26 replies to this topic

[Hisashi No Oni]

After ten in a row pug matches that ended in fail the same way. I suggest it may be time for vet and beginner matches. If you score over some magic lever you are invited to veteran level. Yes maybe even (for the weak) that you can play on both levels if you wish as a veteran. For a game that (I love) that is so interested in balance this may be a good idea. Let them earn score or ranks but dont mix us anymore please. I would even say pay to play would be better than vet team vs noob sacrifice fifty percent of the time.

[Lefty Lucy]

If this game had a decent player base, ELO could do exactly this. However, we don't.

[Takony]

Yep, prolly too few concurrent players.

[Jam the Bam]

So you end up with people getting the hang of mechs and feeling good about the game, then you bump them up to play with the 'Veterans' (btw I've never met a more entitled elitist community that MWO), whereupon they get the shock of their lives and get ***** every game until they just quit?

[MrZakalwe]

Jammerben87, on 04 September 2013 - 04:03 AM, said:

So you end up with people getting the hang of mechs and feeling good about the game, then you bump them up to play with the 'Veterans' (btw I've never met a more entitled elitist community that MWO), whereupon they get the shock of their lives and get ***** every game until they just quit?

Played DOTA/DOTA2/LoL/HoN?

You haven't seen elitist until you've played a MOBA.

Also please define entitled- many people seem to use it to mean odd things.

[Shazarad]

Thread title makes me think of Macho Man Randy Savage.

CREEEEEAMMMM RIIIIIIIIISES TO THE TOP! YEAH.

[scJazz]

Jammerben87, on 04 September 2013 - 04:03 AM, said:

So you end up with people getting the hang of mechs and feeling good about the game, then you bump them up to play with the 'Veterans' (btw I've never met a more entitled elitist community that MWO), whereupon they get the shock of their lives and get ***** every game until they just quit?

You have never played EvE I assume?

[zhajin]

Its not just the player base, its that this game has far to many variable for elo to be effective. add to that the complexity of weight matching. now throw in new players starting with relatively high elos. and on top of that you have the desire for short wait times.

put it all together and you got a match maker that is just curled up in a corner crying to itself....

[Royalewithcheese]

Jammerben87, on 04 September 2013 - 04:03 AM, said:

So you end up with people getting the hang of mechs and feeling good about the game, then you bump them up to play with the 'Veterans' (btw I've never met a more entitled elitist community that MWO), whereupon they get the shock of their lives and get ***** every game until they just quit?

Part of the issue is that Elo (when it works at all) drops new players against average players.

Edited by Royalewithcheese, 04 September 2013 - 06:44 AM.

[Murphy7]

Lefty Lucy, on 03 September 2013 - 10:05 PM, said:

If this game had a decent player base, ELO could do exactly this. However, we don't.

I do not really understand how ELO is determined for us as players, so I am not sure whether I can agree with your statement.

There is the issue with the ELO being balanced across two 12-man teams, and if the score is individuallized,

Imageing a team comprised of 10 people at ELO 1500, and 2 at ELO 1000 dropped against 12 people at ELO 1400

This assumes 1000 to be an average ELO, 1500 to be significantly advanced, and 1400 most of the way towards significantly advanced.

Those two 1000's drop like flies against massed fire and poor geography, skylining themselves, or whathave you, adn then you are left with 10 at 1500 vs 12 at 1400, which starts the steamroll because in that situation numbers tell.

This is hypothetical, but it feels like what is happening in the PUG drops, where most of the numbers are close, but a few players available are not so the shuffle gets slightly lopsided, and the current game flow generally feels like once there is a 2-3 mech disparity in sides, that will most likely snowball into a lopsided victory for one side.

[Sheraf]

Hisashi No Oni, on 03 September 2013 - 09:28 PM, said:

After ten in a row pug matches that ended in fail the same way. I suggest it may be time for vet and beginner matches. If you score over some magic lever you are invited to veteran level. Yes maybe even (for the weak) that you can play on both levels if you wish as a veteran. For a game that (I love) that is so interested in balance this may be a good idea. Let them earn score or ranks but dont mix us anymore please. I would even say pay to play would be better than vet team vs noob sacrifice fifty percent of the time.

Why don't you head to the "new player help" forum, and tell everyone what you did in the last 10 matches, so people can help you figure out what wrong?

[Nik Van Rhijn]

I suggested a little while ago that they implement a split, Up to 50% Elo (whatever that is) and 51% and up.
New players should start at something like 25% or 30% Elo.
Even if it increased time to find a match it should help. What won't help of course is that new players in trial mechs playing against long time, but just below average, players with fully set up customised and elited mechs. Somehow I don't think that there are enough new players for them to have their own queue.
Hopefully weight limits will be in soon.
Something needs to be done by the 17th. I can just see all the game reviewers who haven't already given it a try logging in and giving it an hour at most before composing their review.

