50 replies to this topic

[Burktross]

Water Bear, on 15 June 2015 - 10:40 AM, said:

Edit: I realized something and changed my mind.

If you are "above the bads, but below the goods that my ELO places me with," then it sounds like you have converged to your true Elo, up to whatever range the Matchmaker tolerates. I'm not sure I see how that's some kind of hell.

Hell is mediocre.
Join the "decent" club

[Jman5]

The mistake people make about their Elo is that they make it all about others instead of themselves. Everyone gets their fair share of duds. What makes your Elo go up is whether or not you can persevere despite the sh*t sandwich matchmaker just handed you.

The question you need to be asking yourself is this. "What did higher Elo player do in the past to carry these jokers to victory?"

My humble suggestion is to always remember that the more damage you do, the less damage your scrublord team needs to do in order to win. And just as importantly, the faster you do it, the less damage the enemy can do to your scrublord team.

[DaZur]

Stefka Kerensky, on 15 June 2015 - 10:31 AM, said:

Classifing players by elo (so they can amuse matches more, as they, supposedly, are going to play with similar skilled players) I think is something that comes from T-Ball generation.

Never ever played mechwarrior or battletech with a elo system before, and never felt the need to have elo.

Throw elo MM away.

While I agree with you... It's in place because so many in the player-base demanded insulation from the big-bad comp players because they're scary and they don't play well with others...

My skill level and proficiency as a player will increase from continually playing against equal or lesser opponents - Said no one ever.

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

Soy, on 15 June 2015 - 09:56 AM, said:

Fail Whale story

That reminds me of when I want to play my Stock+ AWS-8Q.

MM: "Oh? You're in your assault mech? Must be your Carry Whale."

Me: "Wat is going on? We just got rolled..."

MM: "Wow, you did bad in your Carry Whale, maybe it was just a fluke."

*3 hours later of mostly losses*

MM: "You've gotten bad with your Carry Whale."

Me: "I'm not in my Carry Whale, I'm in my Awesome!"

MM: "Oh, such a shame. Maybe you should bring your Carry Whale."

Me: "..."

[C E Dwyer]

I do notice it a lot the last few weeks.

As I've mention this week in whine thread.

One Match I'm in games with fellow forum warriors, and know there are good people around me that will attack and play a good game and I can be bold with it.

The next I end up with, well they are less stellar lets put it that way.

It confuses the hell out of me

[Kristov Kerensky]

DaZur, on 15 June 2015 - 10:57 AM, said:

While I agree with you... It's in place because so many in the player-base demanded insulation from the big-bad comp players because they're scary and they don't play well with others...

My skill level and proficiency as a player will increase from continually playing against equal or lesser opponents - Said no one ever.

This, very much this, you do NOT get better playing your lessors OR equals, you get better playing your superiors. From elementary school sports through professional sports this holds true and always has.

I LIKE seeing the top comp tags in my drops, it usually means I've gotten dropped with people who are better than me, usually but not always. Those tend to be the most fun for me, I have to really be on the ball more and do my best.

Other times, seeing lots of no tag/no icon players, I know it's a lower skill MM laugh, I'll be able to jack around and we'll still get a win if I don't totally derp out, which I freely admit I do at times.

The MM was put in because this game had NOTHING to balance out a drop, you could drop with 8 Assaults vs 8 Lights as easily as 8 mediums on both teams. MM was put in using Elo and we had no tonnage included, so it was still fubar with 8 Assaults vs 8 Lights. Tonnage and MM were finally combined and we get..oddly enough, LOTS more stomps than previously. I can do for hours and get 12-0 wins then go for hours and get 0-12 losses. Back before the MM and Elo, I didn't go hours with wins or losses, it was always a back and forth thing. Elo actually seems to cause a lot more stomps then it prevents, at least that's MY perception of it, and I am definitely not alone in that perception.

Previous MW titles didn't use any rankings because previous MW titles weren't designed for online play, it was an addon after thought and left TOTALLY up to the players to decide who they dropped with, remember? You didn't open a server and people just joined, you didn't log into the Zone and just jump into a drop, you got on, you found other players and the GROUP would decide to drop together. PGI is having to create an actual online system that's never existed for a MW title, and since there really aren't ANY ranking systems designed for team play, they are using the only thing that's got a record and anything to back it up mathmatically, Elo. Yeah, it sucks for teams, everyone from MicroSoft to Blizzard knows that and has proven it, but it's still the only thing out there.

