145 replies to this topic

[WolvesX]

I can not belive what I read here!

No screaming, no trolling and lots of interrestings posts! You guys rock!

[MustrumRidcully]

Critical Fumble, on 13 March 2013 - 09:08 AM, said:

Wouldn't the absence of MG Spiders in higher brackets be just as telling as the combat data from those matches?

In that case, Elo acts like comparing the lengths of pencils by tapping them against a desk; they all touch the bottom, but only the longest ones stick out.

Of course, it'd probably be hard to analyze it that way with the way they have it set up - by weight band rather than specific variants.

The absence of certain mechs and weapons in the high brackets will indeed be telling. That is my and probably WolvesX' point. The presence of a mech on a low bracket however may not indicate anything about that mech, it could really just be the player. If you give a noob to MW:O a Splatacat, he won't achieve much, he's still learning how to torso twist and move his mech in a different direction than he'S looking (and in fact, any Catapult might be horrible for the new player, because he can twist so confusingly far. A Stalker might actually be better for him)

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 13 March 2013 - 10:09 AM.

[Adrian Steel]

MustrumRidcully, on 13 March 2013 - 09:51 AM, said:

The absence of certain mechs and weapons in the high brackets will indeed be telling. That is my and probably WolfeX point.

Indeed. I think I've settled into my Elo bracket for the heavies for the most part. I can get 0-3 kills a match normally. If I jump into a Splatcat, however, I'm getting 3+ kills regularly. I suspect if I exclusively played the A1 long enough I would start moving up the Elo ladder again in the heavy bracket (and then come back down when I run my other builds).

Edited by Adrian Steel, 13 March 2013 - 10:09 AM.

[WolvesX]

Adrian Steel, on 13 March 2013 - 10:09 AM, said:

Indeed. I think I've settled into my Elo bracket for the heavies for the most part. I can get 0-3 kills a match normally. If I jump into a Splatcat, however, I'm getting 3+ kills regularly. I suspect if I exclusively played the A1 long enough I would start moving up the Elo ladder again in the heavy bracket (and then come back down when I run my other builds).

That an other important point here.

I don't play vialbe mechs all the time, in fact I often play non-viable mechs. Just for fun.

Ranked / Unranked games.

[WolvesX]

Fun fact: There are actually still players with single heat sinks.

[Tickdoff Tank]

WolvesX, on 13 March 2013 - 09:37 AM, said:

I can not belive what I read here!

No screaming, no trolling and lots of interrestings posts! You guys rock!

Give it time. I am sure that the negative posts will arrive. With a vengeance.

[WolvesX]

Tickdoff Tank, on 13 March 2013 - 11:26 AM, said:

Give it time. I am sure that the negative posts will arrive. With a vengeance.

This time it will be different... not.

[MischiefSC]

Nothing to be negative about. It's all dead on accurate. When I play my D-DC I win almost twice as much as I lose, especially with the new LRM boating craze. People pretend that Tag fixes it but it doesn't. When I drop in a Catapult and my team doesn't have ECM we take drastically more abuse from LRMs. It takes far more skill to coordinate LRM fire via TAG against ECM equipped enemies than it does to just pick a red triangle and click to kill.

The important thing is HOW you balance it to the high end. I can't stress enough that if you don't balance each weapon/mech/variant/item individually against all other items instead of via soft and hard counters with other equipment then you're creating a system that is inherently impossible to balance.

ECM/missile balancing currently is designed to exploit less experienced players and pugs. That's what they do; they're designed to be less effective against organized teams but deadly effective against disorganized ones. Exploitable mechanics will inherently be exploited.

Balance weapons (missiles, ECM, everything) individually. ECM should be no more or less viable and useful than BAP or NARC. It should offer a reasonable 'buff' to certain weapons or situations. There should be no major hard/soft counters to weapons aside from player skill.

LRMs faster, less damage, less maneuverable. ECM not stealth shield, delay but not block lock for LRMs. BAP see around obstacles in range, show all targets in range of equipping mech like they're targetted to allies. TAG and NARC give unique target reticules for allies and buffs to missile hit percentages. ECM disrupt those features.

The defining factor in a match should be player skill, not some attempt at a blindfolded game of rock/paper/scissors - which is what you get with the current balancing system and pug matches.

[Gandalfrockman]

xDeityx, on 13 March 2013 - 06:05 AM, said:

This is all extremely old news to the majority of us.

Would you like to know more?

Why do bad players think they know the answers? This is a great reason why skill indicators such as stats and Elo rating should be made public.

Making stats public is a terrible Idea RIGHT NOW.
The developers can see your stats and use them for the very value judgements you describe.
No-one else needs this information or the level of hostility it generates for new players.

Its important to remember when balancing a game that while it must be balanced for top level competitive play, you should NEVER create a situation where your competitive balance changes imbalance the game completely for the other 95% of your player base.

TLDR:
-This game isn't anywhere near a point where making stats public would serve the good of its community.
-Balance from the top down, but don't JUST balance the top, a game that only balanced for the most skilled top 5% of it community has one foot in the grave.

