22 replies to this topic

[Angel of Annihilation]

Seriously PGI something is totally not working right when game after game your team keep getting sweeped over and over.

It also always happens in cycles. I have a good run where I am getting good match up, making a decent amount of kills, generally having alot of fun, usually seeing alot of the same people then suddenly it is like hitting a brick wall.

All of a sudden I don't recognize any of the people I am playing with and WHAM!!! none of my teammates can even aim properly. I mean I have seen a guy miss a hunchback standing still 200m with 4 medium lasers 5 times in a row and end up dying. It was especially comical since the hunchback he was targeting was deep red in the CT and if he would have even brushed one friken laser across his CT, he would have killed the hunchback.

I mean seriously what the heck here guys? I know I am not gods gift to the game as far as skills go but are you droping me in guarenteed lose teams just because my ELO goes up a bit or what?

Seriously this is not fun in fact it is almost frustrating enough to make me want to quit the game. I mean I seriously feel like I am getting penalized by ELO for being a half way decent player. If your going to assign some stupid score to my skill then at least make sure I am always playing with players of equal skill and score and quit dropping me into matches with people who don't even have a clue that LRMs are ineffective at less than 180m.

And especially don't drop me into these matches IF THE OTHER FRIKEN TEAM OBVIOUSLY HAS DECENT SKILLS!!!

[Hauser]

Well if anything the match maker isn't doing it because you're good.

The match maker tries to get you into a match with equals but it can't always find them. When it can't find them it will get less picky about the players it puts in the match as time goes by. When it happens that there aren't enough of the right players the match maker will just throw everything together to get a match going. You could just be the unlucky sob needed to fill out the team and get a match going.

Now keep in mind that these matches are usually partial failures. For your example you can drop into a low Elo match with 2-3 good players on either team to fill it out. If you rely on your team mates in these matches you could end up with a nasty surprise. I've had a few matches were I throw my self in front of a charging horde so the team has a chance to turn around and stop them only to realize that my team is full of new players and so is the enemy team.

[Corvus Antaka]

I don't get it. ELO is working fine for me. Sweeps happen, but overall the system works fairly well given the difficulty in gauging playerskill based soley on stats.

[jakucha]

What's your win loss ratio op? If it's close to 1:1 them I'm sorry to say it's working fine.

Edited by jakucha, 14 July 2013 - 04:38 PM.

[Dreamslave]

Not only is ELO not working, but the way the game was made, the game snowballs so horrifically once one team starts downing mechs. Of course, there are obvious exceptions, but the game, at it's core, is a snowball-er and that just isn't fun.

[Sug]

The matchmaker "works" in the sense that it tries to make teams that have a fairly close average Elo score.

Unfortunately averaging out the scores can sometimes mean a great player will be stuck with a nub on their team because their (2000 + 1000)/2 Elo score is equal to the two good players with a (1500 + 1500)/2 Elo.

It also doesn't help that brand new players are given an Elo of 1300, which coincidentally is really close to the average player's Elo.

So if you purely pug, you'll probably have a win/loss ratio of about 50/50, which means your score does not move very far from the average of 1300.

Which means that it's really, really easy for the matchmaker to place brand new players on your team.

Which sucks.

Plus the fact that new players are probably using Trial Mechs, and probably using the Assault class one.....

Yeah it's really easy for a team to snowball to failure leading to a 0 - 8 loss.

Edited by Sug, 14 July 2013 - 05:40 PM.

[Hauser]

Sug, on 14 July 2013 - 05:35 PM, said:

The matchmaker "works" in the sense that it tries to make teams that have a fairly close average Elo score.

I'm afraid you are mistaken.

http://mwomercs.com/...-making-update/

Quote

How does the match maker compose a teams Elo rating, is it average rating or closest to a target?

It's closest to a target value, so the match maker starts trying to make a match for an Elo of say 1300 and will pull in players to those teams closest to those values; however, as mentioned earlier within growing thresholds and those curves will be tuned. Currently it may be a bit 'sloppy' about how it's filling those buckets but over time it will be tuned to be much more precise.

