50 replies to this topic

[Kristov Kerensky]

DaZur, on 15 June 2015 - 02:00 PM, said:

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.

I know, and it kills the game as far as I'm concerned because I can't get random drops with top players, which makes it difficult to actually get better.

Ah well, what can we do? Trophy crowd makes up the majority, and they cry way too much when they have to deal with people who are actually better, so we're stuck with what we got.

I do miss the games like BF2 and such, where I could go to the servers of the top teams and get real training and better myself, but that was another time, even though it was less than a decade ago. Which was as far away from the MW2/3/4 experience as this is to that, because in those you didn't have servers to drop in on and practice against the best.

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

Escef, on 15 June 2015 - 11:25 AM, said:

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.

It also doesn't take into account that mechs are not equal in terms of usefulness either. There are few truly awful mechs, like the SDR-5V. But there is a whole plethora of "not very good" mechs like the entire Awesome line up, the ballistic Vindi, and the Mist Lynx. MM doesn't differentiate between an Awesome and a Direwolf. Nor does it differentiate between a Direwolf and a Direwolf, and it shouldn't have to. But it would be nice if it took into account that I'm not going to carry in my Stock+ Awesome like I am in my Gigaspike Whale.

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. 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.

In theory. In reality, things rarely work like the theory behind them. MM doesn't account for guys like Soy that have higher Elo's that just want to derp about in queue.

But a huge myth about Elo is that it is meant to bring about a 50/50 Win/loss. The other myth about Elo is that it's a matchmaker. It's not, it's there to let you know how good you are in accordance with your competition. It's there to keep Magnus Carlson* from embarrassing Johnny Newkidontheblock in six moves (except when Johnny openly challenges Magnus).

In chess, where Elo is used and open to all to see, a 1300 is not even allowed to challenge a 2800. IIRC, you can only challenge players within 200 of your Player Rating (Elo).

MM in video games is the same way. It's there to keep some Underhiveling from having to fight Goldcloaks from the top of Mount Tryhard. They just do so at varying degrees and the hitch is that we can't challenge better players to climb the Elo ladder like they do in chess. We just have to take what MM gives us.

*Magnus Carlson has an FIDE PR(Elo) of 2876 with 267 wins to 77 losses.

Kristov Kerensky, on 15 June 2015 - 02:11 PM, said:

I know, and it kills the game as far as I'm concerned because I can't get random drops with top players, which makes it difficult to actually get better. Ah well, what can we do? Trophy crowd makes up the majority, and they cry way too much when they have to deal with people who are actually better, so we're stuck with what we got. I do miss the games like BF2 and such, where I could go to the servers of the top teams and get real training and better myself, but that was another time, even though it was less than a decade ago. Which was as far away from the MW2/3/4 experience as this is to that, because in those you didn't have servers to drop in on and practice against the best.

That's one of the reasons I like playing in the filthy, nasty, disgusting, meta infested comp scene in MWO. I get to regularly play/scrim against much better opponents. And my stats have soared from it.

The day I left ELP, my W/L was 0.78 and K/D was was 1.69.

Now my W/L is 1.55 and K/D is 2.28.

[El Bandito]

It takes a certain kind of player to be a dedicated pugger. Not every player can handle it. Some crack. They can't take it. They walk away and give up on solo-q forever.

Edited by El Bandito, 15 June 2015 - 03:02 PM.

[Ultimax]

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.

If the MM would at least grant some kind of Elo adjustment based on the mech you are playing instead of expecting you to carry all the scrubs in your un-basic'd crapmech then it might be a bit more palatable.





Would also be cool if it didn't like...put all the trollmandos and lolcusts onto one side as well either.

Something like this was on my team earlier tonight: http://mwo.smurfy-ne...d2f61529e6f1484

After I died I switched to spectate another player.

Who was in a similarly stupidly build TDK.