[WolvesX]

Gandalfrockman, on 13 March 2013 - 12:15 PM, said:

Making stats public is a terrible Idea RIGHT NOW.
The developers can see your stats and use them for the very value judgements you describe.
No-one else needs this information or the level of hostility it generates for new players.

Its important to remember when balancing a game that while it must be balanced for top level competitive play, you should NEVER create a situation where your competitive balance changes imbalance the game completely for the other 95% of your player base.

TLDR:
-This game isn't anywhere near a point where making stats public would serve the good of its community.
-Balance from the top down, but don't JUST balance the top, a game that only balanced for the most skilled top 5% of it community has one foot in the grave.

Pubic stats are a very bad idea, like in BF3, tiers would be great.

BRONZE, SILVER, GOLD, etc.

If its balanced for the top 5% its balanced for the rest of the players -> Look LoL.

[xDeityx]

Gandalfrockman, on 13 March 2013 - 12:15 PM, said:

Making stats public is a terrible Idea RIGHT NOW.
The developers can see your stats and use them for the very value judgements you describe.
No-one else needs this information or the level of hostility it generates for new players.

Its important to remember when balancing a game that while it must be balanced for top level competitive play, you should NEVER create a situation where your competitive balance changes imbalance the game completely for the other 95% of your player base.

TLDR:
-This game isn't anywhere near a point where making stats public would serve the good of its community.
-Balance from the top down, but don't JUST balance the top, a game that only balanced for the most skilled top 5% of it community has one foot in the grave.

I have a differing opinion mainly due to the hotlink you quoted. Unskilled people think that they are vastly more skilled than they actually are, and are therefore the biggest contributors of garbage to the forums.

But in any case this isn't the thread for discussing whether stats should be public or private.

Staying on topic - it is not possible to balance games at low or average levels of play because players do not act rationally at these levels. They do not play to win and therefore their behavior is random and unpredictable. An example is LRMs. How could you possibly balance a weapon system both for players who take cover and those who don't?

But the good news is that you don't need to balance games for low or average levels of play. The players who play at those skill levels don't know the difference between good and bad balance anyway (although they will tell you that they do), and people tend to get better at games so they will be moving into the balanced portion of the game as they come to understand it anyway. Furthermore, if your game is not completely balanced at the highest levels, then your competitions will either be stale or unfair, and competitions with huge prizes are a huge factor in the popularity of a game. Look at Quake, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike for examples of this.

Consider this excerpt from Sirlin's Playing to Win where he is talking about how a player who wants to play competitively should choose their game:

"Anyway, back to choosing your game. Another factor is a game’s ability to hold together at high levels of play. Many games degenerate when played at high levels of skill, and many other games only appear to degenerate but actually don’t. If you choose a mature game such as chess, you can be assured of some real gameplay at high levels, but newer games are a gamble. This may seem like a minor issue now, but whether a game breaks down as you increase in skill is, in fact, a major issue. I would even say that most serious players of most games will reach a point where they feel that their game breaks down and no longer requires any real strategy. Often, this is when they have discovered some powerful tactic that seems to have no real counter, thus removing any strategic thought from the game. I would also go so far as to say that most of the time, the player will be wrong and there will exist either counters to the tactic or far better tactics, and that the game does indeed have more depth left to it. Sometimes though, there is no more depth and the player is right. Unfortunately, this looks suspiciously like the case where the player is wrong. It will take some wisdom to know whether you should continue with a degenerate game in order to discover its further depth or whether to abandon it in favor of a better game."

Right now, no competitive video gamer worth his salt would think about competing in MWO.

[Arete]

Well put, MischiefSC. I completely agree.

[Megurine Luka]

I would just like to add that a lot of the complaints in the forums are from different categories of players. There are casual puggers and that is also divided into what times of the day they play. There are clearly some issues with ELO during off-peak hours, especially for mid to higher ELO players and it appears to be more stable during other times of the day. There are also those who drop as a group of 2-4 and we also have our more coordinated 8-man teams.

This wide range of players will have their own issues based on the following things (probably more than what is listed):

• Personal skill / Experience
  
• Hardware
  
• Internet Connection
  
• Mech building ability (some people are just bad at it)
  
• General playstyle
  
• Grouping preferences (solo/2-4/8)
  
• Time of day when they usually play

These are a lot of factors to consider and a problem for one group of players may not necessarily be a problem for the other, hence we have a lot of conflicting opinions on 'what should be fixed first'. When they all complain at the same time, the forums is flooded with tons of different threads with people arguing in other threads about what they do not feel is a problem while supporting threads that cover their personal issues.


There are common issues, of course, but the order of priority on these issues vary from group to group. A complete novice in a trial mech will have different issues from a pug pilot playing off peak hours to an 8 man group that fights nothing but D-DCs from the same group 3-5x in a row.

Edited by Megurine Luka, 13 March 2013 - 01:29 PM.

