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At the moment, it's still alternating curbstomps in pubs, and the WLR is high enough above 1 to show that it isn't even working to alternate stomprate at 1:1 either.
As you can see the ECM chassis have a significantly higher WLR than the others showing a pretty clear case of the kind of advantage ECM gives your team that even ELO cannot erase.
Strangely it seems the 'lousiest Hunchback' is significantly better than almost all lights though. If the other team was given a non-ECM spider for my Hunchback, this would be enough to push the game in my team's favour already.
I don't see why we can't have both - the ELO mechanism used as a second sorting mechanism after first applying the mech class filter. I mean, we could very well just decide on the players for a match by classed pairs (8 pairs), assign the players to respective teams based on their ELO so that the average ELO on each team is identical, and only add players in pairs so that if one side has 7, the other will also drop with 7. If a 4-man group is dropping, then they'll all be on the same side; if they're all very good players, then have 4 good players ELO wise on the opposing team, and seed the rest to keep overall ELO the same (which means that people attempting to bias winrates by dropping with skilled friends will end up getting the worst players around as their 4 teammates. The bad players can then get to learn from the better ones while simultaneously being enough of a liability in that game such that we don't get a pubstomp situation. This is easier to implement - ALL of the required stats and information needed to do this kind of balancing already exist.
Alternatively, we can look into multiplying people's ELO stats with the BV of their loadout, and matching pairs of people with similar weighted BV, and deciding which guy goes into which team by keeping the total weighted BV as close as possible. I would consider this more as an ideal solution, but it'll entail extra work in assigning BV for every piece of equipment - following Sarna values wouldn't be sufficient as some things are differently implemented here (for instance ECM should have a sky-high BV addition since it has so many more functions here than lore ever gave it). This ideal solution has the advantage that it would allow 8-mans to drop against PuGs and still have fair fights in terms of the overall skill and equipment mix, so friends can play together instead of having to split nonstop. To seal the discrepancy on the side of VoIP, addition of properly integrated VoIP in the client itself (such that players by default can hear any teammates who have microphones), and a better chatwheel system in the style of Left 4 Dead would allow for functional quick chat even by players without microphones.
This current mechanism of attempting to match one player's ELO to another player's ELO on the other team, disregarding team averages, and not caring about mech classes is just bad practice. And adding players one by one, instead of in pairs, creates this annoying 7-8 situation.
I mean, if there were two of me, and one of each of us is added to each team but one piloted a CPLT-K2 while the other pilots a COM-3A, the result of the game will be more or less obvious. ELO is going to be very imprecise unless it is somehow weighted by the efficiency of the build, either by filtering them in series, or by mathematically combining them into a single value.
Edited by Hayashi, 07 April 2013 - 07:53 PM.