[Zordicron]

lordtzar, on 15 June 2015 - 10:12 AM, said:

I find that I'll win more matches by being super aggressive and carrying narc or BAP. I play scout/cat herder. Seems most of these pugs have no clue where the enemy is unless they can see red doritos.

Like one incident where a pirate's bane came into a clumped up group of at least 8 of us, and started circling a whale. The whale turned around and looked at us like "why you shoot meh" and the others had no idea what was happening, even while I was spamming AC rounds at the locust. I kept thinking any second now these guys are going to see the locust, laser death awaits this little locust. Some of my adder's UAC rounds hit the locust and he ****** off. I don't remember seeing anybody but me firing at him even once.

Conversely, if you have BAP and target an enemy the herd will wander in that red dorito's direction. Narc also works really well if you can nail something so that it looks like it's by itself so that even the cowardly ones go mine?mine?mine?mine? mode. They'll deathball in that direction almost without fail.

This story made me LOL. "CAN'T ANY OF YOU ******* SEE THAT LITTLE ***** RUNNING AROUND!! WHY DO YOU THINK I AM SHOOTING!!" Ahh, I know that feels.

I had a match on bog tonight, LOL, I mean, the team camped. And not like, in a good firing line position, on one of the staircases, with 4 flank approaches, in a giant blob on top of each other. enemy has like this one random FS9 running in circles in the open, and the team is attempting to track him. I turned to look behind me to see why they all stopped, it was like that GIF of the kittens all following the toy with their little heads....

team is trying to shoot the FS9, which must have been ROFL, and then..... i see a Trollmando with ECM, trying to sneak between the trees behind them. Call it out. Someone pops a UAV, moves off to the rear side.

Nothing. team is still fascinated with the squeeky mouse. THE ENTIRE ENEMY TEAM IN GIANT RED MEGABLOB shows up on radar. My entire team, minus 3 of us, vaporized in less then 45 seconds.

You run into this type of thing, you know MM was ******* with you. "Time to lose Eld.... LULZ"

the worst part is, the last 3-4 days, my ISP has been COMPLETE garbage, I am seeing 250MS of jitter ON TOP of my standard 180-250 ping. that's right, I see jitter between 150 and 500 Ping. HSR, pfffffffff...... so my contributions have been insufficient to even make the match look closer.

Like 500 PING? Visit Frontier Communication's Facebook page!

As for ELo as a match making tool, it would work IF:

We went back to much smaller team sizes, like 8 vs 8 or 4 vs 4.
We had a lot bigger population.

I would prefer the former, but PGI has bunk server hardware so far as I can tell. Adding more matches to it, not sure if capable. Still, averaging a 4 vs 4 in elo should make it turn out better skill match wise, and besides, then you would at worst have to only carry 3 players.

Current state? I dunno, maybe it doesnt even matter. the game can be so unpredictable for me so far as hit registration, sometimes it doesnt even matter if I am on a team of bads or not. If the 150 dmg I pump into the orange internals CT of a warhawk doesnt kill it, or even turn it red, who cares if I am going to win or lose the match, my score will be poor anyway and it wont show my skill level regardless.

[Kristov Kerensky]

Lord Scarlett, that's why I do CW really, it gives me the chance to go up against top players in an actual team atmosphere, and that's what I want. There's something really nice about dropping in as a PUG in CW and seeing that you've dropped against a 12 man of -MS- or -SA- or one of the other top teams. I know it'll PROBABLY be a total wash, but I know that I'll be doing my best the entire time, and I WILL make them pay for every death I have. And when we PUGs pull our **** together and the final score is 48-40 or 20-40 and they win due to objective destruction, that's an awesome feeling. We didn't win, but we made them hurt, bad, and that's something when you are just 12 random people facing a well trained and coordinated top comp team.