[xDeityx]

Megurine Luka, on 13 March 2013 - 01:24 PM, said:

I would just like to add that a lot of the complaints in the forums are from different categories of players. There are casual puggers and that is also divided into what times of the day they play. There are clearly some issues with ELO during off-peak hours, especially for mid to higher ELO players and it appears to be more stable during other times of the day. There are also those who drop as a group of 2-4 and we also have our more coordinated 8-man teams.

This wide range of players will have their own issues based on the following things (probably more than what is listed):

• Personal skill / Experience
  
• Hardware
  
• Internet Connection
  
• Mech building ability (some people are just bad at it)
  
• General playstyle
  
• Grouping preferences (solo/2-4/8)
  
• Time of day when they usually play

These are a lot of factors to consider and a problem for one group of players may not necessarily be a problem for the other, hence we have a lot of conflicting opinions on 'what should be fixed first'. When they all complain at the same time, the forums is flooded with tons of different threads with people arguing in other threads that they do not feel is a problem while supporting threads that cover their personal issues.


There are common issues, of course, but the order of priority on these issues vary from group to group. A complete novice in a trial mech will have different issues from a pug pilot playing off peak hours to an 8 man group that fights nothing but D-DCs from the same group 3-5x in a row.

It's been years since I've been there, but Elitist Jerks got around this problem by having a subset of forums that required a certain Elo rating in WoW arenas to be able to post on those forums. For example if you weren't a 2100+ rated Mage, you couldn't post on certain Mage forums. If you were a 2100+ rated Mage you could post on those certain Mage forums but not on certain Paladin forums. I believe the reasoning was that too much low-level discussion was dominating the forums and was drowning out the people who could actual backup their arguments in game. It seemed to work really well at fostering intelligent discussions and advancing "theorycraft."

I wouldn't mind the same thing happening here. Not on the general forum, but have a "Pros Only" forum that anyone could read but required a certain level of in-game accomplishment to be able to post in.

[Deathlike]

My ELO's probably too low to make a post then.

[WolvesX]

xDeityx, on 13 March 2013 - 01:32 PM, said:

It's been years since I've been there, but Elitist Jerks got around this problem by having a subset of forums that required a certain Elo rating in WoW arenas to be able to post on those forums. For example if you weren't a 2100+ rated Mage, you couldn't post on certain Mage forums. If you were a 2100+ rated Mage you could post on those certain Mage forums but not on certain Paladin forums. I believe the reasoning was that too much low-level discussion was dominating the forums and was drowning out the people who could actual backup their arguments in game. It seemed to work really well at fostering intelligent discussions and advancing "theorycraft."

I wouldn't mind the same thing happening here. Not on the general forum, but have a "Pros Only" forum that anyone could read but required a certain level of in-game accomplishment to be able to post in.

I like this idea, but the ingame Elo system needs a difference between ranked und unranked games.

If there is not the option, well you are forced to play your best loadout all the time, even if you don't like to.

[FupDup]

Adrian Steel, on 13 March 2013 - 10:09 AM, said:

Indeed. I think I've settled into my Elo bracket for the heavies for the most part. I can get 0-3 kills a match normally. If I jump into a Splatcat, however, I'm getting 3+ kills regularly. I suspect if I exclusively played the A1 long enough I would start moving up the Elo ladder again in the heavy bracket (and then come back down when I run my other builds).

I'm not so lucky. I used to be a career Raven 3L user before Elo, and after Elo I only used the 2X and 4X except for one match last night...it's been a pretty painful losing streak most of the time lately. It doesn't seem to be decreasing after each loss, at least not enough to see a difference.

Right around when Elo got patched in most matches were pretty close and intense, although I think they might have changed something recently to skew things a bit.

Edited by FupDup, 13 March 2013 - 02:36 PM.

[Chavette]

FupDup, on 13 March 2013 - 02:33 PM, said:

I'm not so lucky. I used to be a career Raven 3L user before Elo, and after Elo I only used the 2X and 4X except for one match last night...it's been a pretty painful losing streak most of the time lately.

Right around when Elo got patched in most matches were pretty close and intense, although I think they might have changed something recently to skew things a bit.

Your bugzapper build is pretty decent though

[RG Notch]

Eldragon, on 13 March 2013 - 05:12 AM, said:

Which inevitably results in useless anecdotes on the forums about ECM is perfectly fine because the poster routinely kills ECM mechs.

or it leads to unskilled people claiming ECM is OP because they can't handle it or LRMs or what have you. All I know is the forum is full of whining about something. I never know if today is Elo or ECM or LRMs. We need a color coded chart as to what to ***** about. Oh I forgot, bitching about bitching like I'm doing here also should be included.
But feel free to go back to the echo chamber with all the other folks who think what ever you think is OP too!

[FupDup]

Chavette, on 13 March 2013 - 02:36 PM, said:

Your bugzapper build is pretty decent though

Yeah, gotta love the 2 LL + 2 ML Raven. I just wish that I would have focused more on your CT earlier on Alpine instead of stupidly tearing your arm off.