17 replies to this topic

[Huntsman]

- almost always at the top of my team and compared to most of the other players, it's *by a long shot*

- the rest of my team can't seem to do much damage, can't coordinate well, they make stupid tactical errors, and accidentally damage each other because of how exciting it is to pointlessly shoot terrain even though you may be in the way. They then run off in half a dozen different directions. It's like herding cats.

- other team always seems pretty coordinated

This has been my personal hell. I have literally won about 4 matches of my last 40 with the above factors all being more or less the same.

Something has changed. I've been playing MWO since the beginning of closed beta, and when ELO came into play the game did get alot tougher. Gone were the days of winning 90% of my matches, but I still managed to keep my head above water. Now however my win rate has actually flipped, and I'm winning more like 10%. I feel as though most of the better players get loaded onto the other team, and the scrubs onto mine.

I'm at my wits end with this, and I'm not having any fun. 4 wins in 40. You can't just repeatedly get your teeth kicked in and consider it a good time.

Edited by Huntsman, 28 May 2013 - 03:14 PM.

[Homeless Bill]

Because you're so good and the world is against you.

[Huntsman]

besides that

[Riffleman]

Tinfoil hat time! Mabye there aren't enough players in the low elo brackets to avoid 10 minute waits, so the players about to ascend from steering wheel underhive are purpousley put with the short bussers in order to keep da man down!

[Aslena]

he's right your the only good player in the verse... sorry couldn't resist... I must agree it does seem a little 1 sided in most games either the team I'm on sticks together and does it right or people run off chasing a spider all over the map....

[NinetyProof]

ELO simply predicts how likely you are to win, or lose, a game. Some people have low ELO's and they are working their way up ... some inherit a high ELO from another mech they have mastered and hundreds of games in, and are working their way down for that mech.

Either way, it has nothing to do with whether or not a group of 8 players stands of chance of working together and winning or not.

[Xie Belvoule]

The only common denominator in these 40 matches were....you. Perhaps there in lies your problem, your not as good as you think you are.

You might find this video helpful....



If you plan to drop solo and want any chance of winning you need to be able to kill 4-6 enemies by yourself, otherwise your leaving too much to chance.

Edited by Xie Belvoule, 28 May 2013 - 03:48 PM.

[Huntsman]

How does the need to kill 4-6 enemies by byself mean that my teammates are at the same elo as I am. No, I'm not that good in your average match. I do expect a positive KDR # of myself, and typically am responsible for 1-3 kills in a match, but killing 4 enemies during tha match is probably something that doesn't occur more than once an hour, killing 5 is an event that happens perhaps 2-3/ week, killing 6 is a monthly achivement, and I can count on a little over 1 hand the number of times since I started playing that I managed to kill 7 out of 8 of the enemy. Only once was I ever personally responsible for killing every enemy during a match.

My KDR, while once 9:1, dropped to 5:1 as they made changes to the game, and now is finally dropped to as low as 4:1 as of the last patch that made a changes to ELO. Over the last few days however I can honestly say that I'm petrified to even look at my stats.

Edited by Huntsman, 28 May 2013 - 05:23 PM.

[Jonathan Paine]

Let me hazard a guess: your win/loss ratio >1

Correct?

[Huntsman]

This is what I'm down to:

Wins / Losses 2,248 / 1,022 Kill / Death Ratio 3.91

[cyberFluke]

The reason for this is as follows:

The average ELO of each team is balanced. (or attempted to be balanced)

So if your ELO is high, and there aren't many people of similar ELO looking for a match, you get players on your team of a much lower ELO, to make your team average the other team. Fair, isn't it?

I get it frequently too, total newbies in stock mechs that clearly still have arm-lock enabled and have no clue how to target an enemy, let alone hit it. Welcome to why I very rarely PUG. ELO as it stands is crap. The matchmaker ruleset they've set up is crap. Unfortunately, I suspect that due to the number of players, PGI don't have much choice as to how it's set up.

Give us private matches already. For a start we could test suspected problems far more easily. Being able to control the players in a match would give us the ability to actually *test*, rather than being verbally abused and testing actively disrupted by people who view it as spoiling their game.

Edited by cyberFluke, 28 May 2013 - 06:08 PM.

[IceSerpent]

Huntsman, on 28 May 2013 - 03:10 PM, said:

- almost always at the top of my team and compared to most of the other players, it's *by a long shot*

- the rest of my team can't seem to do much damage, can't coordinate well, they make stupid tactical errors, and accidentally damage each other because of how exciting it is to pointlessly shoot terrain even though you may be in the way. They then run off in half a dozen different directions. It's like herding cats.

- other team always seems pretty coordinated

This has been my personal hell. I have literally won about 4 matches of my last 40 with the above factors all being more or less the same.

Something has changed. I've been playing MWO since the beginning of closed beta, and when ELO came into play the game did get alot tougher. Gone were the days of winning 90% of my matches, but I still managed to keep my head above water. Now however my win rate has actually flipped, and I'm winning more like 10%. I feel as though most of the better players get loaded onto the other team, and the scrubs onto mine.

I'm at my wits end with this, and I'm not having any fun. 4 wins in 40. You can't just repeatedly get your teeth kicked in and consider it a good time.

7 members of Steering Wheel Underhive ™ sit in the queue. The longer they sit, the wider the "acceptable" Elo range of their team gets. Then you click launch, your Elo rating falls into that range, and off to the cat-herding land you go.

Edit:

cyberFluke, on 28 May 2013 - 06:06 PM, said:

The reason for this is as follows:

The average ELO of each team is balanced. (or attempted to be balanced)

So if your ELO is high, and there aren't many people of similar ELO looking for a match, you get players on your team of a much lower ELO, to make your team average the other team. Fair, isn't it?

