there have been some fruitfull attempts in the german community to get tournaments in MW:O going and to keep them fun.
I am pretty sure the devs are not exactly monitoring all the foreign language boards here for ideas on what they could do and since the subject is a rather complex matter, the online translators reach their limits quickly.
The Matchmaker itself is often topic of discussion and a lot of people I play with and talk to have the opinion that the current implementation of the matchmaker does not do a good job of creating even matches.
My personal opinion is that ELO does a good job of judging a pilot. While the current implementation does not stop me from playing with people that have a different "pilot skill" then I do (it just makes me wait longer to play with them), it does a rather poor job at creating balanced games.
The reason for this lies, in my opinion, in the part of this game that makes it drastically different then other shooting games. The weapon you bring matters. A lot.
I often tell my team that success (wins) in MWO depend on 3 things: Teamwork, Individual Skill, Mech Lab choices.
The matchmaker metric ELO to some extend factors in Teamwork and Individual Skill in the fact that it tries to match Groups and assigns a "Skill Value" to the player. What it totally ignores right now is "Mechlab Choice" part of my equation.
A lot of people call for "weight class matching" or "tonnage matching" as an approach for this, but I think it is too simplistic and using that as a metric part would lead to even worse matches.
Strip a Jenner of all of its armor, weapons and equipment and fit the smallest engine and drop into a match. You will still be a "light", you will still be worth 35 tons. You will still have a high elo as a light player, but your contribution to the team will not be worth much.
The battletech board game had a solution for this called BattleValue. Yes the BV could be gamed. Yes it was never perfect. BUT: It was a lot more accurate then "Tonnage" or "Weight Class" and it was applicable to each and every mech build there was in the tabletop.
The german community made an attempt at creating a "MWO Battle Value" short MBV (This is the old forum thread where an old version was presented:http://mwomercs.com/...__fromsearch__1). The results were really good and tried and tested in tournaments that were balanced through it (using stock mechs to keep it easier to calculate).
The creators even pulled up a website where you can paste Smurfy links and it will calculate the MBV of the config. You can find the most recent values on this page as well. Its being tweaked with every tournament the german community completes. (http://mbv.36thdieron.de/)
If you play around with it, you will notice that the cheesier the config, the higher its MBV.
This gives you/us a nice piece for a matchmaker metric.
I would do it like this:
[MBV of the Mech] * [ELO of the player] = Probable Player Combat Contribution Value (PPCCV)
This accomplishes several things:
1) A crappy player in a great config will reach a low PPCCV and probably be less often stomped. As his ELO goes up, his PPCV goes up in leaps, bringing him to his limits (challenging games) pretty quick.
2) A great player in a miserable mech will not have to deal with matches where he is constantly matched against the cheesiest/"best" builds piloted by players of comparable skill.
3) You don't go nuts watching the players on your team after you died, constantly thinking "with that mech, I would do A LOT better". Or at least less often then this happens now.
In a first attempt you could then try to match players in the same way as you match them now, using the PPCCV instead of the ELO.
This should lead to much more balanced matches, since your not ignoring a very important fact in Battletech: "If 2 Mechs are different, they are not the same."
Edited by ClaymoreReIIik, 10 February 2014 - 07:12 AM.