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 what we can read from it.
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 the thousands of players it tracks.
This page is not about how the number is calculated behind the scenes. Only the people who built the game know that. It is about what the number does, and what the results tell us. One thing is certain: it moves after every game. Usually up when you win and down when you lose, but not always. Why not? The community has been arguing about that for as long as the game has existed, and nobody will ever know for sure.
What the data below shows is that two players' numbers cannot be compared one to one. MMR does not only reflect how you play. It reflects how everyone you squad up with plays. Keep reading to see why.
What the number actually is, and how it compares to rating
It exists to put you in a lobby with people at your level, and it moves after every game to get there. Win and it goes up, lose and it goes down. Usually. You can win, take your kills, and still watch it drop, and nobody outside the game knows exactly why. 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 200 points. One playing day in 8 it moves more than 500.
It was never about balance or the team. It is about the one player holding the controller, whoever they squad with. It is built from three things: the damage you do, the kills you take and the games you win. That is it. Turning those into one number is more involved, but the ingredients are that simple.
It moves slowly on purpose. Think of it as an average rather than a score: 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
1,884
Top 10% from
3,251
Top 1% from
5,416
Each bar covers 200 MMR. The grey bars at either end collect everyone below zero and everyone above 6,000, so the tails never stretch the chart.
Half the community sits between 1,323 and 2,517. The shape, a hump with a long tail to the right, is what every rating of this kind looks like.
Here is a simple test. Take any two players who both have a rating, and look at the one with the higher MMR. How often is that also the better-rated player? If MMR measured skill, the answer would be nearly always, and every bar below would be tall.
That is not what the data says. When two players sit close together, the higher MMR tells you almost nothing about who is better. The bars only climb once the gap between them runs into the thousands.
Every pair of rated players on the site, grouped by how far apart their MMRs are, in steps of 250.
Less than 250 apart, the higher MMR belongs to the better-rated player 52% of the time. A thousand apart, 70%. Two thousand apart, 80%.
This is where the two numbers meet. Every rated player is sorted into a row by rating, the best at the top, and each row shows where those players' MMRs fall. The bar is the heart of the group, the middle half of them, with a quarter of the row on either side of it. The line through the bar is the median, the MMR of the player sitting exactly in the middle, spelled out on the right beside the size of the group.
If the two numbers measured the same thing, the bars would climb the page like a staircase. They climb, but they lean on one another. Better-rated rows do drift to the right, yet every row is spread across thousands of points, and neighbouring rows overlap more than they separate.
Best rated
2,457
MMR of Technofied, rating 38.0
Highest MMR
18,668
Legends_1, rating 33.7
The 20 best-rated players on the site hold anything from 2,305 to 18,668 MMR. Better players do tend to sit higher, but inside every band the spread runs into the thousands.
The lowest MMR on the site belongs to a player who wins 19% of games. Half the community wins less than 30%. Whatever put 105 players below zero, it was not losing.
It is not what everyone wants to hear, but it is simple.