We need to do this carefully over time as generally the cost of precision is time to find a match we want to slowly find a very nice balance between time to find a match and the number of matches that are correctly composed.

[Sug]

Hauser, on 14 July 2013 - 06:39 PM, said:

I'm afraid you are mistaken.

http://mwomercs.com/...-making-update/

Ah I was going off of

Paul Inouye said:

Here's how a team works:

At the start of a match, all player's on ONE team have their Elo ratings totaled and divided by 8 (max players). You may realized that this is simply the AVERAGE of a team's total Elo. Team 1's average and Team 2's average are then used to calculate the probability of win (as per the formulas above). If Team 1 beats Team 2, then the appropriate math as above is applied to each player using the probability score calculated by the team averages.

http://mwomercs.com/...79-matchmaking/

But now that I read that again I think he's talking about how Elo scores are changed after a match? Confusing that he starts with 'Here's how a team works: "

Edited by Sug, 14 July 2013 - 06:50 PM.

[Hauser]

Sug, on 14 July 2013 - 06:48 PM, said:

Ah I was going off of

http://mwomercs.com/...79-matchmaking/

But now that I read that again I think he's talking about how Elo scores are changed after a match? Confusing that he starts with 'Here's how a team works: "

Yeah that's how Elo is computed after a team has been established, not how the team it is established.

Edited by Hauser, 15 July 2013 - 02:42 AM.

[mack sabbath]

0/9 today, as usual, every match 0-8 score.

Once you get shoved into ELO Hell, the game will never be "fun" again unless you somehow win 200 straight matches and escape the lobotomy division.....

I feel your pain, believe me.

[Theodor Kling]

I find it to be quite jumpy at times as well. Especially in my Commando. Don´t know why,, but I sometimes see myself facing enemies that snipe me from 1km or further away no matter how fast I go. Then I meet others who couldn´t hit a heavy in a brawl, and overheat every few seconds because they never change from from alphas despite not hitting much. When dead I also see the same wild mix from teammates.
Interestingly enough my new Centurion does not see this as often. There matches next to always are medium level skill on both sides.

[Lugh]

Theodor Kling, on 15 July 2013 - 04:32 AM, said:

I find it to be quite jumpy at times as well. Especially in my Commando. Don´t know why,, but I sometimes see myself facing enemies that snipe me from 1km or further away no matter how fast I go. Then I meet others who couldn´t hit a heavy in a brawl, and overheat every few seconds because they never change from from alphas despite not hitting much. When dead I also see the same wild mix from teammates.
Interestingly enough my new Centurion does not see this as often. There matches next to always are medium level skill on both sides.

You're suffering from Capwarrior artificial inflation syndrome. Happens most often to Light pilots, who are the guys that are able to a potential loss and turn it to a win by capping the base.

Eventually all the wins you should have 'lost' if you were fighting it out put you up to an ELO where the guys that got there 'fighting it out' have little trouble aiming and destroy you because they are not as inept as those in the lower ELO strata at aiming.

Edited by Lugh, 15 July 2013 - 06:13 AM.

[zhajin]

the problem with the match maker is information overload. there are just way to many factors in match making to give good results, for everyone, most of the time. weight class, elo, groups, time window, etc...

and the match maker does not even take into account weapon balance....

[Sug]

Do we have separate Elo scores for dropping alone vs group dropping? Scoring individual players based just on Wins seems like a bad way to rate us.

[Deathlike]

Sug, on 15 July 2013 - 07:24 AM, said:

Do we have separate Elo scores for dropping alone vs group dropping? Scoring individual players based just on Wins seems like a bad way to rate us.

Short answer is no. You would think there should be some sort of group multiplier modification for ELO because as we all know.. better organized groups tends to lead to greater success.

Also, it makes a lot more sense to play in groups when your ELO hits "the wall". It would somewhat reduce the potential for incompetence, but guarantees nothing. At least, you could increase you ELO (but make solo PUGging less viable).

