22 replies to this topic

[Troggy]

It is utterly necessary to have Elo available to the players if it is being used for match making. Here's why:

In an unranked match, you have excellent feedback to your skill progression. You know: 1) Am I winning more or less, 2) is this tactic better or worse, etc. In short, you can see if you are progressing. Moreover, if you get edged out, beaten, steam-rolled or even utterly annihilated, you can see what tactics your opponents used, and try to adapt. You have some kind of active mechanism to learn and get better.

In hidden Elo matches you lose all of your feedback. I understand why people want even matches. It makes sense, and not everyone has the same goals, sense of competition, or inclination toward video games. With Elo ratings, almost everyone will win pretty close to 50 percent of the time.

But, this means that unless you are the best or worse players you will have no idea how well you are doing (assuming the distribution is mono-modal; if it's bi-modal or multi-modal, nobody will know). You could be entrenching bad habits, playing bad positions, you could even be actively getting worse every match, and you would have no idea. Not only do you not see the moves of good players, you do not have any feedback as to your level of play. It will almost certainly result in an undesirable level of stagnation.

Available Elo scores gives the best of both worlds. It gives even matches, while still allowing people to learn, adapt, and compete. It is utterly necessary to be able to answer the question: "Am I getting better." This is very important for interesting play. Perhaps Community Warfare will introduce a different method to do so (if so, very cool), but until then, we as players absolutely need some indication that we are learning to be better at this game.
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Troggy

Edited by Niko Snow, 05 March 2013 - 11:18 AM.

[LackofCertainty]

Also, if you don't display everyone's ELO score, I won't be able to make fun of anyone with a lower ELO than my own.

/troll

I do appreciate seeing what my overall rank is, if for nothing else than it being enjoyable to watch a number slowly creep up over time.

[Arete]

If the elo rating works as intended, you can at least tell if you're moving up. As long as you win more than 50% of your matches, you're most likely moving up. You've peaked when you're at 50% win rate. If you go below, then the rest of the player base has improved beyond your current skill.



But I do agree that your rating should be visible to yourself. Makes it easier to know if how you're doing :-)

[Troggy]

@ Arete,

This is not true. You will win more than 50% of your matches if you are better than the average in a mono-modal distribution, because there will be a large pool of player close to your score to the lesser, than to the greater. Basically, if you are on the portion of the distribution where the slope is negative you will win >50%.

It will also be true if you are improving.

If the distribution is multi-modal, it will be true anywhere the slope is negative (to the more skilled side of any local maxima in the distribution).

Finally, for any given player, the sample size may be small enough that random variations give the player a greater proportion of matches against lower elo players, such that the win rate is greater than 0.50, but the player's elo is constant.

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Troggy

[Arete]

I stand corrected.

But still, the best way to know if you're improving or not is your win ratio if the rating is not made public to you. If your win ratio for the last 100 games is at 50%, then chances are you have arrived at "your" elo rating. If your win ratio is higher than 50%, in general you are improving, or you are ranked high enough to consistently be matched against lesser opponents (this becomes more likely at the top, since if you're on of the 100 best players in a base of 100000, chances aren't great that you'll consistently be "matched" by a similarly skilled player on the other team).
Similarly, if you're on the *** end of the spectrum, you'll probably not have a 50% win ratio. But if your win ratio starts to climb, you are most likely getting better.

[Mazgazine1]

It really is needed, especially with their being very little to do with mech classes at the moment.

I want to know WHY my team is fighting 4 stalkers and we have a single heavy on our side..

[Troggy]

@Mazgazine1,

I'm pretty sure this has about a hundred threads discussing it.

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Troggy

Mazgazine1, on 21 February 2013 - 04:21 PM, said:

It really is needed, especially with their being very little to do with mech classes at the moment.

I want to know WHY my team is fighting 4 stalkers and we have a single heavy on our side..

[Monky]

I agree that I would like to see this, as well as the stats that affect it compared with averages for my Elo level. In this way I can identify my weak points (Hmm I seem to have less spots than players at my level, if I improve that I can probably up my game!)

etc.

