Homeless Bill, on 20 September 2013 - 11:24 AM, said:
I think that whole first paragraph is a lot of unbacked assumptions. You should only play people of a similar skill, but due to small the player pool and the matchmaker's lax standards, you'll see top-tier players in with complete scrubs. The Elo hell bit is what comes of it, but that's only because the playerbase / matchmaker can't find enough competent opponents. Even though anyone with a high win-loss ratio has an Elo that is "too low," it's still probably one of the higher Elos in the game.
Again, I entirely disagree. Though the way points are distributed based on assumed win/loss messes things up, I see no situation where maintaining a good WLR wouldn't get you an increasing Elo. The more you win, the more "assumed loss" matches the matchmaker will try to give you, the more "assumed loss" matches you win, the higher your score is pushed.
The way you talk about things, it seems like you think there are "tiers" of players that you move between, and those tiers are completely excluded from each other. That's not how it works in this game based on all empirical evidence. The matchmaker just tries to match up average Elo ratings - it doesn't set up a Tier 1 match and a Tier 2 match. We've all seen matches that have PEEFsmash, kaffeangst, and some guy that doesn't know how to set up his weapon groups. The longer it waits, the lazier it gets about finding matches.
Again, what should happen is irrelevant. What does happen is that good people continue to win more because there aren't enough other good players to normalize them downwards. I find it hard to imagine that anyone with a 1600+ Elo rating has below a 1.5 win-loss ratio.
I would also like to thank you for being competent, civil, and enjoyable to debate.
If you have played thousands of games, win to loss ratios will take tens of thousands of games to trend down. The relationship between games played and changes in win loss rates is exponential.
Take a player with a 4.0 or 80% win to loss ratio with 5000 games. If Elo works 100% perfectly and matches him perfectly resulting in a 50/50 win to lose ratio. Even after an additional 10,000 games playing at win to loss ratio of 50%, his net aggregate win to loss ratio is still 60%. It would take that player over 100,000 additional games to lower his win to loss ratio to 50%.
The anecdotal evidence of win to loss rates trending downwards at even 5% supports the claim that there is segregation of Elo scores even amongst the the top .1% (the 3 sigma) of players. Is it perfect segregation? Obliviously not, but it has been said by staff that only 7% of games are considered out side of tolerance.
There are brackets for Elo, it is precisely how the teams are constructed according to the devs
Quote
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.
source,
http://mwomercs.com/...-making-update/
So you can expect that we will trend to evenly matched games over time, which validates everything I said in my previous posts. As long as we trend towards 50/50 matchmaking, everything in my previous post is statistical fact, not anecdotal observations or feelings.
It's entirely possible to maintain a positive win to loss ratio and have your Elo score trend downwards. The magnitude of the loss only has to outweigh the wins. Take a player with a 1600 Elo score Vs someone with a 1300. Your arbitrary elite score Vs the starting score. If the 1600 wins that mach they only get 8 Elo points, if they loss the match they lose 42 Elo points. Any win to loss ratio below 5.25, that is 5.25 wins for every loss, will net a downward trend in Elo points if the 1600 plays only 1300. That is Elo hell.
It's also very possible that there are plenty of people with little experience with high elo scores due to the K factors I described previously. Theoretically you could get to 1600 Elo in 6 games which would put you in the top two thirds of Elo scores. As noted in the Dev logs the max change is 50 Elo points per match, So if a new player faces a team who's Elo points are 800 above his score, for every match, for 6 matchs, he can get to Elo 1600 in 6 matches.
This also is a good way to explain why you see "noobs" with elites in matches. A strong K factor allows people to gain a lot of Elo quickly; so quickly that they may end up high ranked after a dozen matches and still not know how to work controls. This will always be an issue with F2P games as they continually add new players to the pool and you want high K factors to ensue good matchmaking quickly.
Edited by Grits N Gravy, 21 September 2013 - 10:54 AM.