General DiscussionDo we actually know how brackets work, or is it all speculation?

It isn't accurate, but it is better than nothing. Look at iceiceice, 2 Normal matches just from page one....

http://dotabuff.com/players/84772440

The evidence of how matching works is basically just examples of what happens, like this. Valve has not said anything about it other than "brackets are not real divisions because MMR is continuous." And they gave one example of a match where MMRs on each team spanned a range of 1,000 MMR.

I have seen that:

It is possible for anyone, even pro players to play a game in Very High, next in Normal, next in Very High
It is possible for a new account to jump straight to Very High after 1 game in Normal with very high KDA.
An "old hundreds of games account" can take 5-10 games to go from mostly Normal games to mostly Very High games.
KDA seems to have some influence on how fast your MMR moves.
When I que with players I know are very good at dota the game will always be in Very High.
When I que with players I know are not that good it often drops to High and sometimes to Normal.

Based on where the pro players go and the tMMR scores of the teams I am very certain that live pages are in order of the average MMR for the game.

Based on my experience playing team matching and the evidence of matches shown on dotabuff the matching is always done #1 team vs #2, #3 vs #4, #5 vs #6 etc.

Based on 150 example games I checked EUwest has the highest MMRs by far, followed by USeast, China, SEA...then much lower USwest, EUeast, and way way down Russia, Australia...others so much lower they had zero games in the first 2 pages over the course of 2 days.

I have been told in PMs that Very High is supposed to be 2-3% of players, and Normal 85% of players with High in between. Obviously who is in each bracket changes every game....and as Valve said the brackets supposedly don't really exist since MMR is continuous. The games were given these bracket labels I guess because Valve wants to hide MMRs and this is some tiny concession to everyone who wants to know where they stand.

If you queue in a group, it doesn't just use the average of your groups MMR, it does that and then increases it "a bit" I guess to compensate for better teamwork.

Yay, KDA matters. Should I start fountain farming?

By the way, China disappeared from the list of servers. Anyone know anything?

They decided it didn't have enough restrictions for their comunism based country...