48 replies to this topic

[Mackman]

bentron, on 22 February 2013 - 04:39 AM, said:

That said, I'm not proposing BV from TT be ported directly to MWO. In fact, I think that would be a terrible idea for many of the same reasons other people do. But what equipment a pilot chooses when they hit the ready button should be taken into account when matching players against each other if the goal is to have an even fight.

For example, take two pilots of equal skill, put them in (for the sake of argument) Jenner Fs with 6 MLs, but only one of them has DHS. That is not an even match any way you look at it. The contrast is even starker if you match a Raven 3L against a 2X, 4X, etc. And then you have the Trial Mechs vs any custom mech that was built with an ounce of thought.

I may be oversimplifying how the matchmaker is supposed to work (or even be completely off), but my point is that nobody wants to be on the team with a Raven 4X and Spider 5K when the other side has two 3Ls. Especially when all 16 pilots have roughly the same Elo ranking (as is the ideal). To avoid that scenario, you have to take mech/variant and equipment into account during the matching process.

Just to reiterate, I'm not proposing BV as a system to account for equipment. I'm not even proposing there should be large differences in "equipment rating" (for lack of a better term) based on weight classes or even tonnages within a given weight class. But if the goal is to have evenly matched teams and close fought matches, you can't discount such a huge part of this game.

See Gaan's post above. This is already taken into account by Elo. If someone consistently uses poor builds and variants, they will have a lower Elo than someone who consistently uses good builds and variants.

Of course, the existence of objectively bad variants, the necessity of playing them extensively and the dis-incentive to upgrade them if you plan on selling them when you're done, all temporarily throw a wrench into things. Ideally, fixing one or two of these issues would go a long way towards resolving the impact it would have on someone's Elo.

The solution isn't BV, because the value of equipment in this game depends on pilot skill. Some weapons are easier to use than others: Some mech configs work when played against low-skill opponents but not against high-skill opponents. Some configs are effective in the hands of a skilled pilot, and utterly ineffective in the hands of an unskilled pilot. BV won't solve anything.

[borisof007]

As someone who loves League of Legends, I worry about Elo hell.

[borisof007]

Mackman, on 22 February 2013 - 09:12 AM, said:

The solution isn't BV, because the value of equipment in this game depends on pilot skill.

Not all of it.

ECM requires zero skill to use, and its effectiveness is to great from it's lack of skill to use. Gauss rifles are powerful, they have long range, do a ton of damage, and make zero heat. However it requires a good amount of skill to use effectively as ammo is scarce for it, it takes a lot of space, weighs a lot, and it's very fragile.

ECM weighs next to nothing, takes very little space, it's practically passive to use, and it nearly blocks out an entire weapon group among other targeting advantages. What's its drawbacks?

[Mackman]

borisof007, on 22 February 2013 - 09:24 AM, said:

Not all of it.

ECM requires zero skill to use, and its effectiveness is to great from it's lack of skill to use. Gauss rifles are powerful, they have long range, do a ton of damage, and make zero heat. However it requires a good amount of skill to use effectively as ammo is scarce for it, it takes a lot of space, weighs a lot, and it's very fragile.

ECM weighs next to nothing, takes very little space, it's practically passive to use, and it nearly blocks out an entire weapon group among other targeting advantages. What's its drawbacks?

So you're advocating for BV for some components, but not all? How does that work?

[SinnerX]

GoodBad, on 22 February 2013 - 01:01 AM, said:

OP have you tried to build and use swayback in TT? Its bv will be very low, but in MWO its very useful. Same with Raven 3L and other ECMed mechs. In MWO they are very useful, sometimes decimating enemy teams. I cannot imagine same situation in TT. http://www.masterunitlist.info/
AS-7D is 1897bv and Raven 3L is 708bv. You need almost 3 Ravens to counter Atlas. And in TT it makes sense, in MWO not.
So, no, bv will not be good in MWO.

So you mean they would have to modify the BV system to work from a MW perspective, just like they've done with armor values, weapon fire rates, hit boxes, heat values, and equipment functionality???

Oh good heavens, that would be ludicrous.

[Gaan Cathal]

borisof007, on 22 February 2013 - 09:24 AM, said:

Not all of it.

ECM requires zero skill to use, and its effectiveness is to great from it's lack of skill to use. Gauss rifles are powerful, they have long range, do a ton of damage, and make zero heat. However it requires a good amount of skill to use effectively as ammo is scarce for it, it takes a lot of space, weighs a lot, and it's very fragile.

ECM weighs next to nothing, takes very little space, it's practically passive to use, and it nearly blocks out an entire weapon group among other targeting advantages. What's its drawbacks?

No, really. There are a million ECM threads, take it there. This is an entirely separate discussion that needs ironing out independant of other balancing issues. Advocating adjusting the matchmaker because of overtuned gear as opposed to treating it independantly and adjusting the gear is moronic.