And lets face it, TOO many people in online gaming are participation trophy crowd players, we see it constantly on these forums and ingame. They flat out REFUSE to play anyone better than them, and they pitch a fit whenever they lose REGARDLESS of why. This is the reality of online gaming today, from MWO to WoW to LoL to BF4/CoD, you see it constantly. Wait till this game hits Steam....

[Sir Wulfrick]

DaZur, on 15 June 2015 - 10:03 AM, said:

My Elo musing?

Like that sinking feeling in your stomach when your significant other responds to your query of how does she feel with a curt "fine"... One needs to recognize and embrace that gut feeling one gets when they drop into a match and you just know it's a Elo game.

This made me laugh. One of those moments when you have to put down the computer and silently ponder what you've done, usually without even being aware of it...

[Escef]

Lord Scarlett Johan, on 15 June 2015 - 11:02 AM, said:

That reminds me of when I want to play my Stock+ AWS-8Q.

MM: "Oh? You're in your assault mech? Must be your Carry Whale."

Me: "Wat is going on? We just got rolled..."

MM: "Wow, you did bad in your Carry Whale, maybe it was just a fluke."

*3 hours later of mostly losses*

MM: "You've gotten bad with your Carry Whale."

Me: "I'm not in my Carry Whale, I'm in my Awesome!"

MM: "Oh, such a shame. Maybe you should bring your Carry Whale."

Me: "..."

It's funny, but I was just mentioning the issues of ELO being weight class dependant on my stream this morning. For example, as far as MWO's ELO system is concerned, my performance in Light Show (400XL laser-boat Battlemaster) and Skuld (2xAC20 King Crab) should be the same, despite the fact that one is a super-heavy skirmisher and the other is a brawler, and therefor play nothing alike.

[Mercules]

Elo MM doesn't try to give you a 50/50 win/loss. All the MM does it try to give you closely balanced matches then determine which team might win so it knows how to adjust your Elo at the end. That means you could literally be assigned to a team that is set to lose 100 times in a row. It's unlikely, but with randomness thrown in it could happen.


In addition, because most of you can't bother to take 10 minutes to wait for a match the MM loosens up and starts allowing worse and worse matchups to occur the longer it takes to make a match. Pretty soon you have top end players and Mr."I don't know which way my feet are pointing." in the same match because there were not enough light players queued up of the right Elo so it just kept expanding it's search.


Remember that when the que is %54 Heavies and you decide you will drop in a Heavy anyway.

[Tiamat of the Sea]

Stefka Kerensky, on 15 June 2015 - 10:53 AM, said:

My point is that rolf stomps happen, and if they happen it's not the end of the world.

T-Ball generation guys want elo system because they feel the need to have a possibility.

Instead, imo, my skills improve only when I meet better pilots than me, watching well how they pilot. I don't care if I get stomped.

Personally, I'm in a weird in-between position.

I absolutely don't mind playing people better than me, but. If the people I'm playing against are too much better or I die to sudden ambush, I consider that useless. If you get stomped super-quick, you just don't have time to learn anything about what you need to change. If your first mistake is your last mistake for the match, no matter the contest, no matter whether or not it's a game, you learn virtually nothing.

That said, as much as it frustrates me to wind up in dire outmatches, I simply am not going to let that stop me. Which is why it annoys the hell out of me when I'm dropping with people, the others in my group see a comp team, and immediately they just... give up. "Well, we're gonna get stomped." Aaaaagh, that drives me nuts.

[Water Bear]

Burktross, on 15 June 2015 - 10:54 AM, said:

Hell is mediocre.
Join the "decent" club

Your Elo goes up when you beat someone with a higher Elo than you and it goes down when you beat someone with a lower Elo. Assuming this scheme naturally converges (with various features to make it a real algorithm), after you've played long enough your Elo converges to a number that represents your true skill level.

If your Elo isn't changing much over time, then you are going to be in between the extremes that the match maker uses. This is true of everyone, regardless of what their actual Elo number is. Everyone is mediocre in this sense after playing this game for a sufficiently long time.

For example after my Elo has converged, whether I regularly play against members of Lords or whatever the heck or regularly play against monkeys, I am "in the middle" of the range of the matchmaker allows me to live in.

And anyway, even if you think your skill level is only mediocre in any sense, that's 1) not the matchmaker's fault, nor that of the Elo system and 2) is not really a bad thing in a video game, depending on what's important to you.

Not to get all day-time television on your ass, but we can only play to be the best that we can be, to be the best that our abilities and training allow. Pursue your best, even if your best is average.