There will always be people who whine about stats because they don't like them or they think they get judged on them. Well, you do. Tough. Welcome to Earth. I get judged at my job on 'stats' every day. They are useful tools, and not having them available is crap.

[Troggy]

Also, the argument that making Elo scores available would cause people to "game the system" is utterly invalid.

While I am aware of Goodhart's law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

The only way to get a better Elo is to win games against people who are better (have higher Elo) than you. I would argue that if you can do this (in any way), then you are not "gaming the system," but are rather just "good". This is why Elo was invented. It's almost impossible to game (as long as a random matchmaker is in play - or at least a non-random one that doesn't allow refusals).

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Troggy

[Fooooo]

People don't game the Elo system to GAIN in rank.

They game it to LOSE rank and stay at the bottom, where they shouldn't be..........

Or they have multiple accounts and thrown in various ones into their group to lower the team average. Hence an easier game.....

This is why it should not be shown at all......not that it really stops anyone from making tanked accounts etc...but it makes it harder to see exactly what elo you have, which means you have no idea if its low enough to drop your team down or not etc.....

Edited by Fooooo, 22 February 2013 - 12:13 AM.

[Asmosis]

since its based on team win/loss, you'd not only have to not contribute but to get to a very low rank you'd have to actively sabotage your team by attacking them. One person not contributing doesnt tip the scales that much at mid ranks.

[MilitantMonk]

Elo does not need to be shown. It's not a yardstick to measure e-peen anyway.

[arghmace]

I agree that there should be some way to tell if you're getting better or worse in this game.

Also I'd like getting better to be rewarded in xp and credits. What we have now is communism

[Asmosis]

i'd imagine we'll have all sorts of ranking things when community warfare shows up, as well as the ranked competitions like the one starting tomorrow.

Seeing Elo makes about as much sense as watching how the MM computed teams prior.

[Povier]

Correct me, but ELO is rather about killing another player than winning a match.
If ELO is working everyone finaly must get a kill to death ratio of excactly 1.

[arghmace]

Asmosis, on 22 February 2013 - 05:21 AM, said:

Seeing Elo makes about as much sense as watching how the MM computed teams prior.

How so? I think Elo score tells really well how good you are. It is pretty much the equivalent of victory percentage (that no longer tells anything).

Povier, on 22 February 2013 - 06:06 AM, said:

Correct me, but ELO is rather about killing another player than winning a match.
If ELO is working everyone finaly must get a kill to death ratio of excactly 1.

According to everything I've seen in this forum, Elo is calculated mainly by victories, kills shouldn't have any weight in it.

EDIT: You are right, though, that everyones K/D-ratio should converge towards 1 since everyone should be matched against their equals more or less.

Edited by arghmace, 22 February 2013 - 06:12 AM.

[Povier]

I see: http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__1639451
thx

[Inertiaman]

+1 @ OP

I have no idea why the mechwarrior oldschool seem to fear competition so much. Is it characteristic of the dice-rolling clique? I'd have thought the very nature of TT gaming was to win so competition would be a natural undertone. Instead the general feedback from perfectly decent old-guard players always seems to be "it's just epeen and doesn't matter". epeen it may be but it matters to the individual, and there's not a single game out there with any kind of skill rank that doesn't show it...

Edited by Inertiaman, 22 February 2013 - 07:28 AM.

[zmeul]

because this is still a BETA, yea' I know
the ELO rating should be shown for every player in the match, they can take it away once the game gets released

PGI should also make tools available to players for comparing their rating to others, via in-game and/or via the portal - this is a must

Edited by zmeul, 22 February 2013 - 08:33 AM.

[Rakura]

Theres like 5 other threads on this ... currently speaking with the way matchmaking was originally released they dont have enough data to show everyones rating... furthermore if you know ANYTHING about how an ELO rating truly works you would realize that unless you have 1000 games played your not ever gonna know what your true rating is.