[Lord Ikka]

Since Elo is designed (originally) to balance individuals, it is very hard for it to balance a game that incorporates 24 individuals together, since just taking the average of team members and using that is not a great way to go. Hopefully the tonnage balancing will give Elo a little bit of help with the balancing metric, but match-making in general is not great for this game.

[Psikez]

:| nobodys posted this yet? At least it was referenced

[Funkadelic Mayhem]

May the team with the most or biggest premades win!

Its the exact reason I don't play but a match or two here and there now. Lost all interest in playing really.

[Taemien]

I never quite understood the complaints about ELO.

If you get wasted, its not because ELO is messed up. You just rolled bad on the dice or made a bad decision. The point I am making is even Vets get trounced by circumstance. No amount of coding is going to prevent someone from rounding a corner just as the entire enemy team decided to go that particular way that match.

This would happen to a friend of mine and myself running a duo. Had a bunch of rounds in Frozen City and Forest Colony. We'd run the tunnel. Most times we'd run up behind the enemy and wreck havoc. Every so often we'd run into 8 angry mechs. ELO didn't cause that. Most of the time it wasn't even premades either. We just got unlucky.


I keep hearing about the poor noob pilot that gets trounced. You know the ones they speak of. The horrors of how they get wasted by veteran players unfairly matched against them because of faulty ELO programming.

Where the heck are these people? Everyone I see in a match has an idea of what they are doing. They aren't humping the side of a building. They are moving around, maybe not as good as I do, but good enough to be a threat if they are on the other team.

I see bad mistakes being made here and there. But nothing that can't be chalked up to arrogance or overstepping themselves. Mistakes even I make from time to time. They might be a bit unorganized, but nothing that is continously getting them trounced.

I see screenshots of people losing to a team with only 1-2 kills or no kills.. but like I said in other threads. A 12-0 isn't always a stomp. There might be 10 critical mechs on the winning side. The factor might have been focus firing was better on the winning side. Once you get 2-3 mechs down, you're up by to a 9 or 10 vs 12. The odds of pulling through start dropping dramatically. You go from 4:3 odds to 2:1 to 3:1 to 6:1 odds fairly quickly. If you're down 10 mechs scoring a kill at that point is a major victory.

Take it from me. The majority of the players aren't the cream at the top. You all are in the same boat believe it or not. There is only a few players who can honestly say they are top vets and most of them are MW4 and MWLL vets. Which I can say, there is probably 20 of us for every 10,000 players.. and thats even being generous. And not all of them are super vets either, but casual players just like you.

Don't sell yourselves short. One to one player skill isn't kicking your butt in MWO. Its situational awareness, teamwork, and sometimes a little luck. The number of super vets is rather low and even they can succumb to focus fire and teamwork being used against them.

Now that we're getting tutorials ingame. I think we can do away with ELO and put everyone in the same setting. Let people get better by playing against better players. I'm all for baptisms by fire, but I want players to be able to walk to those baptisms instead of crawling. And thats what those tuts are good for. Once a player knows how to move around a building and/or hills, he's fair game, the rest is on them to be able to compete.

[Jestun]

any matchmaker is only as good as the playerpool and ranking system allows. and no automated system can perfectly rank single players in a 24 person team game.

[OneEyed Jack]

I'm no expert, but it seems to me it wouldn't be hard (relatively) to create Elo tiers and only build a match from within a tier, or even just institute an absolute Elo range limit for a given match. The wait times may be a bit longer, but I don't think it would be terrible, and it wouldn't perfectly balance anything, but it would put players on a much closer to level playing field.

Heck, they wouldn't even need to announce that they'd done it. They could just do it quietly and let the b*tching about matchmaking gradually fade away to only the relatively few who are always looking for something to blame for their sucking. But weight limits won't affect experienced, regular teams being put in the same matches with noobs in trial mechs.

[Kahoumono]

As a pug, ELO is so frustrating because it functions in cycles. There will be streaks where my team wins matches by large margins (8+ mechs survive), after a few of those my ELO peaks and I get a run 5-10 matches going the other way. I think purely random teams would be better than this.

There needs to be multipliers to the ELO increase and decrease for groups and stock mechs respectively. This is assuming there is a advantage(however slight)in being in a group, most obvious being comms but can be as minor as complementing each others play styles with mech selection. As for stock mechs it is obvious playing in a stock mech is a handicap and the expected performance needs to be dropped.

[Elfman]

Elo disparity seems more of an issue in UK prime time than US prime time.

Last night’s games for example we I ended up in 3 matches where we had people who were still in trial mechs trying to work out how to move and shooting missiles with no lock and med lasers at targets over 1k away.

I generally play 19:00 GMT to 23:00 GMT and the later it gets the more even the skill balance in each game.

On Saturday mornings the skill difference you get in PUG games is huge due to low player numbers at that time