597 replies to this topic

[Frisk]

Public ELO is the only was we can constructively build a e-sport out of this game. So many people on these boards ***** about so much.... I'd love to verify my theory about those forum jockeys.

[Livewyr]

Why yes, I would LOVE public Elo, not in the forums where I can use it to browbeat my fellow forumers, but in the game so I know at the beginning of the match whether I should disconnect or not.

[xDeityx]

Caviel, on 11 June 2013 - 01:56 PM, said:

You should keep quotes in context before declaring them invalid.

I'm not sure what you mean. That was the first sentence of your post and I quote the next sentence directly below that. I didn't cut anything from your post, I quoted literally 100% of the words in your post that I was replying to. How you can call that out of context I am not sure.

I also did not intend any intellectual dishonesty by splitting your post up in that matter. That's not how I argue because it defeats my purpose of turning you from an enemy into a friend in regards to the point we are discussing. I thought that the two segments I quoted deserved two separate replies, so I split them up and replied to everything.

Note that while you are complaining about me quoting you out of context despite all of the words in your post being quoted in mine, you cherry pick my posts that weren't even in response to you, and you don't quote them properly so that anyone can go back to the original post by clicking the bent left arrow in the upper-left corner of the quote.

Caviel, on 11 June 2013 - 01:56 PM, said:

I don't think PGI uses Elo either, because I feel Elo is irrelevant beyond the match maker. PGI makes the decisions and has all the data, we offer opinions and observations. PGI doesn't need Elo to judge observations since they have the real data.

I apologize, I read your earlier point too quickly because I was trying to reply to 5ish people at once. I thought by "game data" you meant Elo but I see that's not the case now.

I don't think it matters what data PGI has on file, what matters is how they use it. So far they have put out an incredibly imbalanced game, so whatever they are doing isn't working. Game communities have historically been huge contributors to games, especially online ones. This is why I think the more data that is available to the community the better the game will be.

Caviel, on 11 June 2013 - 01:56 PM, said:

Reversing that logic, people are going to post regardless of their Elo ranking, why can't you just not read and respond to the unsubstantiated posts and not even deal with public Elo? Then PGI and IGP does not have to invest time in coding for and supporting public Elo scores and more time on other things.

It has been stated repeatedly that the purpose of making Elo public is to foster an understanding of the viewpoint that a player is coming from. How does ignoring unsubstantiated post help that?

And you can't just ask someone for that information. Right now there are very few people that can tell you where they fall in the Elo rankings. You can kind of guess, but because of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and other illusory superiorities you really have no idea. I think I'm a better than the average player...but so do most people!

Caviel, on 11 June 2013 - 01:56 PM, said:

The impact on the forums is just one aspect. Wait until it starts getting applied to mercenary groups so that the new and unskilled players are shunned from in game content as well. Anything that locks out a set of players is bad for the game since all players are bad/new at one point.

Are you suggesting that there will be no mercenary groups who will accept players with low Elo ratings? I suggest you check out the recruitment section, as there are groups who are dedicated to training new players already. Given that information and the fact that PGI has stated that anyone can join the PGI-run Houses (Marik, Steiner, Davion, Liao, Kurita), the suggestion that new and unskilled players will never find a mercenary group to access some of the game's content seems like nothing but fear-mongering, which has been a theme in the nay-sayers throughout this thread.

Caviel, on 11 June 2013 - 01:56 PM, said:

As I mentioned earlier, MW:O doesn't have the tens of millions of active players to shrug things like this off. I wish it did.

And as I mentioned earlier in response to this, MW:O is currently bleeding players because of the horrible balance which this thread is trying to help.

Edited by xDeityx, 11 June 2013 - 02:51 PM.

[Chavette]

Livewyr, on 11 June 2013 - 02:37 PM, said:

Why yes, I would LOVE public Elo, not in the forums where I can use it to browbeat my fellow forumers, but in the game so I know at the beginning of the match whether I should disconnect or not.

