countries. So I would say the population of about 5-6 million who have internet and computer, of that there is quite a large number who play DOTA. Not good DOTA though xD

So a low populated easy server makes it abusable by russians and what not BUT I don't see anyway around it in a country where DOTA is fairly popular

https://rjackson.me/tools/mmstats/

Found this page, shows how many people searching at a specific time per server
I thought it was pretty neat

Apparently at 4 am there is only 51 South Africans searching :(

why are there two very distinct spikes on singapore? does everyone have a breakfast and dinner game?