[Escef]

Mercules, on 15 June 2015 - 11:35 AM, said:

Elo MM doesn't try to give you a 50/50 win/loss. All the MM does it try to give you closely balanced matches then determine which team might win so it knows how to adjust your Elo at the end. That means you could literally be assigned to a team that is set to lose 100 times in a row. It's unlikely, but with randomness thrown in it could happen.

In theory, if MM is working properly with an adequate population to support it, a 50/50 W/L ratio would be a side effect. IIRC, TPTB have stated that the variance from average Elo on most teams is under 100, and that in some extreme cases has been in the neighborhood of 150. Now, Elo generally assumes a baseline of 1200. So, here's the thing to keep in mind, however good you think you are, the odds of you being more than 200 points better than the worst guy on your team is small, and the difference being 300 or more is really slim. If you are seeing completely new guys, guess what? Your Elo score is most likely less than 1500, probably less than 1400. If you have an Elo score of 1600, you would almost never see someone with a score lower than 1300 on your team, and usually at least 1400.

In short, you (in the general sense "you", not anyone specifically) probably aren't as good as you think you are. And those guys on your team probably aren't as bad as you think they are.

[Kristov Kerensky]

Quickdraw Crobat, on 15 June 2015 - 11:38 AM, said:

Personally, I'm in a weird in-between position.

I absolutely don't mind playing people better than me, but. If the people I'm playing against are too much better or I die to sudden ambush, I consider that useless. If you get stomped super-quick, you just don't have time to learn anything about what you need to change. If your first mistake is your last mistake for the match, no matter the contest, no matter whether or not it's a game, you learn virtually nothing.

That said, as much as it frustrates me to wind up in dire outmatches, I simply am not going to let that stop me. Which is why it annoys the hell out of me when I'm dropping with people, the others in my group see a comp team, and immediately they just... give up. "Well, we're gonna get stomped." Aaaaagh, that drives me nuts.

I feel that that attitude is wrong, you can ALWAYS learn from your loses, regardless of how quickly they happened. When I was first starting to get into martial arts, I'd step on the mat for sparing with people who'd been at it for years and I'd get taken down so fast I didn't SEE what happened, but the person who'd just taken me down would ask me, 'what did you do wrong?' and I would have to stop and THINK about what just happened and realize my mistake, even if it was just 'I'm not ready to face you yet, my skills aren't good enough'. I was 6 when I started in martial arts and I was able to learn that lesson at that young age, why can people who should be at least twice that age NOT understand it?

After you get taken out in MWO you can spectate and watch the rest of the players, something a lot of people don't bother with. I ALWAYS do it, because I want to know what I did wrong, or what the other guy/team did right, because sometimes you didn't do anything wrong, the other guy/team was luckier than you. Most of the time, I see my mistake wasn't a mistake, it was simply the other guy/team getting lucky, but when it was a mistake on my part, I can hopefully see what it was and learn to not repeat it. That's really all getting better is, learning what NOT to do and making sure you don't do that again repeatedly, so that what you DO do is the right thing more often than not.

Going up against people who aren't my equals is a waste, going up against my equals isn't a total waste but it really doesn't make me better. To be better I need to face my superiors so I can learn what not to do in more situations. Sometimes my superiors are so far beyond me that I will only learn that I am not ready to face them yet, but I have STILL learned something very important, MY OWN LEVEL OF ABILITY. People too often think they are far better than they really are, that's a fact that multiple studies have documented. We NEED to be reminded of that fact once in a while with a good swift ass kicking.

Escef, Russ has stated that the MM is usually within a 100 points, but it has strayed over 1000 at times, so when I'm seeing EmP and people who are literally dropping for the first time, guess what, I am NOT seeing people who aren't that much different in skills from myself, there is a huge gap taking place sometimes in the solo que, even Russ has admitted it, although he pretty much brushed it off as so rare as to not be noticable, despite the fact that PGI has noticed it.

Edited by Kristov Kerensky, 15 June 2015 - 11:55 AM.

[Mercules]

Escef, on 15 June 2015 - 11:50 AM, said:

In theory, if MM is working properly with an adequate population to support it, a 50/50 W/L ratio would be a side effect.

There isn't an adequate pool to draw from. Remember, match making can't go very long or people complain so what we are talking about is the MM trying to make a match from a pool of people who happened to click 'ready' in the last few minutes. How many people is that even in prime time?

[Escef]

Mercules, on 15 June 2015 - 11:55 AM, said:

There isn't an adequate pool to draw from. Remember, match making can't go very long or people complain so what we are talking about is the MM trying to make a match from a pool of people who happened to click 'ready' in the last few minutes. How many people is that even in prime time?