You should do that. And they should implement the LoL leaving abuse-auto ban system too. Two wrongs would make a beautiful right.

Edited by Chavette, 11 June 2013 - 02:40 PM.

[Livewyr]

Chavette, on 11 June 2013 - 02:39 PM, said:

You should do that. And they should implement the LoL leaving abuse-auto ban system too. Two wrongs would make a beautiful right.

Why yes, they should do that, right now. Damn those ***holes getting CTDs on load screens.

[Chavette]

PanzerMagier, on 11 June 2013 - 02:20 PM, said:

I've never seen a game with a "good" community that had a public elo system.
I use league of legends as an example. Worst community in the world. Because EVERYTHING runs off elo...

Just go away... all you stat whores... this game is bad enough, I don't understand why you want to make it worse.

I call and raise. Halo/MW2 on xbox live. No elo.

That game is catered to kids, ofc there will be kids.

[Febrosian R Gillingham]

Caviel, on 11 June 2013 - 12:51 PM, said:

This whole argument is based on the game somehow functioning differently for a low and high Elo score player. It doesn't, a medium laser does the same amount of damage no matter what your Elo score is.
....
We all play off the same code base, there is no difference in game behavior between Elo ranking players.

The game absolutely plays differently at different skill levels, as it does in every competitive game. A medium laser does NOT do the same damage for all skill levels. Watch a good light pilot in a jenner against a bad medium/heavy/assault pilot in the middle of a brawl. Their lasers hit for almost the whole duration, and stay more or less on one component. Compare that to a bad light pilot against a good medium/heavy/assault pilot. Their lasers are often not on target, and when they do hit they are spread all over the mech due to poor aim and defensive torso twisting.

Of course the game mechanics all function exactly the same, but the players' abilities to utilize those mechanics vary wildly at different skill levels. Anything that requires a certain degree of skill (be it aiming, positioning, timing, etc) to pull off will look weak at low levels (since players won't be able to do it well) and has the potential to be horribly broken at higher levels. Anything that requires relatively little skill to pull off may be overpowered at low levels, but much weaker at higher levels where other builds/strategies with a higher skill cap eclipse it. This is why the balance at different skill levels is different, and why the skill level of the player/poster matters in a discussion about balance.

Maybe Elo is not the best metric to use to represent skill, and maybe making it public is a bad idea, but at least its something to curb or at least understand some of the more ridiculous posts in the balance forum.

Edited by Febrosian R Gillingham, 11 June 2013 - 02:58 PM.

[xDeityx]

Chavette, on 11 June 2013 - 02:13 PM, said:

While I appreciate your WoW life story, most of us probably didn't play the game or understand what you meant by it, just sum it up in a paragraph, we'll understand.

I don't understand why this whole thing is such big of a deal. What I'm seeing is that the trolls are trolling this thread overtime, being afraid ELO arrived they'd get trolled by the good players. I know this is wrong because good players don't troll all day long, they have better things to do. For this reason its a safe guess they got this idea by relating to the good players from themselves.

Sorry, that WoW story was really more of an individual reply. TLDR I got better at WoW PvP by utilizing information in a forum that only let players with a high Elo rating post. Public Elo directly benefited me as a player.

As to the second paragraph, I think you should apply the Principle of Charity to everyone posting in this thread unless they are spewing vitriol and being an obvious troll. From my point of view the folks who don't want Elo public are just misinformed, and hopefully that's how they view me as well. People on both sides of the argument are being uncharitable to their opponents by saying that the people who don't want public Elo are just unskilled or afraid, and the people who do want public Elo are just stat whores who want to troll people. This is wrong and it hurts the discussion. Both sides have genuine points!

PanzerMagier, on 11 June 2013 - 02:20 PM, said:

I've never seen a game with a "good" community that had a public elo system.
I use league of legends as an example. Worst community in the world. Because EVERYTHING runs off elo...

Just go away... all you stat whores... this game is bad enough, I don't understand why you want to make it worse.

