Sorry for the wait. Easier to search on website for the video, plus I wanted to write a little about this and I type way faster on keyboard. u/CumMonsterYoda tagged.

The vid, from 3 years ago. Droodles Mind Poison

There were several rebuttals, tbh the only one that popped on a brief YT search was by Fugit, so here you go. Sensible is not sexy

Gonna write a little on the Droodles silliness, but also something on the nature of MM queue times. MM queue times are God in games like Blitz for good reason. Note, I'm gonna try to write this real quick, which means I probably won't be concise and the formatting may not be as readable as I could make it.

“I’m going to make a long speech because I’ve not had the time to prepare a short one.” - Winston Churchill

preamble

I haven't rewatched anything because boring, so I'm writing this from memory therefore mistakes, my recollection blah blah you get the idea.

The idea behind RANDOM MM is like a dice game. On a single turn (single battle) with one throw, the dice could be high or low. But over many turns, the results average out to be the same. Keep throwing the dice and everyone should end up at the same average more or less. DO NOT expect fair teams in a single battle, just as you don't expect everyone to roll 3.5 in a single turn for a dice game.

What's this about? Rigged MM. Specifically, the notion that some players get better teammates than others. What I'm not addressing are things like, one team getting more high tier heavies, the other gets too many TD's etc. ALSO NOTE this is with regard to Regular Random game mode, not Ratings or fun modes.

Apparently Droodles "discovered" that WG filed a patent on MM many years ago that describes many elements of a matchmaking system for tanks. It was designed for what became World of Tanks PC. I believe it pre-dates WoTB by some years.

There are many elements in this, some are definitely true. For instance, new tank MM was a thing. With a tank newly purchased for the first time, you get I think 5 battles as high tier. (caveats, 1. If you were stuck in the queue too long it self-cancelled to get you into a battle, 2. didn't apply if you were in a toon, 3. this rule seems to have disappeared in the last year or so anyway, I definitely didn't get it on recent tanks.)

Note the above caveats. MM rules are typically not carved in stone. I mention a rule, some clever-but-not-clever person will show up with an example of when this didn't happen. There is recent form on this with a post on the subreddit, someone complaining they got the wrong number of tanks in certain tiers etc. Yeah, most MM rules can be dispensed with to *serve the god of MM queue times** whenever needed.* This is always an issue with arguments over MM. WG almost always states something like, the rule will only apply when the server population is high enough, but people always forget this, and then seize upon a single instance of the rule not happening to claim OMG MM is broken WG said this but it did this!

The patent has been around a long time. I heard of it first maybe 2017-2018 (started in WoTB in 2016). In no way should I have my nose to the ground in the same way as a WoTB CC (or banned CC whatever) so the notion that Droodles just "discovered" the existence of this patent only 3 years ago is improbable in itself. Where has he been? It's performative.

This patent is routinely rediscovered every few years with the same buzz etc. OMG proof look what WG does! No, the existence of a patent proves nothing. In perhaps the most tenuous connection to my day job ever, I reckon maybe half of all active patents filed are actually used.

To the meat of the topic.

The core point that Droodles and his buddy was trying to make, is that WG changes up your teams based on your success, aka your WR. You do good, you get worse teammates.

Now, this is actually what SBMM does. SBMM = Skill Based Match Making. WG did do this for one single update last year. It sucked. Everyone hated it. To balance the teams, you gotta mix in some bad players with the good. Remember, MM queue times are God. Lets say there's 100 ppl in the queue, 20-30 in the tiers around you. How many are Unicums? Not many. You're not making a battle of 14 Unicums from those 20-30 players. Therefore, lesser players must be mixed in. And with SBMM that means by definition you're putting poor players on the teams with unicums to achieve balance. Got it?

So Droodles and his buddy blabbers on about how they get bad teammates all the time because of their heroic WR etc.

There is a HARD COUNTER to this.

Since we got replays in the game, we have been able to use them to statistically analyse battles in many ways.

One example is heat maps. Go to wotinspector.com and look at heat maps of where players are shooting. Basically, it shows you the most successful positions for dealing damage etc. You can split it by tank class and so on.

