Cimarb, on 10 July 2014 - 06:01 PM, said:
Let me reset this a bit...
The matchmaker is currently borked big time. We have brand new players playing with those that have played for years. We have tourney teams playing against casual players. The current system, however you want to phrase it, is not working.
No, the current system
is working
as it is designed to work. What it's NOT doing is working in a completely different manner, how you want it to work:
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I want to play with against players that are of equal skill and/or experience as myself. I do not want to have to explain how to chainfire weapons, or what the button for air strike is. I want brand new players to play with people that are also learning, so they are spared the comments that come from us experienced players when they cannot even hit an Atlas walking by them.
The vast,
vast majority of players are Medium Elo. It doesn't matter how good they actually are, the majority of players' skill level becomes Middle Elo based on how the system works. Average Elo is, in fact, average.
I understand you only want to play with more experienced players. I get that. But this system isn't designed to do that. What the system is designed to do is match teams as fairly as possible, and get people to the ranking they should have as quickly as possible.
The reason new players start middle ranked (actually, Cadet players with <=25 matches are substantially lower in practice - the system tracks actual Elo and Cadet Elo simultaneously during this time) is that it's quicker to get them to an appropriate level from that starting point, so everyone can get better matches faster. In most cases, however, they're not going to move far from that middle point simply because most players belong right there.
There are two tricksy factors here:
1) People hate to think they're actually average players, despite the fact that almost everyone actually is an average player.
2) Consider, if you will, 20,000 concurrent players at a specific moment in time. If those players spend an average of 8 minutes inside a match, 2 minutes getting drinks/chatting/tweaking loadouts/buying consumables/whatever then hit Launch... with a 30sec window looking for a match, only 5% of the currently online players are in the matchmaking pool at any given time. That's 1000 people in the MM's grasp when trying to put a match together, with 48 players per match, weight classes to consider, and elo ranges of 1-2800. The hard reality is that the vast majority of those players are going to be very, very average players, sprinkled thoroughly with newish players, and the MM has to build a match
right now. The further from middle Elo you are, the greater the Elo delta within your team must be, simply because there aren't enough like-ranked players searching at that exact same moment in time.
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I believe that basing our "Elo" on multiple statistics will make for a much better system of matching players. That, combined with using BV versus weight class, will make for a much better experience for everyone.
In magical "We don't actually need to design a system" land, sure. You brush it off as "Hard, but possible", but you don't really seem to grasp
just how hard it is.
You can't just incorporate other statistics into Elo, because Elo is designed as a player ranking algorithm specifically that doesn't use scores. So, what you are asking for is a ground up new system.
There is nothing like that around today. There's no example system you can look at and tune to fit. How, exactly, do you rank things?
How much is a kill worth? An assist? What is the relationship between a Spotting Assist and a PPC on an Awesome? Not only do all these things need values, they all need values that are correct relative to each other. You'd never find to people, not even professional designers, who would have anything close to the same ideas there. This is not a trivial task, it's not even a hard task, it's a virtually impossible one. Try it. Seriously. Try to build an algorithm that will take all these stats into account in a useful way.
Now, how do you prevent gaming the system? If I find Kills are worth a lot, I can deliberately cripple players
but never kill them to get a lower matchmaking ranking, so I'm regularly placed against weaker opponents to ease cbill generation and the appearance of awesomeness. The more factors used in determining your ranking, the easier it becomes to game.
Elo isn't gamable, at least not in a useful manner aside from possibly "smurfing" into PGI's old style of tournament. The only way to lower your Elo artificially is to deliberately lose a lot of games
against lower ranked teams, which can be hard, because that means other people on your team are likely better than your opposition too. All so you can... win games easily until you get back where you were? You'd end up, either way, with roughly 50% wins anyways.
Elo isn't perfect. It doesn't do what you want, and isn't expected to. It does fail most notably when there are insufficient player counts in the matchmaking pool to make ideal matches.
But there currently isn't a better system. If you think you can make one, go to it! There's a lot of money to be made there.
72
, right? How'd that turn out?