This is an example of treating people uncharitably. We are not stat whores just because we want public Elo. You don't understand why we want to "make the game worse" because you don't understand our position - please try!

Frisk, on 11 June 2013 - 02:29 PM, said:

Public ELO is the only was we can constructively build a e-sport out of this game. So many people on these boards ***** about so much.... I'd love to verify my theory about those forum jockeys.

It's starting to become industry-standard in e-sports for this very reason. But MW:O seems to lag behind the industry standard in so many ways. For an example I would point to the fact that we only just now got a mouse sensitivity adjustment bar. In an FPS game where they aren't even using a proprietary engine this should have been done insanely sooner.

Livewyr, on 11 June 2013 - 02:37 PM, said:

Why yes, I would LOVE public Elo, not in the forums where I can use it to browbeat my fellow forumers, but in the game so I know at the beginning of the match whether I should disconnect or not.

You can't honestly mean this...it would effectively be the same thing, no? You could just post screenshots of people's Elos. Not that I think that would be a problem, but presumably from your previous stances you do.

[Livewyr]

xDeityx, on 11 June 2013 - 02:50 PM, said:

You can't honestly mean this...it would effectively be the same thing, no? You could just post screenshots of people's Elos. Not that I think that would be a problem, but presumably from your previous stances you do.

Oh yes, I totally intend for PGI to make Elos public in games...

That way I know to disconnect at the beginning of the match and grab another mech!

[Dude42]

Livewyr, on 11 June 2013 - 02:37 PM, said:

Why yes, I would LOVE public Elo, not in the forums where I can use it to browbeat my fellow forumers, but in the game so I know at the beginning of the match whether I should disconnect or not.

Livewyr, on 11 June 2013 - 02:41 PM, said:

Why yes, they should do that, right now. Damn those ***holes getting CTDs on load screens.

Livewyr, on 11 June 2013 - 02:52 PM, said:

Oh yes, I totally intend for PGI to make Elos public in games...

That way I know to disconnect at the beginning of the match and grab another mech!

PGI can tell whether you left the game intentionally or got disconnected. You can tell yourself, just look in the logs, a quit is marked as "CGameRules::OnDisconnect: Client has disconnected: cause=eDC_UserRequested, desc=User left the game",

whereas a disconnect looks something like "CGameRules::OnDisconnect: Client has disconnected: cause=eDC_ProtocolError, desc=Remote disconnected: Malformed packet"

So yea, they should implement it, then you can abuse the system and get banned. Works for me.

Edited by Dude42, 11 June 2013 - 03:12 PM.

[Livewyr]

Dude42, on 11 June 2013 - 03:10 PM, said:

PGI can tell whether you left the game intentionally or got disconnected. You can tell yourself, just look in the logs, a quit is marked as "CGameRules::OnDisconnect: Client has disconnected: cause=eDC_UserRequested, desc=User left the game",

whereas a disconnect looks something like "CGameRules::OnDisconnect: Client has disconnected: cause=eDC_ProtocolError, desc=Remote disconnected: Malformed packet"

So yea, they should implement it, then you can abuse the system and get banned. Works for me.

You're not seriously saying I can't unplug my internet are you?

[Dude42]

Livewyr, on 11 June 2013 - 03:23 PM, said:

You're not seriously saying I can't unplug my internet are you?

People in LoL can unplug their ethernet cables too, they still get banned. Just sayin

It is possible to tell from the disconnection error that you unplugged your ethernet cable or lost internet. If you internet just happens to go out every time you're in an unfavorable position... well, it doesn't take much to correlate the two. Good Luck

[Livewyr]

We programmers have our ways.

(And who's to tell if it's always unfavorable position?)


EDIT:
Should clarify that I wouldn't actually do it (as that would be a ToS violation) but I saw it happen all the time in WoT... and was very tempted to do it in WoT myself..

Point being.. it would happen... and it's unnecessary.

Edited by Livewyr, 11 June 2013 - 03:57 PM.