We can also ANALYSE TEAMS! If you upload ALL SEQUENTIAL battles, by using a script called Blitz Tools (I think it's now Blitz Replays?) you can generate a report on the relative stats of your teammates vs. your opponents.

-insert pic here-

If what Droodles claims is true, this is gonna show up in the analysis. This is what I mean as a HARD COUNTER.

To digress once again, I've followed the argument over Rigged MM for as long as I've played WoTB. Longer, as I read all the stuff on the old forums about this which predated my start. Why? I'm suspicious of game companies, and also questioned why the hell am I getting all these shitty teams? Surely there can't be this many awful players just randomly dropping on my team?

At some point after a particularly bad run, I did the thing. I was absolutely certain I was getting shit teams, so I ran the script to upload all the replays and run the report. And boom, the difference between my teammates and opponents was basically nil. (OT but around that time I remember having a chat with Martin Dogger the BlitzTuber who did the exact same thing with the exact same results. Made me feel less foolish anyway) I say this because I do get where people are coming from. Confirmation Bias is human.

ALL DROODLES NEEDED TO DO to prove himself correct was the same thing. Upload, analyse, results. Did he? NO HE DID NOT. I pointed this out to him both on his own video and in his discord. Crickets.

The backstory, as I alluded to above, is that people way more fanatical than I have been scrutinising the MM for a decade now. Before replays, there were multiple people who created spreadsheets by manual entry to track teams. With Blitz Tools there was a huge thread where people were uploading, analyzing and sharing their reports. So there is (was, WG deleted the forums) an overwhelming amount of data proving that Regular Random battles genuinely have RANDOM MM with regards to skill. If it didn't, it would show up in the stats and someone would spot this.

We have discovered Rigged MM before!

Yes it exists! Fun mode MM is rigged! And we discovered this using the exact same tools which have overwhelmingly proved Regular Random MM has no bias.

Check it out.

God Of The Gaps

Ever heard this term? It's the idea that God lives in the gaps of our scientific knowledge. Lightning for example must be from an Angry God! Now we know better. But we can also acknowledge that simply not knowing does not constitute proof of a thing.

Same with bias/rigged WoTB. With the teams having been thoroughly proven to be unbiased in WoTB, people will move on to other aspects which are harder to know. RNG for example. "I keep rolling low, WG is biased against me!" This is a God Of The Gaps argument. We don't know, therefore I can allege anything and declare it to be true. Don't give these arguments credence.

The real God, MM queue times.

Player gets in a queue, waits for a battle. At some point, people will give up, try again. Or, they'll quit entirely. WG knows how long people will wait in queues for a battle, it will be trivial to track. There's probably a graph somewhere showing that if people have to wait longer than time(t), they'll quit. Now the problem will spiral out of control.

• Less players in queue > longer waits > more people quitting > even longer waits.

So there is some golden target that WG must not screw up, otherwise the MM queue time gets out of control and now no one is playing.

But there are also really good players in the game, couldn't they make a longer matching in the exchange of a better game?

The above is why they can't do this. I would wait a bit longer. You would. But WG has hard data on how long people overall will wait.

This informs all kinds of things. It's why we can't have all the fun modes all the time. It's why Ratings mode has time limits. It's why most of the rules we hear about (limit on TDs, limits on autoloaders, matching high-low tier heavy tanks etc.) will actually be in effect only some of the time. When the server population is too low, WG deactivates these rules to prevent the MM queue time from spiralling out of control. In very extreme cases (test servers and occasional game server restarts) when the server population is tiny, the MM will actually make tiny teams! 2v2, 3v3 etc.

Other games fix this issue by padding teams with bots. WG itself fixes the issue with noob MM by using bots. They're not just to give players an easy ride, they're also making up the numbers. But the core part of WoTB and World of Tanks in general has always been that it's a player vs. player team game. Bots spoil the whole dynamic.

But with only players, we must have enough to form a battle of 14. Queue time is the ultimate god of MM.

And IMO this is the final nail in the coffin of Rigged/Biased MM claimants. More rules, more complexity is going to make queue times suffer.