It has been a well-known fact for quite a while, that the majority of the player base in MOBA and Hero Brawler games is incredibly skilled. Don’t be fooled by the term “average” player. This “average” player is everything but average. He is Challenger skill wise in League of Legends, Dendi has been his Pudge apprentice in Dota and don’t get me started on his skills in Heroes of the Storm.
There are just those few issues that keep pulling him back from making his skill reflect his rating. Let us not forget about the "noob, toxic teammates" and "broken matchmaking".
But is any of this actually true?
An Illusion of skill
The Dunning-Kruger effect represents a cognitive bias under the influence of which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. This term that became so notorious in the gaming community has been coined by psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning in 1999 in their publication “Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.
A cognitive bias, to put it simply, is when we systematically make inferences about people, situations and even ourselves that are illogical and contradict rationality. In this way we create a bubble of our own that is called “subjective reality” which determines our reality according to these flawed perceptions of ours. The best way to conquer a cognitive bias is to be aware of it. That however is a lot harder than it sounds.
Across four studies, Dunning and Kruger found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. An example of such an overestimation is the fact that even though they were in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Paradoxically, with skill improvement people developed better self-awareness and those people recognized their limitations a lot more accurately. A primary argument in the Dunning-Kruger effect theory is the statement that skills that show competence in a particular domain are the same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain – one’s own or anyone else’s.
Perceived logical reasoning ability and test performance as a function of actual test performance (Study 2).
But how does this apply to Heroes of the Storm or any other game? Well a person that is influenced by this bias not only overestimates his own skills, he also underestimates the skills of others and is a lot more likely to put the blame of the failed engage, the lost objective and ultimately the lost game on others. This is called “locus of control”.
Who do you blame?
People with an internal locus of control believe that things happening to them are in their control, thus they are more likely to look at themselves rather than at others, and people with an external one believe that they cannot influence how their life goes and they attribute the end results to external, environmental factors. The environment in Heroes of the Storm, being their teammates and Dustin Browder.
By "Dustin Browder", I mean the matchmaking. In MOBA and brawl games, it is ridicuously easy to blame matchmaking for your losses. A "concidence" is that the lower you go in MMR, ELO, rank, League, or whatever the type of ranking is, the more people blame matchmaking. This tendency created the myth of "ELO/MMR Hell". A place on the ladder which is created by devs, because they like to see your gaming experience fall apart. Of course this "Hell" was proven to not exist on numerous occassions.
The phenomenon which discredits it the most is the existence of "boosting". It is essentially a service where you pay a high ranked player to play on your account and boost you to good ranking. The fact that a person can be paid and be on the clock to boost your ranking 10/10 times, means that the skill to exit your hell is achievable. You just don't possess it, and by trying to blame external factors deny yourself the prospect of ever reaching it.
Despite this evidence, people who suffer from this bias still find ways to rationalize their bad experiences. When they lose, it is because of the Nova that laned bot all game and didn’t come help the team. It has nothing to do with the fact that their skill shot accuracy is less than 20%, their positioning is abysmal and they spam the same talent build that they saw on Grubby’s stream during Alpha. This refusal to seek the fault in oneself and desperately looking for it in other factors, creates a loop of failure that extends a lot further than just a person's HotS game.
It can't be me...
A possible rationalization about the matchmaking being tuned specifically to destroy their games could be that they possibly believe that Blizzard feels threatened that they are so good, that if they don’t get handicapped by matchmaking, they will reach a rating that is thought to be….unreachable. A conspiracy of this scale could be true, but until some evidence supporting it appears, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems like a more plausible explanation.
Now admittedly the game does have some matchmaking problems. Those problems torment the top players, the people above and around 4k MMR. However for the majority of the player base, those problems are statistically insignificant and are also not the reason why they are stuck at this low rating.
As in any other game, if you play enough and more so, consistently good, you will climb the rankings. This isn't a personal opinion. This is basic statistics. And in the current matchmaking when you do, when you reach the top ,you might indeed experience issues. But not issues affecting your MMR or ranking. The issues that you would experience affect your game enjoyment and more importantly – practice.
The matchmaking issues hurt the esports and competitive side of the game, they don’t hurt the “360 no scope” pro at rank 20. They might like to believe they are rank 20, because Browder hates them and keeps a designated employee responsible to f#%! his games up.
But just maybe, it's the Dunning-Krueger effect running rampant in the Nexus.
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