oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
Yet, it will even out. You will have as many games that end in a stomp as games that don't end in a stomp. The idea is to use a system to try to reduce the number of stomps because having an even number of stomps is not a good thing when you can aim to have fewer stomps.
But as I said before about 500 people said hey this new system you're putting in makes MORE stomps not less.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
It's not like this is the first game to use Elo. It's not like they invented their own system from scratch, though they, and many games that use an Elo system, may decide to use what the system is telling them differently. Starcraft 2, Dota 2, LoL and CS:GO all use Elo and these are on the short list of the most competitive games out there.
It's entirely possible that they still have some problems with it, but it is very likely that even with problems that it is better than completely random matchmaking.
Random was a lot more fun. At the end of the day fun keeps people playing.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
Yes, a fair matchmaking system is designed to sabotage your win rating. If you were an above average player and random matchmaking was used, then on average you would fight against players who are worse then you and you would win far more than you lose.
You realize that's an impossible position to defend right? A fair matching making system will NOT sabotage your win rating. That's essentially walking into the territory of rubberband AI and that makes people not want to play.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
This might be fun for that above average player but it is not fun for the loser and it may be boring for players who are more interested in a challenge than about winning. It will try to match you against equally skilled players so that you will only win about half the time.
You have to understand that this is the basis of matchmaking. Even if you are a good player, you're intended to lose every other match you play on average. People don't like this and would rather win all their games but that is a perception problem, not a problem with the matchmaker.
Here I am going to disagree with you. There was a MM mode for full teams (be it 8 or 12) that was 100% full competition all the time. Why did it die out? Not enough people want to play super competition mode 24/7. That ought to be enough to tell you that it isn't a good idea. Why am I intended to lose every other game? If I am an above average player I should be winning more often than someone who is less skilled than me. This goes back to the handholding scenario. Why do bad players deserve to have their hands held and kept from being in games with above average players (not even talking about all stars)? This is the antithesis of the video game arcade spirit. It's the spirit where everyone wears a helmet, plays in a foam padded room and gets a trophy even when they lose.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
Also, if people left because of a perceived problem with the system that doesn't exist again it is not the fault of the system.
I'm going to have to disagree with you again here because tons of people left when Elo was implemented before the rise of the PPC era. And then more people left when poptarting became the heart of this game. In the past people were winning more than they lost because they were above average. Now the game is set so that no matter how poorly you play you should on average win half the time. That's BS. Out of all the players you want to favor for your game it shouldn't be the bottom of your barrel because they are the least likely to stay AND put money in your game anyway.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
Keep in mind that for all you know if they kept the random matchmaking with the newer 5+ player group queues that it could have been much worse.
Be careful about inserting idle speculation. For all you know random match making actually did end in near perfect matches 99% of the time.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
People don't like change and tend to remember "the good old days" as better than they were. The good old days didn't have to deal with 5+ player group queues that we have to deal now and larger teams are essentially shifting the matchmaking towards organized stomping just by the virtue of them being a team. Again, this is something that any matchmaking system would have problems with.
Actually the start of the game made people play as a single person against groups of 8 people on voice coms. It took them at least a month to fix it but that is how it started. They changed the game so that you had 4 people max in your lance and if you wanted more you played 8 on 8 organized team mode and I've already covered this. You had games where it was 4 lances fighting each other and I think the game was never better.
Elo is fine with organized play once you start stacking team members with comms. But it has no place in the single queue. That is where BV would be a much better system. Look at mechs and say this build is either ratedt high, low or somewhere in the middle. You can set the game to recognize optimized meta builds and builds that are alpha/dps oriented. I already covered this too and you glossed over it. There's no need to add + score - score after each match and calculate the new betting odds between rounds. That's just a waste of time.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
Because sometimes there simply aren't players of equal skill for the matchmaker to make a match with. Let's say there were only two 12 man teams of unequal skill that played MWO and nobody else at all. You're asking for an option that would simply never put you in a match instead of at least getting to play, even if it would be a stomp. As a hint, the longer you are searching for a match the worse the match is likely to be because the fact that it is waiting so long means that it can't find a suitable match for you so it will slowly start to consider less suitable matches.
I'm saying if this is how the MM is going to behave then there needs to be an 'opt out' box to check. You can have it just fine in a random system because it didn't mean to do that. But as soon as an Elo que does it on purpose that's messed up. I think a lot of people would rather have the game say, " I can't put you in a fair match, would you like to get your arse handed to you or would you like to wait longer; or maybe you'd just rather play a different game."
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
This is stil better than having completely random matchmaking! How likely do you think it is for a highly skilled player to do something incredibly stupid? It is far more likely for a random player to do something stupid. And yes, good players can have bad days but this is completely outside the matchmaker's control. If you used BV someone using a high BV mech could be having an off day as well. It is better to gamble with an educated guess such as Elo than to gamble completely randomly.
My understanding of people is that any of us is likely to do something stupid or have something unlucky happen to us at any given moment. What you seem to not be getting is that Elo penalizes you for being good (and rewards you for being completely terrible at the game). BV penalizes you for min/maxing and taking the absolute best possible build. That I think would be a much better match maker. You leave room for good players to win via skill with bad equipment and the opposite where bad players beat good players using bad equipment. If the player doesn't like his position he has some choice rather than an invisible magic Elo system.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
Because if you don't have that 50% target then the result is the good people would have high win rates, like 75% lets say, and the other majority of players would have extremely low win rates. They would be stomped so bad they wouldn't even want to play. Then once they quit, who's left? Only the good players who will then be forced to play against each other and then you'll go back towards the 50% goal anyways. You can only win by making other people suffer. You can't ask people to suffer more than you do, so we aim for 50% so that the suffering is shared equally.