[bentron]

Mackman, on 22 February 2013 - 09:12 AM, said:

See Gaan's post above. This is already taken into account by Elo. If someone consistently uses poor builds and variants, they will have a lower Elo than someone who consistently uses good builds and variants.

Of course, the existence of objectively bad variants, the necessity of playing them extensively and the dis-incentive to upgrade them if you plan on selling them when you're done, all temporarily throw a wrench into things. Ideally, fixing one or two of these issues would go a long way towards resolving the impact it would have on someone's Elo.

The solution isn't BV, because the value of equipment in this game depends on pilot skill. Some weapons are easier to use than others: Some mech configs work when played against low-skill opponents but not against high-skill opponents. Some configs are effective in the hands of a skilled pilot, and utterly ineffective in the hands of an unskilled pilot. BV won't solve anything.

I think I see where the divide is now. You and Gaan (correct me if I'm wrong), are trusting in the Elo system to evenly match players on average over many, many games and accept that not every match will be fair. I'm more concerned in the match to match balance and properly matching (for example) those top tier players who get drunk and decide to run trial mechs or joke builds all weekend. Yes, those players will take an Elo hit for that, but so will the rest of their team due to the disadvantage they've been put at by a few guys just screwing around.

While I respect your views, I think I'll have to respectfully disagree. If Elo were a visible metric and functioned as some sort of ladder ranking (as in SC2), I think I'd be on the other side. PGI however has chosen to keep it behind the scenes, which, it seems to me, means they don't want Elo treated as a traditional ladder ranking at all.

For what it's worth (again), I'm not advocating BV for MWO. I just think that equally skilled players should not be matched against each other in similar mechs if one of them chooses to bring an optimized build while the other happened to bring something without Endo or DHS (which may or may not indicate pilot skill, but are not dependent on pilot skill at all), lots of machine guns and flamers, etc. It simply makes for unbalanced matches and is unfair to the rest of the team to be penalized for something completely out of their control.

I should also note that when I talk about this, I'm mainly talking about PUG drops. I'm also of the opinion that the 8-man queue could do without Elo and simply match loosely based on class/tonnage given the much smaller pool of players. PUG drops and organized 8v8 with both teams on voice comms are two very different beasts, but I digress.

[Mackman]

bentron, on 22 February 2013 - 11:54 AM, said:

I think I see where the divide is now. You and Gaan (correct me if I'm wrong), are trusting in the Elo system to evenly match players on average over many, many games and accept that not every match will be fair. I'm more concerned in the match to match balance and properly matching (for example) those top tier players who get drunk and decide to run trial mechs or joke builds all weekend. Yes, those players will take an Elo hit for that, but so will the rest of their team due to the disadvantage they've been put at by a few guys just screwing around.

While I respect your views, I think I'll have to respectfully disagree. If Elo were a visible metric and functioned as some sort of ladder ranking (as in SC2), I think I'd be on the other side. PGI however has chosen to keep it behind the scenes, which, it seems to me, means they don't want Elo treated as a traditional ladder ranking at all.

For what it's worth (again), I'm not advocating BV for MWO. I just think that equally skilled players should not be matched against each other in similar mechs if one of them chooses to bring an optimized build while the other happened to bring something without Endo or DHS (which may or may not indicate pilot skill, but are not dependent on pilot skill at all), lots of machine guns and flamers, etc. It simply makes for unbalanced matches and is unfair to the rest of the team to be penalized for something completely out of their control.

I should also note that when I talk about this, I'm mainly talking about PUG drops. I'm also of the opinion that the 8-man queue could do without Elo and simply match loosely based on class/tonnage given the much smaller pool of players. PUG drops and organized 8v8 with both teams on voice comms are two very different beasts, but I digress.

You're right, and I would love for them to eventually implement something very similar to LoL's system of "ranked" and "unranked" games. Both use Elo as the matchmaker, to ensure fair matches, but the Elo is visible in ranked, making it ideal for "tryharding." Unranked, then, becomes the venue for less optimal choices, or trying out new characters.

That way, there's a way for someone to play serious matches, or less serious matches.

[Mangonel TwoSix]

@OP

You awnsered your own question, kinda, but you have it backwards. I'm sure ELO is not perfect but give it some time.

As for Battle Value? Its completely flawed. There are so many moving parts that it would NEVER be close to balanced. Everything from armor, weapons, and engine to ECM, mech variant, and modules would be in play. Do you really think the Devs could come up with a Value for each item in the game that would be universally equal? We already know you can't just take the tabletop values and plug em in. You can not compare realtime to turn based.

In the hands of different people and situations each piece of equipment would be more or less valuable. Expand that over all the moving parts for each mech and you have a disaster in the making.

Give ELO a chance. Let them tweak it. Your seeing weight disparity because its being less selective the longer your in the queue. Let them find the sweet spot in regards to that and reevaluate then.