Dota 2 long losing streak quotes

Dota 2 long losing streak quotes

I’ve had to explain this same phenomenom a couple times now, so I’m making this thread mostly to bookmark it so I have a quick reference I can copy-paste for when it comes up in the future.

[Full disclosure: everything here is my own opinion, based on the limited information Valve has released and my own observations.]

A lot of people seem to think that having a streak or multiple consecutive streaks of either wins and/or losses indicates that the ranked MMR system is somehow rigged. What’s really going on though is that this is entirely expected if you understand basic statistics and how the game balances teams.

If you ask someone to predict a series of coinflips they’ll probably tell you something like “H-T-H-T-H-T-H-T-H-T-H. etc etc etc”. And if you flip a coin once, and then ask someone to predict the next flip, they will almost always predict the opposite.
BUT THIS IS NOT HOW TRUE RANDOMNESS WORKS! In a truly random scenario, each outcome is independent from all other outcomes. (Dota is not a perfectly random outcome, obviously, but it’s analogous for the purposes of this example. I’ll go into more detail on this point later on.)
In other words, events with random outcomes still allow for clumping. Throw a box of pennies on the ground and some will land close together and some will land all alone. Flip a coin repeatedly and you’ll frequently get streaks of just one side or the other.

You can test this experiment for yourself – there are lots of websites that let you flip coins, roll dice, etc. I just did it myself and for 20 flips had the following outcome: T-T-H-H-H-H-H-H-T-H-T-H-H-H-T-T-T-T-T-T

Over 1000 flips I’m very likely to end up with a 50/50 split, but in any one small fragment of the data, the ratios can be very different. This is what is happening to you – just by chance you’re in one of those periods where a lot of one outcome comes up. Play another 100 matches and see if it doesn’t even itself out.

Now, remember when I said DotA is LIKE a cionflip, but not exactly the same? That’s because the players help determine the outcome of any single match. However, the random factor still applies because (at least in theory) at the very start of the game both teams are perfectly balanced. From the very moment you start picking heroes, that is making decisions to affect the outcome, the odds start to shift, bit by bit, one way or the other. The reason that most players end up with a 50/50 split over many games, wether they are 500 MMR or 6k, is because over a large number of matches you face players of roughly equal skill. That means that the outcome of the match is random, and what player-skill really affects is the levels of skill the match is played at.

The problems largely come into play because the system doesn’t have perfect knowledge of a player’s skill at all times, because people’s relative skill can vary by hero, time of day, level of exhaustion, etc, because the system needs to work around unbalanced stacks that players make themselves, and because the system does not have an unlimited pool ever players at every single MMR level to draw on. This is one some games end up feeling lopsided and why players have winrates that cluster AROUND 50%, but are rarely perfectly 50-50.

If there’s any particular point you don’t understand, please let me know and I’ll elaborate further.
And if you managed to read through all that, good for you and thank you for your time!