Edited by Deathlike, 15 July 2013 - 09:01 AM.

[hammerreborn]

If you honestly think Elo doesn't work, make a smurf account.

[Angel of Annihilation]

The thing is I am not sure what is going on but like I said, it goes in cycles. Also I have alot more loses than wins overall so not at 50% W/L.

I get 20-30 matches where everything is relatively even. My team wins some and then loses some. I might even get to the point where we are winning 6 out of 10 matches for a short while then WHAM!! Brick wall. Each and every match is a sweep or close enough to one to not be a difference. This will happen 10-20 matches in a row over and over and even if I do get a win it is because of a lucky cap, not because we actually beat the other teams mechs.

As far as team scores go, when this occurs I am the only one doing anything. Several times I have did more damage than my entire team combined and in 90% of the cases at least double damage than anyone else on the team. In many of the match we will only have one to two kills and those kills are mine. I mean don't get me wrong, sometimes I suck wind in a match but rarely am I not ranked 1 or 2 on my teams and I did manage to take 20th place in the Heavy vs the World tourney which seems like it would put me in the top 10% skill wise considering there were over 2000 players competeing in the same catagory.

This is why I feel like I am being punished because I have a decently high ELO.

An example I used when talking with a friend is this:

Michael Jordan shows up at the basketball court. Also at the court are 9 other players. 5 are low ranked college level players, 4 of them are completely newbies and never played on a team.

Now to try to match up the team and make it equal the MM takes Michael Jordon and gives him the 4 newbies because obviously MJ is obviously such a great player that it has to offset his skill some way. Then they put the college players all on one team. Now mathmatically this makes sense but here is the issue. MJ can only do so much by himself. If his team can't dribble, pass the ball or shoot, the 5 college players even as PUGs are just going to dominate the match because they CAN actually dribble, pass the ball and shoot.

Now obviously I am not the MJ of MWO but I almost feel like my skill level places me on some magic ELO borderline score that at some point tips over and thus I get stranded on low ELO teams with the expectation that I will carry the team. This then continues until my ELO score drop back to the other side of the border at which point I get balanced matches again.

Honestly I don't know that this happens, but I can't explain it otherwise. I mean I am talking such a massive difference in the skill levels between teams that the matches aren't even fun and over in just a few minutes.

[Sug]

hammerreborn, on 15 July 2013 - 09:11 AM, said:

If you honestly think Elo doesn't work, make a smurf account.

Did that. Full of trial mechs and AC/20 jags. Weird.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that on my main account, I join a match and my team slowly filters in. Sometimes its a 1 v 8 for like 10 seconds. On the new account when I joined a match my entire team shows up instantly.

Sug, on 15 July 2013 - 10:01 AM, said:

Did that. Full of trial mechs and AC/20 jags. Weird.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that on my main account, I join a match and my team slowly filters in. Sometimes its a 1 v 8 for like 10 seconds. On the new account when I joined a match my entire team shows up instantly.

And MJ in his prime could totally take on those other players.

[hammerreborn]

Sug, on 15 July 2013 - 10:03 AM, said:

Did that. Full of trial mechs and AC/20 jags. Weird.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that on my main account, I join a match and my team slowly filters in. Sometimes its a 1 v 8 for like 10 seconds. On the new account when I joined a match my entire team shows up instantly.




And MJ in his prime could totally take on those other players.

So a buddy of mine made a smurf account because basically he only has 6 or 8 mechbays and he's not buying anymore. And he uses it for testing new builds so as to not hurt his precious 5 k/d ratio.

When I drop with him in my Jenner, I feel like I can solo the entire team. It's a joke. Unless they have steaks I just weave through the entire team with reckless abandon and occassionally get scraped.

Then he gets back on his main and we go against a certain Highlander 732 team and watch the entire team get poptarted.

[Chronojam]

Too bad PGI's own Elo is so damn low that they never see a problem.