1
I am trying my best not to be too rude in this post but, I am floored by some of the things I've seen in this game. I assure you I want actual conversation, not just "lol yer mad @ game lel get out". I wanna be proven wrong and please do so.
After doing some research apparently this game still uses an almost entirely unedited chess master elo system from, if I am not mistaken, the 90s. A system based on the system Arpad Elo developed masterfully named after himself. He made this back in 1960 and it's final adjustments were made in 1978.
Excuse me?
This game is using a system older than video games themselves, that is so intense. A lot of popular games use the chess master system but they have heavily edited to and added a lot more too it. Example: League of Legends does things like this; playing a new character? Elo get's lowered a bit, playing a brand new role? Elo get's lowered A LOT. They clock how much time you spend do various things and add those numbers together to help either lower your base elo (wins/loss) to a few other elo systems (wins/losses amounts such as how much you lost by, how often you lose, etc). They have multiple elo systems converging on one another that all comes together to help you get the best match possible. When I play that game I sometimes stomp, I sometimes get stomped, but I for the most part I have even matches.
EDIT: Apparently there is more editing, and MWO does modify their system to work based off changing elo if you were accepted to win or not. It also takes ACCURACY into account. This however is not enough, and the elo for the matches is balanced on team averages. This isn't really any better than just using the base chess master system, this is almost worse considering the rampart disregard for player skill gaps. Situation: If 6 of the 12 players on a team are amazingly awful people that afk and shoot at the ground, and the other 6 are top tier players, the system will think "This is a perfectly average team" and put them up against another team which, could actually be 12 perfectly average players. Those players might stomp the 6 people on the team made up of 6 basically afk dummies and 6 MWO GODS, but those 6 uncontrollably strong players will wipe the entire other team.
Now I realize MWO is not League of Legends. These are two different games that make entirely different brackets of money. However do you think you could use something better than chess master? Or at least edit it a bit?
How about adding something like; how often people play that mech class, how often people play the mech they are using. These are very simple, very effective, not terrible difficult, ways of helping balance the matches out. Perhaps if you're feeling dangerously statistical you could add in things like; what kind of weapons or ultility devices the mechs going into the match are using so you don't get 10 players all with ECM in a team of 12 people (I have had this happen I am not joking) and if you must put 10 players on a team with ECM put 10 players with probes and counters on the other, do something gosh dang it!
I would also like to note something that is very, very seriously said. The UI in this game is one of the worst I have ever, ever seen for a game in this budget bracket. I have played thousands of games, helped develop a small handful, and have tested many more. The fact that there is NO SEARCH FUNCTION AT ALL anywhere in the UI in-game or in the mechbay area is actually sickening. I can't even search a mech by name, let along all the things I should be able to search for. I should be able to put in a search for any mech with say... random examples; display any mechs with 6 or more missile hardpoints, or exactly 5 missile hardpoints. I should be able to multi-search various items. Display all mechs with at least 3 missle and energy hardpoints with 300 or more base armor. In a game where your customers are willing to SELL OUT 500 dollar packages of in-game goods and still have a UI that gets shown up by games from <2005 is beyond any words I can give save for this last point.
I have seen a game prototype, a vague concept of a game created that is "playable" (using that term loosely) to just show a simple concept and is often years before even an alpha state, have a better search function than this game. This prototype was developed by one person in six months, during that six month period they took a week, a single week, to develop a full UI search function. Mind you, the amount of items and data to search was VERY SMALL but the idea fact remains that a single person, almost as an after thought, has outdone the developers of this game.
Vassago Rain, on 14 August 2014 - 07:48 AM, said:
The in-game mechlab and UI 2.x are both useless.
If you want to know what mechs are capable of, you use this site: http://mwo.smurfy-net.de/mechlab
Literally no one uses the game's own tools for anything, and PGI have shown very little interest in improving them, for whatever reason.
If you want to know what mechs are capable of, you use this site: http://mwo.smurfy-net.de/mechlab
Literally no one uses the game's own tools for anything, and PGI have shown very little interest in improving them, for whatever reason.
Wow, this is pretty eye opening. The fact that the developers themselves are outdone (tremendously might I add) by someone with some free time and a web server is actually kind of soul crushing.
Please for the love of video games and logic, prove me wrong about these points I've made. I want to be mistaken, I really do. This is all just light research and observation, but if I am actually correct about these points then I am stunned as to how this game thrives as much as it does. I was told in another post the main reason this game gets away with a lot of this stuff is because there are no alternatives for easy access mechwarrior. Is this really true?
Cited works, very light and I need to find the rest of my links again, some were from these forums but I ended up losing those. I would also like to note I would do better hard research if given the time, but the developers of this game hide an awful lot of information that cannot be obtained unless data-mined, as shown below in a few of these links:
http://themittani.co...chmaker-problem
http://themittani.co...tchmaker-update
http://www.reddit.co...ar_perspective/ (some really good posts here about all sorts of things related to this, and a lot of issues not posted about here).
http://www.reddit.co...and_ultimately/ (semi-old, perhaps outdated due to patches?)
http://www.reddit.co...ing_we_have_to/ (talks about matchmaking, how the various patches effected things, seems semi-unrelated but in the comments is where the actual discussion is).
http://www.pcgamer.c...t-with-caveats/ (this one is just highlighting things about the Interface, however my points made on UI can be observed by anyone who has played, literally any other MMO, and have also played this game.)
Edited by Estrous, 14 August 2014 - 08:08 AM.
class matching (and even if they did we used to game the HELL out of that one)
