51 replies to this topic

[GingerBang]

Is it just me and my squadmates, or does everyone else tend to lose all day one day, and then win all day the next? It just seems ridiculous. I've had days were i've gone 1W and 34L, then the next day it is almost the exact opposite. What on earth is going on here? It happens all the time, there never seems to be inbetween. Some days you seem to only be up against the worst of the worst, then the next you just get rofl-stomped all day long.

Edit for clarity:

I should mention i think ELO is obviously working. WHen i'm not dicking off, everything seems fairly equal, but it seems that day by day there is a huge difference between each side of the fence. Some days you win 80% of the games, the next day you lose 80% of the games. I W/L is juuuust above 50%, it is just really, really weird how i only win for a whole day (which is fun as hell) but then lose for a whole day (which is awful). What is the balance between individual matches?

Edited by GingerBang, 12 August 2013 - 05:14 PM.

[Tor6]

It's fubar. Some rounds it'll be a close fight (REALLY rare), some rounds we'll have one lance run off to cap a far point and fight their entire team and win while essentially down 4 people (often without losing more than 2 folks on our side). Other rounds its a complete roll in the enemies favor. And sometimes you wind up with a whole lance of trial mechs on your side for some reason.

In other words it's probably 'even' on win/loss, but it's not fun because it often feels like whether we win or lose is completely out of my hands. :/

[Angel of Annihilation]

I have a wierd trend myself.

I will find myself winning 6-7 out of 10 games for a week or so at a time, then I hit some magic thresehold of winning too much and all of a sudden I will go through the most massive chain of failures imaginable where I am easily losing 9 out of 10 games and/or going through 15-20 game losing streaks.

It is kind of like those Japanese water clocks you see in those rock gardens. It fills and fills with water until it get full then all of a sudden it tips and all the water flows out immediately only to snap upright and slowly start filling again.

[Homeless Bill]

As I've said before, you'd do well to herd your PUGs as best you can. Some of the time, everyone blobs up and does it right. Other times, half your team is headed to upper city, while the rest is going lower; when that happens, you either need to speak up or prepare for inevitable defeat.

Losing streaks happen, they're the worst thing ever, and you have a relatively easy way to stop them: team chat.

[PEEFsmash]

In 12v12 pugging for me there are no big swings. I win about 80-85% of my games with the losses scattered equally.

Edited by PEEFsmash, 12 August 2013 - 11:04 AM.

[Oriius]

I pug mostly and have seen no real patterns in anything other than my own performance. I will sometimes start to make a lot of mistakes and do badly, this can cascade as I become annoyed, though I'd like to think that is at least a tad more rare than it once was. (It does also work the other way)

When I lose (or indeed win) I always look at what I could have done better. My own ego can be the worst thing for my performance, and nothing annoys me more than when I think of blaming anyone but myself for bad play.

[Appogee]

It's the matchmaker cycling us between ''put you with a decent team where you are likely to win'' and ''put you in a crap team where you are likely to lose'' to achieve its target 50:50 W/L ratio.

Trouble is, you either stomp or get stomped, most of the time. And neither is particularly fun.

[ProfessorD]

In my experience, having a team to drop with doesn't magically fix this problem. It still happens. I've had 3 lancemates for nearly every drop for several weeks and we have weird streaks, too.

One of my current hypotheses is that the matchmaker doesn't control for the variation in skill between the best player on a team and the worst player.That variation matters; I logged scores from a series of about 40 solo PUG games over a weekend a few months ago and found that the losing team tended to have a larger match score standard deviation than the winning team by about 20 points. To get a result like that from teams of 8 over 40 games is huge. I haven't figured out yet how that trend would translate into day-to-day steaks like this.

[Budor]

Pretty random to be honest, but you can always blame your team and rage in the forums later. Multiplayer shooters, they never change ^^

[GingerBang]

So far today i'm 1W and 12L. Yesterday i was around 30W and 5L. Two days prior i went 1W and 34L before i just stopped keeping track. There seems to be 0 middle ground, and it seems to be rather solid about the day by day bit too. I don't know what the difference is, it happens with out without teammates.

Edited by GingerBang, 12 August 2013 - 11:22 AM.

[GingerBang]

Appogee, on 12 August 2013 - 11:17 AM, said:

It's the matchmaker cycling us between ''put you with a decent team where you are likely to win'' and ''put you in a crap team where you are likely to lose'' to achieve its target 50:50 W/L ratio.

Trouble is, you either stomp or get stomped, most of the time. And neither is particularly fun.

