29 replies to this topic

[Electron Junkie]

That is all carry on.

[Tarogato]

Define "Elo Hell" and why do you think you're dealing with it right now?

[Electron Junkie]

10 matches less than 200dmg and zero kills... Why the hell am I dropping against the 228 crew???

Edited by Electron Junkie, 30 May 2015 - 04:24 PM.

[o0Marduk0o]

Group queue?

[Electron Junkie]

Nope, solo... I am just convinced PGI hates me lol.

[Mazzyplz]

have had similar experience this event;

it's not so much that the enemy team is all jumping with erppc panthers that are impossible to hit

my teams since friday seems like just downloaded the game on thursday - the quality of my teams has decreased 200%
at the beginning of a match you can tell wether it's going to be bad when they all run different directions and more than half camps the low ground

i managed to complete the event in about 4-5 hours on friday, but for my last 3 matches, and from then on... it's been really bad

i am thinking of not playing until monday

[Nightshade24]

Electron Junkie, on 30 May 2015 - 04:23 PM, said:

10 matches less than 200dmg and zero kills... Why the hell am I dropping against the 228 crew???

o0Marduk0o, on 30 May 2015 - 04:42 PM, said:

Group queue?

For me it's 228's every time. Which I kinda hate as this weekend specifically I am playing with new players trying to help them play... and when 228 is on the enemy it's kinda hard to persuade the friend the game is still good when your entire team keeps dying in 2-3 minutes, while when playing with them, you have to drop every tactic you know and simply leeroy it. because any caution is a lost of time damaging and kill assisting.

Not that there is anything wrong with them. Quite nice bunch of people and they are quite skillful, but I kinda feel that this gmae shouldn't really do 5 people+ in normal matches or 9+ in CW. (I believe due to normal dropship standards in BT, most merc groups drop 1, 4, or 8 people at a time, 12 should be reserved for defending a planet your unit owns)

[Void Angel]

Er, that's not really correct. Individual dropship capacities vary - the Overlord class 'Mech transport dropship can land an entire battalion.

[Mazzyplz]

i managed to alleviate my team problem by picking a non-support mech and going for the individual kill.

support mechs don't work when team doesn't play ball



also - pinpoint can actually hit poptarts if you land the shot.
holding pulses on a hovering target is a fool's errand

Edited by Mazzyplz, 30 May 2015 - 06:29 PM.

[Wildstreak]

My ELO seems fine. I either get a good game or one where allies just walk right into my line of fire just like usual.

[ShinVector]

Wildstreak, on 30 May 2015 - 08:12 PM, said:

My ELO seems fine. I either get a good game or one where allies just walk right into my line of fire just like usual.

If you Win/Loss ratio is >1... MM says you are in the WRONG !!
'Here some bad match ups for the LOLs'

[Mazzyplz]

ShinVector, on 30 May 2015 - 08:26 PM, said:

If you Win/Loss ratio is >1... MM says you are in the WRONG !!
'Here some bad match ups for the LOLs'

i am pretty sure that's more than just a myth

i think the Matchmaker gives you teams that are more and more wet behind the ears as your winloss climbs until it's basically forced back down this way

at least in pugs... there is a lot of debate around this, but it seems that matchmaker doesn't actually build fair fights - they just put you in random fights that they expect you to either win or lose and if you challenge their assumption they adjust your score that way

[ShinVector]

Mazzyplz, on 30 May 2015 - 08:31 PM, said:

i am pretty sure that's more than just a myth

i think the Matchmaker gives you teams that are more and more wet behind the ears as your winloss climbs until it's basically forced back down this way

at least in pugs... there is a lot of debate around this, but it seems that matchmaker doesn't actually build fair fights - they just put you in random fights that they expect you to either win or lose and if you challenge their assumption they adjust your score that way

Uhhh... I don't get you.. ELO's primary source of calculation value is win/loss to be more exact the odds or winning and losing..
It should be relative to win/loss ratio most of the time...

ELO can only build fair fights. when there are enough of people in the same ELO bracket... Else... It is ELO hell for someone.