[Chavette]

Dude42, on 11 June 2013 - 03:30 PM, said:

People in LoL can unplug their ethernet cables too, they still get banned. Just sayin

It is possible to tell from the disconnection error that you unplugged your ethernet cable or lost internet. If you internet just happens to go out every time you're in an unfavorable position... well, it doesn't take much to correlate the two. Good Luck

It takes a few occurrances, and the sit out time grows after each one. Its a great system that makes people behave and requires zero manpower in return.

Livewyr, on 11 June 2013 - 03:32 PM, said:

We programmers have our ways.

(And who's to tell if it's always unfavorable position?)

Man I wish these forums had a /voteban command sometimes...

[Livewyr]

Chavette, on 11 June 2013 - 03:36 PM, said:

Man I wish these forums had a /voteban command sometimes...

me too!

[TOGSolid]

xDeityx, on 06 June 2013 - 12:08 PM, said:

This would actually curb the elitism, or at least shine a light on whether it is justified or not. There are far more players who act like they are elite than there are players who are actually elite.

If someone is acting elite because they are in the top .01% of Elo ratings then what's wrong with that? They ARE elite, and I'd like to know what they have to say about the state of the game because they have a better understanding of it than 99.99% of the players out there.

We have clear evidence from other communities that public Elo scores do nnothing but encourage elitism and makes the community even more toxic. In a word: No. Besides, being good at a game doesn't mean you know a ******** thing about how to balance anything.

Edited by TOGSolid, 11 June 2013 - 04:36 PM.

[xDeityx]

Here's an interesting excerpt from David Sirlin's Playing to Win e-book regarding the topic of balance at high and low levels of play. It's from a chapter about how a competitive player of games should choose his 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."

TOGSolid, on 11 June 2013 - 04:33 PM, said:

We have clear evidence from other communities that public Elo scores does nothing but encourage elitism and makes the community even more toxic. In a word: No.

If the evidence is so clear, why are we debating it? Just show us the clear evidence and we can end this discussion.

How do you know that it is specifically public Elo scores that cause the vitriol in that community as opposed to the size of the community or some other factor?

[TOGSolid]

xDeityx, on 11 June 2013 - 04:35 PM, said:

Here's an interesting excerpt from David Sirlin's Playing to Win e-book regarding the topic of balance at high and low levels of play. It's from a chapter about how a competitive player of games should choose his 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."



If the evidence is so clear, why are we debating it? Just show us the clear evidence and we can end this discussion.

How do you know that it is specifically public Elo scores that cause the vitriol in that community as opposed to the size of the community or some other factor?

For the same reason the glue eaters around here still argue about repair and rearm being a good thing and think machine guns should never damage mechs. Let's be honest, this forum community has never been blessed with an overabundance of brains.

The WoT forums have been brought up numerous times as exhibit A of why public scores are bad. I'm not going to go do research for you just to make you happy when this thread has done it already.

[xDeityx]

TOGSolid, on 11 June 2013 - 04:44 PM, said:

For the same reason the glue eaters around here still argue about repair and rearm being a good thing and think machine guns should never damage mechs. Let's be honest, this forum community has never been blessed with an overabundance of brains.

I see. So it can't be that there is a valid debate going on in a 26-page thread, it's just that everyone disagreeing with you is stupid. That's an extremely immature outlook that really won't change anyone's mind, but so be it.

TOGSolid, on 11 June 2013 - 04:44 PM, said:

The WoT forums have been brought up numerous times as exhibit A of why public scores are bad. I'm not going to go do research for you just to make you happy when this thread has done it already.

Actually this wouldn't be you doing research for me, it would be you backing up a claim you made. Since you aren't going to back up your claim, I see no compelling reason to treat it as valid or acknowledge it any further. Thanks for making it easy on me.

[Livewyr]

"There would appear to be a fire burning in the office building."
"Aw heck, it'll burn anyways.. throw in a stick of dynamite.."