The trouble seems to be that it can't make the switch in any reasonable amount of time. If Elo were just working alone, as Elo should (even Mr. Elo himself laughs at people who use it with other ladder algorithms) it should be about a 50:50 chance by match, not at all by day.

Edited by GingerBang, 12 August 2013 - 11:25 AM.

[Tor6]

The problem with this implementation is that Elo is not designed 'to ensure a win/loss rate of 50%'. The point of it is to match players of equal (or near equal) skill such that folks will have games where either team can win through outplaying their opponents. Currently this is very much not what what it is doing.

Edited by Tor6, 12 August 2013 - 11:33 AM.

[ProfessorD]

Quote

It's the matchmaker cycling us between ''put you with a decent team where you are likely to win'' and ''put you in a crap team where you are likely to lose'' to achieve its target 50:50 W/L ratio.

If this is what's happening, then the devs need to explain how they really implemented the matchmaker, because this isn't what we were told. It's also really just not how a matchmaker should work.

Quote

If Elo were just working alone, as Elo should ... it should be about a 50:50 chance by match, not at all by day.

This is much closer to what we were told and it's also how the matchmaker really should work.

There's a bigger question here. Why does this dev team have to re-invent the matchmaker? There are good matchmaking systems out there. Starcraft, before they started allowing "unranked" games mixed in with "ranked" games, had a brilliant system, just as one example. Independent of implementation in a particular game, this is a mathematically completely solved problem.

Edited by ProfessorD, 12 August 2013 - 11:36 AM.

[Stoicblitzer]

there has to be a better way to do matchmaking. unfortunately, i don't think PGI will explore any other way since they spent so much time reinventing their wheel and now they have foolishly announced a "beta tag removal" day so they are busy with other "features."

[GingerBang]

ProfessorD, on 12 August 2013 - 11:36 AM, said:

this is a mathematically completely solved problem.

And that's why PGI cannot solve it.

[Screech]

Done over 1500+ pug drops and don't recall any streak getting past 5 or so. I would imagine one would see the biggest swings switching back from group and solo play. I think 12v12 might end up lessening this as well.

[Joseph Mallan]

If I am PUGging I don't worry about Wins. It is foolish to do so. What concerns me is how well did I serve the team? If I got a kill an some assists I did my job. It is a team game and the better team wins.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 12 August 2013 - 12:19 PM.

[Vincent Quatermain]

GingerBang, on 12 August 2013 - 10:33 AM, said:

Is it just me and my squadmates, or does everyone else tend to lose all day one day, and then win all day the next? It just seems ridiculous. I've had days were i've gone 1W and 34L, then the next day it is almost the exact opposite. What on earth is going on here? It happens all the time, there never seems to be inbetween. Some days you seem to only be up against the worst of the worst, then the next you just get rofl-stomped all day long.

Nothing is amiss here. Elo ranking strives to make you win half of your matches, so thus your win/loss record will begin to resemble that of a recorded series of coin flips. In any series of random coin flips, there will be streaks of all heads or all tails that go on for many flips. In fact, if this wasn't occurring, you would have a better case for the Elo ranking being busted.

[aseth]

GingerBang, on 12 August 2013 - 10:33 AM, said:

Is it just me and my squadmates, or does everyone else tend to lose all day one day, and then win all day the next? It just seems ridiculous. I've had days were i've gone 1W and 34L, then the next day it is almost the exact opposite. What on earth is going on here? It happens all the time, there never seems to be inbetween. Some days you seem to only be up against the worst of the worst, then the next you just get rofl-stomped all day long.

I've seen similar results, though sometimes it's a couple of days of wins before a night of horrific slaughter.

I really dislike the current matchmaking though; it was a lot better when weight categories were roughly matched up across the two teams.

[Lostdragon]

Joseph Mallan, on 12 August 2013 - 12:19 PM, said:

If I am PUGging I don't worry about Wins. It is foolish to do so. What concerns me is how well did I serve the team? If I got a kill an some assists I did my job. It is a team game and the better team wins.

While that is true to an extent I think it is also short sighted. If you know how to win and you are not trying to get your team to do what is necessary to win then you did not fulfill your obligation to the team. If you just sit back and worry about playing your role without providing leadership and direction when it is needed then you did not do everything you could.

I pug 100% of the time and I go in to every game expecting to win. If my team is doing something that is not conducive to winning I try to politely steer them in the right direction. Sometimes they listen and sometimes they don't, but if you just sit back and let your team self destruct while you try to get kills and assists to make yourself look good on the game summary screen then you have not done everything you could to win.