I absolutely, 100% guarantee you that this is not how it works. If this was the case, you would only get baddies and rookies after sitting in the queue for a bit. In reality you can get instant queue pop as soon as you click launch and find half of your team in trial mechs asking the usual newbie questions.

Edited by IceSerpent, 28 May 2013 - 07:50 PM.

[NachoFoot]

Xie Belvoule, on 28 May 2013 - 03:43 PM, said:

The only common denominator in these 40 matches were....you. Perhaps there in lies your problem, your not as good as you think you are.

You might find this video helpful....


If you plan to drop solo and want any chance of winning you need to be able to kill 4-6 enemies by yourself, otherwise your leaving too much to chance.

I don't know what they mean by 'Elo Hell' but I do believe (and see) Elo Karma. Elo Karma suggests exactly what Fluke mentioned: You are placed on teams with new players to balance out your Elo. Its aggravating and, yes, I have blasted my fair share of players.

Still, it would be nice to see how exactly Elo is implemented here.

[Star Captain Obvious Kerensky]

IceSerpent, on 28 May 2013 - 07:46 PM, said:

I absolutely, 100% guarantee you that this is not how it works. If this was the case, you would only get baddies and rookies after sitting in the queue for a bit. In reality you can get instant queue pop as soon as you click launch and find half of your team in trial mechs asking the usual newbie questions.

That's because the other guy was sitting in the queue for 1-3 minutes, until the matchmaker widened their acceptable Elo range. It cuts both ways.

When you get into a game instantly it usually means you got paired with someone who has been waiting for a while; for weal or woe.

Edited by Eldragon, 28 May 2013 - 08:47 PM.

[cyberFluke]

IceSerpent, on 28 May 2013 - 07:46 PM, said:

I absolutely, 100% guarantee you that this is not how it works. If this was the case, you would only get baddies and rookies after sitting in the queue for a bit. In reality you can get instant queue pop as soon as you click launch and find half of your team in trial mechs asking the usual newbie questions.

There's nothing stopping a team setup essentially waiting for a high enough ELO player such as the OP to balance out the numbers. This highly depends on available player numbers being low enough of course.

The evidence I have weighting my hypothesis is that dependant on who I'm teamed with, the skill level of the other players (both sides) varies drastically. By this I mean, if I team up with three rookies and drop, the other lance are usually quite competent and communicative, the opponents offer little to medium challenge, helped greatly by the fact I'm on voice comms with the rookies.

If I team with three highly skilled players, the other lance are frequently new guys or paint eating tools that run off on their own in heavies and assaults, and we get one to three kills, but lose.

To be honest, even if I'm wrong about it's configuration, it doesn't change the fact that the current system of forcing at least two disparate groups to be on the same team, and expect them to function as a whole, without offering a workable, in-game voice comms system is... laughable.

[Funkadelic Mayhem]

stop defending a broken elo/matchmaker. You look silly.

[p00k]

NachoFoot, on 28 May 2013 - 07:47 PM, said:

I don't know what they mean by 'Elo Hell' but I do believe (and see) Elo Karma. Elo Karma suggests exactly what Fluke mentioned: You are placed on teams with new players to balance out your Elo. Its aggravating and, yes, I have blasted my fair share of players.

Still, it would be nice to see how exactly Elo is implemented here.

the idea of elo hell is that, in a team game, by some streak of bad luck your elo gets dropped down to newbie levels. then all your teammates are newbies, and as a result you can't ever win because your teammates suck. the fallacy is that what it's supposed to also mean is that your enemies are also all newbies, so you should be the deciding factor in winning

however, that fallacy relies on certain assumptions. there needs to be a large enough player base looking for a game to keep the average elo, and presumably skill level on each side, tightly clustered. hard to say if that's the case in MWO (who the **** really believes paul or garth or whoever it was that said there were tens of thousands of players?). for folks who weren't around in closed beta, there used to be a counter in the UI that listed hwo many players were online at any point in time. PGI decided to remove this for some reason (transparency is bad, right?) more importantly, it assumes that the matchmaker creates teams by placing people of similar elo's on each team.

problem is, there's a popular rumor that pgi hasn't bothered to deny, that perhaps the matchmaker doesn't gather people of similar elos. instead, it maybe gathers people of variable elo's in an attempt to match the average elo of each team. maybe if a team has 4 good players, and the enemy has 8 average players, it tries to find 4 bad players to even things out. this seems like a pretty cumbersome way to implement elo, but ****, it's PGI. it wouldn't be the first time they did things the stupid way. doesn't help the situation that they don't come out and explain how their matchmaker works, only how it adjusts your elo post-match

the other problem is the issue of partial premades. this too can be implemented in a variety of ways, and PGI hasn't exactly demonstrated the ability to choose the most reasonable way to do things in any given situation. toss in an attempt to balance team tonnage, an attempt that all to frequently fails miserably, and it's a miracle PGI was able to cobble something together that perhaps has some semblence of proper elo (perhaps. of course we'll never know, now will we?)

Edited by p00k, 28 May 2013 - 11:52 PM.

[FiveDigits]

Irregardless of how the matchmaker currently does it, it's its job to bring you to about 1.0 win/loss ratio and 1.0 KDR. You still have a long way to go down.

The reason for the unpleasant matchmaking experience is that the rating spread inside a team is too high.
A team of four 2000 Elo players and four 1000 Elo players gets an averaged team rating of 1500. Compared to a team of eight 1500s which you might then face your gameplay experience will be drastically different (read: worse).

There are two possible reasons for this apparent behaviour:

• The matching algorithm is too sloppy. The rating difference inside a team has to be smaller.
  
• The population is too small to group players with similar rating with each other most of the time.

Both are bad, but only the first case would be in PGI's hands to fix (directly).