18 replies to this topic

[Silverfang22]

I've seen a few games where one time has a lance of 4 assaults or 4 lights partied up and it seems to lead to a serious imbalance in weight a lot of the time (I have had it both somewhat balanced i.e. 4 atlases on one team but 4 assaults on the other team and completely unbalanced i.e. 6+ lights, including cicadas in this number, on one team but only 2-3 on the other).

Anybody else noticed this?

Edited by Silverfang22, 13 October 2013 - 10:00 AM.

[Veranova]

Weight limits.
There will be weight ranges for every size of group. Some-time around UI2.0 I think.

What I find more is that ELO goes a bit crazy.
I'm not sure how ELO is calculated for groups, it seems to vary a lot between my 4-mans.
I would like to know this.

[warner2]

ELO is for a player, so ELO for a group is the average for all players in the group.

[1Sascha]

Don't see how this is related to 4-man-groups.

I've been in PUG-only matches with 7 Atlases or 6 -7 Lights per team myself.

As long as we don't have dropweight-limits, I guess all this is more down to chance/randomness than anything else.


S.

[Modo44]

1Sascha, on 14 October 2013 - 03:39 AM, said:

Don't see how this is related to 4-man-groups.

4 players get into the same match without skill or weight restrictions. This removes them from the solo queue, and it means the matchmaker has to cope with whatever they throw at it. As a result, everybody else gets worse odds at an even match. Clear enough?

Edited by Modo44, 14 October 2013 - 04:02 AM.

[1Sascha]

How do you know all this?

Is there a definitive description of how the matchmaker actually works?

Quote

4 players get into the same match without skill or weight restrictions.

Same goes for four random players who PUG. What's your point?
And BTW: I can definitely tell a difference between me PUGging and dropping with my squaddies, whose K/D-ratio is a lot better than mine. The opposition is a lot better when I do 4-man-drops.

Quote

This removes them from the solo queue, and it means the matchmaker has to cope with whatever they throw at it. As a result, everybody else gets worse odds at an even match. Clear enough?

So if there *is* a solo-queue, there's also a 4-man-queue, right? So chances are that there'll be another 4-man group on the other side who can also spawn whatever they want. Like I said: This is what I feel happens to me when I do 4-man-drops.

Again: I fail to see a point here.

Especially since I've yet to find that definitive description of how the matchmaker actually works.


Unless of course the point is the same old whine of "premades are OP!! stop allowing people to actually team up and coordinate their efforts.. this is not a game about teamwork after all!!"



S.

[Modo44]

Solo players can be put in different matches. If they happen to sync, they can be put on opposite sides depending on skill and mech chosen. But when 4 players drop together, the matchmaker must find 4 players to match the entire group, both on skill and on weight. This gets really troublesome in the higher skill brackets, since there are few players to choose from by design. A good 4-man ROFLstomps PUGs, and if you drop solo in that environment, half your games are virtually guaranteed wins/losses.

This is obviously not the only issue with the matchmaker, but it makes them all clearly worse.

Edited by Modo44, 14 October 2013 - 04:55 AM.

[Electron Junkie]

1Sascha, on 14 October 2013 - 04:14 AM, said:

Unless of course the point is the same old whine of "premades are OP!! stop allowing people to actually team up and coordinate their efforts.. this is not a game about teamwork after all!!"

S.

Premades are fine just seperate them from the PUG queue. This is 90% of the reason that matchmaker is broken.

[1Sascha]

Electron Junkie, on 14 October 2013 - 05:10 AM, said:

Premades are fine just seperate them from the PUG queue. This is 90% of the reason that matchmaker is broken.

No objections here. I'm all for separating PUGs and premades.


S.

[Redoxin]

Electron Junkie, on 14 October 2013 - 05:10 AM, said:

Premades are fine just seperate them from the PUG queue. This is 90% of the reason that matchmaker is broken.

How is it broken? Seems totally fine to me. Broken because you dont win every single game or what? Goal of the matchmaker is to get everybody at about 50% win rate. Which of course will not work perfectly for people at the veryy top or very bottom of the MMR.

I play almost only solo since MMR (Elo) was introduced. Because since then I dont win more games when playing in a group.

[Modo44]

Redoxin, on 14 October 2013 - 06:02 AM, said:

How is it broken? Seems totally fine to me. Broken because you dont win every single game or what? Goal of the matchmaker is to get everybody at about 50% win rate. Which of course will not work perfectly for people at the veryy top or very bottom of the MMR.

Oh, it works perfectly. You either get stomped into the ground, or the premade(s) carry the match regardless of how much or little you do. Super fun game.

The goal in a game is to generate fun matches, which the current system excels at preventing.

Edited by Modo44, 14 October 2013 - 06:16 AM.

