General DiscussionGames with no skill bracket

currently its either lobby or Normal Skill

The game is so low skilled that it cant tell which bracket you are in.

Actually, I've had some HS and VHS games that were blank for a while, dunno what's up with that.

i always thought those were rly low skill games

From what I can tell they are "Inbetween Skill"
Also, undetermined players, or parties can cause a blank Skill Bracket

There are a number of things that can cause this. The API works in such a way that skill bracket data is only available for a short period of time, and only for most (but not all) matches. Additionally the API can (and does) go down, meaning we can't get skill data for any matches within a time window.

TL;DR: missing means missing, not that the match was low skill.

^ Yeah I was thinking that, probably just unfortunate time windows in which your game ends, and when the server, coordinator, or whatever at valves end just happens to be busy updating, or patching, or anything honestly.

I had blank too at my qop coz i play party with my friend and he is 1k mmr

blank means ur hidden bracket

@jason
u definetely know better, but I just dont see what you are tralknig about.

I havent seen a single consistent VHS player with blank matches
literally every time there appear games without skill bracket, it is played in normal skill for some reason, and mainly its the bottom part of NS. if u open any profile of a player who is a normal skill resident, youll find a lot of blank matches. lately (=last year) the only matches that are not detected by steam API, are played in this bracket.

also whenever steam is down, it just delays the appearance of the match on dotabuff, but when it finally comes, the skill bracket is attributed within a short period of time (like 5 minutes or so).

I can confirm. Some 1k MMR games or lower have no skill bracket. (Im not 1k but the average sometimes gets to low 1k. Im 2.5k, still bad though)

blank means ur destined to be 8k.

The skill bracket data is made available in segments grouped by skill ID (1 normal, 2 high, 3 very high). There's a cap to the number of matches that will appear in each segment at once: if a match enters and exits without being seen (due to an API issue, etc), the skill data for that match is lost.

More normal matches are played than high, and more high than very high. This generally means that skill data for the lower skill matches have the lowest TTL and very high has the highest.

With more matches and a lower TTL, it's easier to miss them - so in fact yes, we miss the skill bracket for normal matches more often. With that said, it's completely possible (and happens fairly often) that we miss skill data for higher skill matches as well.

This is why I say not to read into it: there's no way of knowing for sure: absence of a result has no reliable meaning. In this situation your best bet is to look at the match. Whatever bracket most of the players typically play in is likely to be a good guess.

Hopefully this helps clarify things!

ye ic, thanks for explanation, jason