MMR – How It Works
What the game's matchmaking number is, where yours sits, and how much of it to believe.
What the game's matchmaking number is, where yours sits, and how much of it to believe.
What the game's matchmaking number is, where yours sits, and how much of it to believe.
MMR is the number Population: One uses to decide who you get matched with. The game never shows it; pop1stats reads it straight from the game, without changing it, for 4,852 tracked players. It goes up when you do well and down when you do not, like the ratings behind chess, Dota or Rocket League. What it does not do is tell two nearby numbers apart. This page shows why.
What each number is for
It is built to get you into a lobby with people at your level, and it moves after every game to get there. Lose badly and it drops you; dominate and it lifts you; after a few games you are where the game thinks you belong.
It is a team number, too. Squad up with better players and their MMR bleeds into yours; squad up with weaker ones and yours bleeds into theirs. That is by design. A stable MMR usually means you play with the same people, at the same level.
On a typical playing day it moves about 207 points. One playing day in 8 it moves more than 500.
It was never about balance or the team. It reads what follows you into every game, kills and damage, and does its best to say how well you play, whoever you squad with. A win counts, about as much as three kills, no more: a win belongs to the team.
It moves slowly on purpose: the best 15 of your last 20 playing days, so one bad evening does not move it and one good one does not either.
Median
1,912
Top 10% from
3,264
Top 1% from
5,477
200 MMR per bar. The grey bars at the ends hold everyone below zero and everyone above 6,000. The highest tracked MMR is 18,741 (Legends_1), the lowest -9,762.
Half the community sits between 1,358 and 2,536. The shape, a hump with a long tail to the right, is what every rating of this kind looks like.
Take any two rated players. How often is the one with the higher MMR also the better-rated one? Rating is pop1stats' own score from recent results. If MMR tracked skill closely the bars would be tall from the start. They start at a coin flip and climb only as the gap gets wide.
Every pair of rated players, grouped by how far apart their MMRs are, 250 at a time.
Under 250 apart it is a coin flip: 52%. A thousand apart, 69%. Two thousand apart, 80%.
Each bar is the middle half of a rating band's MMR, the tick its median.
Best rated
2,529
MMR of Technofied, rating 37.1
Highest MMR
18,741
Legends_1, rating 36.2
Don't read skill from it. It was never built to show that. It is your current state of play: where the game will put you tonight, given who you have been playing with lately.
For you personally it can still be a signal. Play with the same people over time and watch it move: up means the game is putting you in harder lobbies. Held against a random player's number, one against one, it says almost nothing, because that is not what it was built for. If you must compare, compare in thousands, not in hundreds.
For how someone actually plays, look at their results. That is what the rating on their profile is made of, and what the leaderboards rank by.
The 20 best-rated players on the site hold anything from 2,529 to 18,741 MMR. The medians climb with rating; the spread inside every band is thousands wide.
The lowest MMR on the site belongs to a player who wins 39% of games. Half the community wins less than 30%. Whatever put 103 players below zero, it was not losing.