freak, on 12 March 2013 - 01:52 PM, said:
Before I begin I want to make something very clear, I am a 24 year veteran of the Battletech Table Top game, a registered Catalyst Demo Agent and have played every Mechwarrior game since Mechwarrior 2, anyone who thinks I don't know what I'm talking about stop now and leave because odds are I've probably forgotten more about this Universe/Game then you know.
Recently I've been seeing a lot of commentary on the ELO matchmaking system, many people have commented on individual matches but I would like to present some more concrete data. I have been working on unlocking the Master Level on my Awesome-9M and decided to kill two birds with one stone by grinding the necessary XP and recording the data from a series of matches to illustrate several points.
Over the course of several hours I played a total of 20 straight matches, all but 1 was in my custom Awesome-9M, for the benefit of completeness the mech is equipped with 3xERPPC's that I have set to Chainfire and 3X Streak SRM2 racks for periods when cooling is necessary as well as for dealing with light mechs. Finally it carries a Beagle Active Probe to aid sensors and because I had tonnage left over and was at Elite level with the Sensor Module for the entire test. The only match not fought in this mech was a single game (Game two on the list) in the Trial Trebuchet-7M.
The Win/Lose results were as follows,
Wins = 6
Loses = 14
That's a lose rate of 70%, if the ELO system is supposed to provide me with balanced matches, why isn't closer to 50%???
Most of the matches took place on the Frozen City/Frozen City Night and Forest Colony/forest Colony Snow maps and were a mix of Conquest and Assault.
The actual Win/Lose ratio is not my only point however and I want to draw attention to the Casualty figures for the 20 Matches, specifically the number of mechs destroyed on each side.
Casualty Figures.
8/2
8/2
5/4
8/0
8/2
8/3
8/2
8/4 *
6/2 (Base Cap Win)
8/2
5/3 (Base Cap Win)
8/3
7/1 (Base Cap Win)
8/2
8/1
8/4
7/4 **
8/0
8/3
8/4
The two Asterisk marked matches I will get to in a minute but a casual look at the figures illustrates a disturbing trend. Under the ELO system of matchmaking 65% of the matches ended in a casualty rate of 8/3 or worse for one side or the other, what I would reasonably describe as a Landslide Victory for one side, 50% had a casualty rate of 8/2 or worse, if that's not a Landslide, I don't know what is.
* This particular match looks close initially until you factor in the fact that the winning side had 3x Atlas D-DC mechs, mechs which are not only the largest, most heavily armed and armoured monsters in the game but that are also fundamentally invisible and invulnerable to LRM and Streak SRM fire and furthermore were fighting on the River City Night map.
**Another match that looks close on paper but was a Conquest game on Frozen City were one team had a Cicada, a Jenner and a Spider while the opposing sides fastest mech was a Yen Lo Wang. The only reason they didn't simply CAP their way to a victory was they wanted the kills, even then the points at the end had over 400 points in the difference.
From the various comments and posts here on the forums there is a clear indicator that ELO is producing more Landslide wins and they are not fun for anyone, if as the DEV's say, the sytem is supposed to produce more even matches then the rests should be showing at least half the games with 8/4 or closer casualty rates. Further I would make the following contention,
ELO is fundamentally flawed because it conflicts with a primary principle of Mechwarrior Online.
Time and again PGI have stated that MWO is a game that requires teamwork, yet they have introduced a system for generating matches that is based on the skill of the INDIVIDUAL, a quality that is variable at best, some pilots are better in light mechs then heavies. Some groups drop as teams while others have to try and rely on their spatial awareness to guess what the team is going to do. TeamSpeak can help but only if the bulk of the people you drop with are using it. So if Team Co-operation is the key to victory, why are you matching up people based on INDIVIDUAL skill??????
This also means the system is ignoring the differences between the different chassis and believe me this can make a huge difference, for example, my Assault mech is an Awesome. I like it, it suits my style and since I am a Marik player I feel it is appropriate but, an Awesome of any type will struggle to bring down a Stalker as the Stalker typically mounts more weapons and armour, not much but it gives it an edge that a pilot must be careful of. Against an Atlas though an Awesome is lunch, the lighter mech may hurt it, even cripple it but the Atlas is simply too large and well armoured to deal with.
This is not as big a problem in TableTop play as the ranges of weapons are fixed values and certain tactics can level the playing field but, again as has been repeatedly stated by PGI this game is not TableTOP, as such weight of fire and weight of ARMOUR make a huge difference that ELO completely ignores.
Most of the time the solution to a problem is the simplest, I would suggest PGI return to a simple tonnage based system for now (I am not going to go into things like ECM and Weapons here and now, this post is long enough and is for a specific problem). Later a look at a BV balanced system may allow the DEVS to narrow the gap even more but ELO needs to go, if you want more proof of this then I would heartily encourage more and more players to repeat my experiment and post the results to illustrate the problem, give PGI all the data they can handle, if necessary until they choke on it.
Pugs cry for Elo, pugs get Elo, pugs realize that the old system let them beat up on worse pugs, pugs cry about Elo.
And so continues the hydrological cycle of pubbie tears.
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