[Mazzyplz]

i think that's the problem, when there aren't enough people - it will put you in a fight it knows you will lose.

that's how the matchmaker works; if the matchmaker expects you to lose, and you lose - it doesn't change your elo.
if it expects you to win and you win, it doesn't change your elo.
\
if it expects you to lose and you win, it bumps your elo.

at least that's what i gather from listening to russ and the playerbase and the feel i get from playing

also, no - it doesn't really make fair fights. how do you explain pug matches with people just earning their cadet bonus paired up vs veterans? if elo could only make fair fights that would not happen.
i get that new players haven't had their elo upper or lowered and that it takes some time, but it's got to be something more than that given how frequently this happens

[Tarl Cabot]

The MM, iirc, is primed off the first person's Elo it queues up then starts filling both teams. Is it one side then the next side?(/hugs) Depending on who is available in the queue, it will spread its range to fill the team when needed.

Other thing to remember is a player's Elo is not affected by the CW drops. Play just barely enough in the normal queue to get some things done then spend the rest of the time in CW drops. And if unit members drop in the same group, pretty sure most of the time there is communication. Most PUGs can do ok as long as there are a few who will actually take the lead. And not all of them need to follow the directions, especially if the other team is not even talking.

Just from observation but lots of posts where players gripe about Elo or their PUG teams simply do so when those teams do not act as a team, and generally a team which no one stepped up to the plate while their opponent may very well had one or a few step up and provide direction and/or simply communicated among themselves.

[Void Angel]

Mazzyplz, on 30 May 2015 - 08:31 PM, said:

i am pretty sure that's more than just a myth

i think the Matchmaker gives you teams that are more and more wet behind the ears as your winloss climbs until it's basically forced back down this way

at least in pugs... there is a lot of debate around this, but it seems that matchmaker doesn't actually build fair fights - they just put you in random fights that they expect you to either win or lose and if you challenge their assumption they adjust your score that way

No, it's a total myth. It's a common misconception that Elo (not an acronym) tries to move you to a 1/1 win/loss ratio. That's not correct - Elo doesn't care if you win or lose. It does not care what your win/loss ratio is. What Elo cares about is whether or not you are winning as much as it thinks you're supposed to win. So if you win a match against total scrubs, your rating would move very little - if at all. And Elo is fine with that. Elo only adjusts your rating significantly (if at all, depending on the system) if you're winning or losing more than it thinks you should. Otherwise, if you're at the 75% of the player base, and getting matched with a random distribution of players, you would be expected to win 75% of the time, overall - math people will notice that I'm drastically simplifying, but this is accurate as far as it goes. The system works well enough with the middle range of Elo ratings, but as you raise yourself higher and higher in the rankings the pool of people you have to play against that are near your own rating gets smaller... causing longer wait times.

This is where teams come into play. Because the upper ranges of Elo rankings were simply unable to get matches, the Devs had to tinker with release valves in the acceptable range of ratings. So when you get matched up, you can have people who are dramatically more or less skilled than some other players - and they're only matched based on the teams average Elo. Thus, you can have teams where very high-Elo players are matched with total newbies and placed against a team of solidly middle-range enemies. Sometimes, this works out well for the high-range players, and sometimes not.

The trouble is - and here's where the myth comes from - that it's hard to really tell where your teammates actually belong on the Elo scale. First off, the difficulty curve of MWO looks more like a plotting of the Mandelbrot Set - in 3D. There are many skill sets in MWO that players who have favored one style of play may be lacking on other skills: a dedicated gauss sniper may not brawl well; a light pilot may be great at dismembering larger opponents, but have a more difficult time dogfighting other lights. People may be playing new chassis, trying new playstyles, or maybe they just LRM-boated themselves into their current Elo rating and are now trying to adjust to using real weapons.

Add in people's tendency to remember extraordinary events, and you have the makings of the myth that Elo will punish you for "winning too much." Players remember when they do 1000 damage and still lose the match; they don't remember the times when they went head to head with the enemy team and had a close match quite so well - even though both of those results could come from lopsided teams. Then there's cumulative focus fire, player mistakes, etc, etc. When players perform poorly on our team, we remember it, and it's easy to attribute it to low Elo. And when so many players say "Elo is based on KDR" as shorthand for what Elo actually does, the total fabrication that Elo will match you with bad players to bring your KDR down seems plausible - instead of the errant fantasy that it actually is.

