People falling from ladders is not fun?

Should be self explanatory from the header, but...

Ive been enjoying mostly good balanced team games for months, but few days ago that totally changed. I found myself way up in the http://zero-k.info/Ladders having over night gone up to casual position 15 or so(from 25 or so) and unlocking the secrets of top20 zero-k players, for a moment. Then suddenly game balance was totally against me, because I had way too much ladder points? 2650 or so, so about 50 too many. I counted from replays that I lost 12 more games than I won in last few days. 12 shit joke balance games over from the start, loss after loss after loss. And before that sudden up-jump in ladder, in 6 days I counted, I had 8 more wins than losses, so its a big, sudden, change.

Now after falling from the top 20 part of the ladder by 50 points/15 positions thanks to shit un-enjoyable games, back to my normal, after which I now counted 8 more wins than losses.

So: up up up up up up down down down shit down down down down down up up up up up. Dont seem and feel balanced? Or Im I wrong on something?

Same thing happened months ago for few days. For no reason, win after win turned for loss after loss because of suddenly weird balance being totally against me.

= few top ranked, forgotten and kingly players fell from the ladder few days ago, messing balance? Falling because no games played in a months time?

I quickly looked at few other peoples games, they dont seem to get such a losing streak as me, so maybe this is all in my head after all.

Also not really related to the topic, but looking at my rating history, my line is going down even when Im winning more battles than losing, whats up with that? I dont mind, its just weird as hell.

Well, my losings very, very clearly started when I magically got too good for my skill. So cant be a case of bad luck.

Losing streaks and winning streaks are common in multiplayer games.

You can temporarily gain enlightenment or pick up a bad habit and fall into a rut.
Not sure of the mechanism, but it's not specific to Zero K or to our balancer.

In Dark Souls III I would have a run of 20 matches without a loss, then have a couple of bad matches and then I'm losing almost half my matches.

I think only the ladders themselves, the afk channel based on the ladders, and rank colours care about relative positions. Colours are particularly sensitive to, say, the #1 player idling off the ladder, since the rank colour thresholds change quite a bit in response.

[Spoiler]

I wouldn't be surprised if it's just Covid fallout making the stronger players have more time to play. You're mostly playing the big team game so you won't be affected by matchmaking for finding opponents at least, and a lot more new players have been around lately so if you're on a team that has to fight Godde and there's some new players on your team that will get bad.

Personally I'm having a hard time finding matches when I'm available to play them, having to wait in queue for 15 minutes to have an opponent show up because my MM rank is weirdly high :(

NaaaaaaIdont believe in losing many battles in a row is bad luck or whatever. I know if one messes up something, like a news reader says wrong words, its prolly going to happen again during that newscast. Same for single battle, if you lose focus or morale. Every battle is different, unless you get trolls and new guys in your team battle after battle and enemy does not(ok thats bad luck, but this does not happen often. I havent noticed teams being much the same). I do very often give my best to win, so I do not believe in luck being the reason for those win/lose streaks. Again, I blame the magical ladder climbing I did which resulted in poorly balanced games for few days. I shoulda taken a screenshot or paid more attention, but Im pretty sure I was the highest blue player in the ladder, and it looked wrong, and it was wrong.

Yesterday was another shitty game day for me, few more losses than wins, but battles had(clear stupid) reasons for losses. Balance was good-ish, but playing(or players) was stupid. Quickly thinking I-feel-reasons for yesterdays losses, my team and enemys... because new guy with elo 1500 playing worth negative 200 elo, good players fooling around while enemy gives 100%, good player doing risky shit and failing, letting pluk live free and not making anti, too many copper players in team, too many good players rushing super weapon... well, thats just too many idiot players doing wrong things. Unenjoyable. Big team room had one 4v4 that I saw, it was good.

Ok, lobsterpot is pure cancer. Add trolls to the mix. Nevermind ladder strangeness in that case.

This almost 50% win/lose is fine even if its like 6 loses in a row sometimes. Im sure those games feel balanced anyway, if there is no trollish stuff to mix battles up too much. Its just this few days of total unbalance after the ladder thing, oh and also that rank thing said "win one more battle to gain rank", it was wrong. So it was 99% progress, now its 83%, and its balance again. Same few months ago, total unbalance for days suddenly, and !predict was "always" not in my favor.

Anyway, I feel like this topic can die now.

Is the chance of victory from after battle results page? That % is not the same as with before battle !predict. I think.

With !predict even 5% difference is noticeable in game. 40% vs 60% is huge.

Not people from falling lader it not fun. Staying all time in ladder is not fun. Dats why pluk is playing at such level.
Btw this loosing and wining streaks is also in Dota2. And i think not only there. That's interesting phenomen.

esainane is right. WHR will try to refine the elo prediction of past days using future information. So it is to be expected that most battles will have their win chance slightly shifted by their own result. In any bigger team battle the !predict chances when the match starts should be perfectly 50%, since the server tries all combinations to minimize the Elo difference.

Looking at the predictions of past battles will give you an idea of how well the balance was predicted, but there's no quick fix without implementing a better balancing/rating algorithm.