[Redoxin]

Modo44, on 14 October 2013 - 06:15 AM, said:

Oh, it works perfectly. You either get stomped into the ground, or the premade(s) carry the match regardless of how much or little you do. Super fun game.

The goal in a game is to generate fun matches, which the current system excels at preventing.

Play with premades yourself, and you will find out you dont win more games. The real world correlation of premade and winning is VERY weak.

Stomps are in the nature of the game. Simply because the team that gets the early advantage tends to snowball very hard. For example, if one team gets the first two kills without getting one of their own destroyed, the game is almost always won.

When I still played 8 man team games, we would sometimes drop against the same team several times in a row. So we would win 7-1 first, and the next game we would lose 2-6. Stomps for different teams, although the same players are in the game. So how could any matchmaking ever change that? It cant.

Edited by Redoxin, 14 October 2013 - 10:16 AM.

[Modo44]

Redoxin, on 14 October 2013 - 10:15 AM, said:

Play with premades yourself, and you will find out you dont win more games. The real world correlation of premade and winning is VERY weak.

That may be. The correlation between the number of premades and the quality of games for solo players, however, is quite clear.

[Bartholomew bartholomew]

My win/loss is usually slightly worse when dropping 4 man. Dunno why. but it seems that our group ELO might be high enough to make it that way. And I usually see a charlie lance with all trial mechs when we do. Then we end up either getting stomped hard or winning with usally two people outside of our group making real good match scores. And the rest of the kills/assists are ours.
Using ingame chat in tandem with teamspeak usually helps for winning.

And for the guys making good scores without being on teampseak with us. GREAT JOB!

On the flip side. I have had a few where being four man made no difference. The scores across the whole board were fairly even. And most times those were the AWESOME scraps.

[Werewolf486 ScorpS]

Had a serious mismatch the other night where my team had our lance in Jenners and another 4 man in Hunchbacks with a lance of mixed classes and our Assault was an Awesome. The other team had 4 Atlas, Jeagers/Cataphracts, two Kentaro, two spiders. We rushed their cap and they came to fight only to loose terribly bad to our underweight team. It was sad....

[Bartholomew bartholomew]

I have noticed that if you run a more balanced four man you get more weight balanced matches. And a better skill match.

[1Sascha]

Quote

Play with premades yourself, and you will find out you dont win more games. The real world correlation of premade and winning is VERY weak.

Stomps are in the nature of the game. Simply because the team that gets the early advantage tends to snowball very hard. For example, if one team gets the first two kills without getting one of their own destroyed, the game is almost always won.

^ That.

Anecdotal evidence from two nights ago:

Dropped with at least two 4-man on our side plus a disruptive little troll who'd grab command, shuffle Mechs around and when asked by the entire team to put it back the way it was, ignored the team and then started insulting everyone. Disrupted early gameplay for our entire team while everyone who got shuffled around was using chat and we got steamrolled. Next match, the same troll was on the other side where he pulled the same {Scrap}. Other team got disrupted early on - I *think* they even started shooting each other over it. So we steamrolled them.

But even without disruptions, the point is still very valid: If you get a good start, you're very likely to win the match. It's pretty rare to see teams come back from 0 - 2, 0 - 3.

Or how about this? We had eight squaddies on the other night and actually managed to synch-drop and even landed on the same team. So we should've wiped the floor with the opposition, right? But we still lost pretty badly.

One also shouldn't forget that TS can be as much a liability as it can be useful. Some matches, people will just talk {Scrap}/joke around, thus robbing themselves of concentration.

And if you suck, you'll also suck while in a group of experienced TS-users. A squaddie of mine is relatively new and still makes quite a few stupid mistakes. When we see him do it, we'll point this out to him, but he'll still do stuff like charge mindlessly into a group of 3 or 4 enemies or stand around in the open for no reason. Meaning: TS isn't some sort of magic bullet that'll turn an utter n00b into a brilliant player at the push of a button.


S.

Edited by 1Sascha, 15 October 2013 - 12:17 AM.

[Kmieciu]

Modo44, on 14 October 2013 - 06:15 AM, said:

Oh, it works perfectly. You either get stomped into the ground, or the premade(s) carry the match regardless of how much or little you do. Super fun game.

The goal in a game is to generate fun matches, which the current system excels at preventing.

Even the best 4-man premade cannot carry the mach if the rest of the team is useless:

Spoiler

If I drop with friends that have 2-3 W/L ratio the matchmaker groups us with people in trial mechs, Dragons, Awesomes and Commandos against lances full of Highlanders and Victors.

[Modo44]

Like I said, premades are not the only problem, they just make the overall matchmaker issues more glaring. What you described happens to high-skill anyone, solo players and groups alike.