Now you're abandoning the math behind the stats. Let's say team A always wins. In a random system when team A always wins you stand to be on team A exactly half the time. Good players and bad players appear with about equal frequency on both teams with a random distribution. Individually they would get killed often but they would have about 50% win rates because someone is likely to carry them to victory even if they can't. Go team A go! Another thing to note is that Elo was also a way to slow down player progression because you get a LOT more rewards playing more/faster games.
It's quite silly right now to be in a high Elo bracket and have to work 2-3 times as hard to get a win for every single damn game than some super bad player down in the "I'm bad at this game bracket". That environment is fine when there is a tournament. But everyday play shouldn't feel like you are running up a treadmill. But that's what Elo makes the game feel like and after a while it becomes frustrating. It's not fair to the upper end to be penalized because the lower end is so bad. You must agree with this sentiment because you said no one side should carry most of the burden (or something to that effect). What you're doing with Elo is making the good players share the burden of losses they don't deserve. Said another way they have to lose the game in unfair matches to pay for the sins of bad players who can't handle that burden. Yes it is supposed to sound ridiculous.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
Yes, it is their fault for not having voice chat, no questions there. And yes, I completely agree with you that the ability to play in large groups ruins the game for small groups of people. People say that if they couldn't play in their large groups that they would quit, but I'm pretty sure people could make do with running groups of 4. But that's for another discussion.
This is the I want to stomp noobs mentality. Which is different from I want to be on a level playing field mentality. Group queues have been hurting this game for a long time. I kinda wish they had decided to screw over the large groups because they have a huge investment in this game and they WILL come back when community warfare comes out. The average gamer on the other hand won't ever come back when he realizes how unfair a match he gets in the group pool. Those dollars go out to steam, battlefield 14, final fantasy 99 or whatever game you want to imagine.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
This is a fine concept except that it is impossible to assign BV in a game like this that has so much mechanical skill involved. BV only exists in the MW TT game and in the TT game there is no mechanical skill. I pointed out before why BV doesn't work and you haven't refuted those points yet. In summary, there are at least four problems, shown by these examples:
1. A small laser on a jenner has value. A small laser on a direwolf has practically no value.
2. A mix of medium and large lasers has good value. A mix of small and large lasers makes a lot less sense.
3. In TT PPCs hit or miss based on a dice roll. In MWO they hit or miss based on mechanical skill. For people with bad aim PPCs would have a bad return on investment. For good players they'd be penalized for their ability to aim well with it. BV doesn't account for mechanical skill.
4. A jagermech with 6 MLs has more BV than a firestarter with 6 MLs but the firestarter would likely win that 1 on 1 fight due to mechanical skill used to outmaneuver the jagermech.
1. You can assign confidence levels to setups. Slow mechs with short range only weapons would have reduced confidence
2. Why? With the right hardpoints small+large is just fine. I guess you never saw the old HBKs with all small lasers in the pack/head and large lasers in the arms.
3. BV doesn't need to account for mechanial skill. Maybe some of the optimized weapons should be rated slightly lower because they are hard to use. But everyone knows the flavor of the month OP build when they see it. Rate these builds high!
4. That's a terrible example because the Jag is one of the mechs you can play all 3 varities with exactly the same build. You wouldn't be considering that scenario. It would be something like a non ECM spider (good pilot) with bad weapons vs an optimized Victor with good weapons (bad pilot). You're largely missing the point and this is an extreme example to show you what I'm talking about. I was saying we make a new BV system with roots from TT but not copied from TT. I want a system where you can have a good player can use a knife to win and have a fair fight against a bad player with a knife.
oneproduct, on 20 October 2014 - 12:24 AM, said:
So again, for the last time, if you want to modify a player's Elo a much better option would be to use the "potential goodness" of a mech. It is very easy to determine this potential goodness by looking at that mech's win/loss ratio as determined by the average stats of everyone who has ever piloted it. If the JM6-S wins 60% of the time, then give the pilot riding it a slight Elo boost.
You cannot assign BV when the usefulness of the weapon is determined by player skill. In TT everyone rolls the same dice to see if they hit. It will always do a fixed amount of damage rather than lasers in MWO having their damage dependent on how long you can keep your beam on target and missile weapons having their damage dependent on how many of them you can actually get to land on your target.
I think our conversation may have to come to an end because I respectfully disagree with most of what you're trying to say and I see little room for anything besides stagnation.
Think about the AC/20 for a minute. You either need to be fast to deliver it when no one is looking or you need to be tough so that you live long enough to get close to deliver those shells. A 64 kph stock engine HBK is a really stupid design for delivering the AC/20. Such a build would have low confidence. A great player is going to have trouble making that build work under any circumstance. On the other hand consider some of the optimized laser vomit builds. Good range with good speed means it is pretty easy to kite inferior range enemies. That's an easy build for most players to use and you can assign guaranteed confidence ratings for it.
I largely do not care that Elo exists in the way that you're thinking about it. You think it's the only way to rate people and I disagree. All things being equal the level 3 MC airstrike/artillery is better than nothing right? If Elo were really fair it would account for people who are too cheap or just don't know how to use these items. Imagine for example if you got -100 off your score for not using consumables. That's the kind of thing I am saying we could use a BV system to better balance games (If we must use Elo).
Imagine there was a universally worst ranked build that can still function without completely sabotaging the mech (things like weapons with no ammunition). Imagine that anyone using this mech with this build automatically gets ranked as Elo 700 for playing this mech even if your normal ranking is 1700. That's something you can do with BV that you can't do with Elo.
This allows for a setup where good players can say I'm tired of using the best weapons and always fighting the best people. I think I'll use sub par weapons and fight aganist sub par players and still have fair matches.
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