In prime time? Who knows? Probably somewhere upwards of 1000, but that's just a guess. It could be higher, but I doubt it is much lower. I livestream at off-peak hours (5:30 AM to 8 or 9 AM, US East coast), and I will see several names repeatedly, and dozens of names I don't recognize. So, I could guess when I'm doing my show there's at least a few hundred on.

Part of the MM's problem is that we give it hoops to jump through (3x4 weight class distribution), which can really hurt match quality as lights are frequently less than 15% of the queue.

[Escef]

Kristov Kerensky, on 15 June 2015 - 11:55 AM, said:

Escef, Russ has stated that the MM is usually within a 100 points, but it has strayed over 1000 at times, ...

1000 is a stupidly high gap, and one that I expect (and hope) is exceedingly rare. Unfortunately, I doubt any of us is going to be privy to exact numbers (though I wager PGI has all of the number crunching done and on file, and constantly updated).

[Mcgral18]

Jman5, on 15 June 2015 - 10:54 AM, said:

The mistake people make about their Elo is that they make it all about others instead of themselves. Everyone gets their fair share of duds. What makes your Elo go up is whether or not you can persevere despite the sh*t sandwich matchmaker just handed you.

The question you need to be asking yourself is this. "What did higher Elo player do in the past to carry these jokers to victory?"

My humble suggestion is to always remember that the more damage you do, the less damage your scrublord team needs to do in order to win. And just as importantly, the faster you do it, the less damage the enemy can do to your scrublord team.

Generally, you'd think killing half the team and dealing 1100+ damage would be enough.

Sometimes, yes it is. Only good match in a Myth Lynx, due to the less than stellar teams, both of them. XL AC5 hunchbacks supported this victory.


Not too many sub 200 damage players; only 2 on our side and 4 on theirs, as opposed to the half of both you often see. Only 1 assault really pulled his weight; of eight, that's not very good.

Now, I'm almost certain my Assault Elo is higher than my Lights; I barely play the latter, while the Banshee alone has over 1k drops.

Oddly, similar result, different outcome.


You'll notice there were 2 Assault, of 8, who did anything this round. One per team.
There were 4 sub-200 on their team to our 6 sub 200 (the typical half).

I've gotten 1400 damage, hitting their entire team, and still lost. Though, apparently since I got the Killing Blow on this one more than those, it's supposedly worth more.


Sometimes the carry required by the MM is too much; not enough ammo or heatsinks can possibly be mounted to carry that much. You'll get swarmed in a 4+ VS 1 fight because half the team did less than 200 damage, dying too early due to poor positioning or RNGeesus deciding that headshot was a 1 shot (yes, crit system allows for that, as do the AC35s from the sky).

Lighter mechs are better off in that one regard, that they can run and cool off, while Assaults are stuck to stay and fight, limited by their heat and/or ammo.


In the end; there's only one thing you can do. Wub things until they die, then repeat. Sacrifice mechs in the name of RNGeesus, and hope for the best. Hope your team has fewer mechs being levelled (10% slower, 20% hotter, half as agile, etc...) and the MM gods don't betray you.

[Water Bear]

Mercules, on 15 June 2015 - 11:55 AM, said:

There isn't an adequate pool to draw from. Remember, match making can't go very long or people complain so what we are talking about is the MM trying to make a match from a pool of people who happened to click 'ready' in the last few minutes. How many people is that even in prime time?

He already said that the range is reported to be within +-100. Depending on the magnitude of the numbers, you should expect to see your win loss tend to 50% after a long time, yes even in the real world. Looking at mine, it's 54% win, 46% loss and I've played more than 3000 games. Seems to be working as intended.

[C E Dwyer]

just to add this is my win/lose scores I'll let you do the math if your want %

2,212 / 2,026

[DaZur]

Kristov Kerensky, on 15 June 2015 - 11:18 AM, said:

I LIKE seeing the top comp tags in my drops, it usually means I've gotten dropped with people who are better than me, usually but not always. Those tend to be the most fun for me, I have to really be on the ball more and do my best.

Problem is we have to deal with the "everybody needs to win" mentality that is so prevalent... There is a faction of our community that expects to win even when they don't necessarily deserve to.

How do you combat the need to hand everyone a trophy to keep them playing and invested?

There was a time when PC games were challenging and finding the solution / tactics was the reward.

Edited by DaZur, 15 June 2015 - 02:01 PM.