These kinds of matches don't happen often in the solo queue. But when they happen, we remember them - and they do tend to happen to higher Elo players more frequently.

[Mazzyplz]

Void Angel, on 30 May 2015 - 09:43 PM, said:

No, it's a total myth. It's a common misconception that Elo (not an acronym) tries to move you to a 1/1 win/loss ratio. That's not correct - Elo doesn't care if you win or lose. It does not care what your win/loss ratio is. What Elo cares about is whether or not you are winning as much as it thinks you're supposed to win. So if you win a match against total scrubs, your rating would move very little - if at all. And Elo is fine with that. Elo only adjusts your rating significantly (if at all, depending on the system) if you're winning or losing more than it thinks you should. Otherwise, if you're at the 75% of the player base, and getting matched with a random distribution of players, you would be expected to win 75% of the time, overall - math people will notice that I'm drastically simplifying, but this is accurate as far as it goes. The system works well enough with the middle range of Elo ratings, but as you raise yourself higher and higher in the rankings the pool of people you have to play against that are near your own rating gets smaller... causing longer wait times.

This is where teams come into play. Because the upper ranges of Elo rankings were simply unable to get matches, the Devs had to tinker with release valves in the acceptable range of ratings. So when you get matched up, you can have people who are dramatically more or less skilled than some other players - and they're only matched based on the teams average Elo. Thus, you can have teams where very high-Elo players are matched with total newbies and placed against a team of solidly middle-range enemies. Sometimes, this works out well for the high-range players, and sometimes not.

The trouble is - and here's where the myth comes from - that it's hard to really tell where your teammates actually belong on the Elo scale. First off, the difficulty curve of MWO looks more like a plotting of the Mandelbrot Set - in 3D. There are many skill sets in MWO that players who have favored one style of play may be lacking on other skills: a dedicated gauss sniper may not brawl well; a light pilot may be great at dismembering larger opponents, but have a more difficult time dogfighting other lights. People may be playing new chassis, trying new playstyles, or maybe they just LRM-boated themselves into their current Elo rating and are now trying to adjust to using real weapons.

Add in people's tendency to remember extraordinary events, and you have the makings of the myth that Elo will punish you for "winning too much." Players remember when they do 1000 damage and still lose the match; they don't remember the times when they went head to head with the enemy team and had a close match quite so well - even though both of those results could come from lopsided teams. Then there's cumulative focus fire, player mistakes, etc, etc. When players perform poorly on our team, we remember it, and it's easy to attribute it to low Elo. And when so many players say "Elo is based on KDR" as shorthand for what Elo actually does, the total fabrication that Elo will match you with bad players to bring your KDR down seems plausible - instead of the errant fantasy that it actually is.

These kinds of matches don't happen often in the solo queue. But when they happen, we remember them - and they do tend to happen to higher Elo players more frequently.

that sounds about right.

well it seems my idea was wrong, but the effects are similar some of the time at least

[Void Angel]

They can seem to be. But it's really got very little to do with the matchmaker, and almost nothing to do with Elo itself. It's just too complicated to assign such a simple explanation, even though we like our explanations pared down with Occam's Razor. I honestly think that the biggest factor is that the game's difficulty curve looks like this:


...and that we remember extraordinarily bad/good matches more readily than the merely expected.

[Idealsuspect]

Electron Junkie, on 30 May 2015 - 04:43 PM, said:

Nope, solo... I am just convinced PGI hates me lol.

With this sort of event lots of group players play in solo for face some unexperimented pilots and for play more than if they were in group also get good place in leaderboard xD.

[Nightshade24]

Void Angel, on 30 May 2015 - 06:10 PM, said:

Er, that's not really correct. Individual dropship capacities vary - the Overlord class 'Mech transport dropship can land an entire battalion.

Yes, but the overlord was quite expensive to operate and run for a regular merc unit. Try thinking back to the earlier MW games... notice the fact that the dropships often dropping you are...
And notice how the overlord dropship is often very rare in all 4 titles.