Sadly, it's not something the majority of the playerbase wants to do, so we end up with a MM that's using the only ranking system used by the 'Big Boys' in the PvP online world, Elo, which is so NOT made for groups, even 3v3 like LoL. It's a pure 1v1 ranking system, that's it, it's not adaptable to anything else despite constant attempts for years to do so by far better mathematicians then anyone PGI employs.

But that is the nature of the beast, we have to simply deal with it. Like El Bandito said, it takes a special type of player to keep doing the PUG life. I have to do it, it's part of my duties as Executive Officer of SRM to look for new blood, so PUGing is a given for me. Luckily I actually enjoy it MOST of the time, but there are days when I want to just reach through the internet and slap a mother's son.....ugh.

[Water Bear]

Lord Scarlett Johan, on 15 June 2015 - 02:48 PM, said:

In theory. In reality, things rarely work like the theory behind them. MM doesn't account for guys like Soy that have higher Elo's that just want to derp about in queue.

But a huge myth about Elo is that it is meant to bring about a 50/50 Win/loss.

The basic operation of Elo - which you can read a description of on Wikipedia and which can be summarized in 2 sentences - is that you gain points for beating players with a higher Elo than you and lose points for losing to a player with less Elo. To turn that into an algorithm, you adjust the points you receive / lose based on the size of the Elo difference. There are some other technical details to account for, but they don't matter for the purposes of this discussion.

The reason Elo is a useful system is exactly that such an algorithm should intuitively converge to a stable number for each player, and by definition two players of equal Elo aren't expect to beat each other with odds better than random chance - 50%.

The fact that algorithm is working is something you can verify for yourself. Except in extreme cases (such as the best players in a game, like the chess master you mentioned, the worst players in a game, or people new to the game), people who have an Elo that lots of players have, and hence can all be matched together whenever those players look for a game, should have about 50/50 win loss. Like me, and probably most people.

I will point out that when I started this game my W/L was probably noticeably above 50% since I played Unreal Tournament and Starcraft 2 at a moderately high level, but after my Elo adjusted up, I am now "average" among players at my Elo, as it should be. In other words my archived stats are better than my current ones, and for that reason.

[Mawai]

Kristov Kerensky, on 15 June 2015 - 02:11 PM, said:

I know, and it kills the game as far as I'm concerned because I can't get random drops with top players, which makes it difficult to actually get better.

Ah well, what can we do? Trophy crowd makes up the majority, and they cry way too much when they have to deal with people who are actually better, so we're stuck with what we got.

I do miss the games like BF2 and such, where I could go to the servers of the top teams and get real training and better myself, but that was another time, even though it was less than a decade ago. Which was as far away from the MW2/3/4 experience as this is to that, because in those you didn't have servers to drop in on and practice against the best.

Interesting viewpoint.

I would suggest that if you want to learn from "the best" that you join a competitive team that contains good players.

Random drops with random players in the PUG queue is rarely if ever going to give you the opportunity to play with better players whether it has an Elo matchmaker or not.

One part of what makes "good" players "good" is their ability to synergize and work well with a team. It is a team game. The best PUG queue players can take whatever sort of team the matchmaker gives them and try to make something out of it. They show good situational awareness, an ability to see what their fellow PUGs are about to do and either support it or perhaps head off that big mistake before it happens.

Honestly, that tactical level is really what the game is about. There is no real way to learn how to aim by watching someone else play. You already know to either aim for a vulnerable mech section where the armor has been stripped, a leg, the CT or where someone else on your team is aiming. It is better to focus fire down one opponent than to damage two.

This then brings us around to Elo matchmaking. On any team there will almost always be folks better than you. They don't need to be staggeringly better to learn from. If you can demonstrate the ability to learn from the folks you are playing with ... your level of play will rise and you will be in matches with ever better opponents. You don't need to be thrown into a match that you have no hope of winning against a half dozen folks that are so much better than you that it isn't worth your time playing.

You might have fun in that situation ... but most won't. They want to have fun while learning something ... which doesn't mean being either on a team that stomps or one that get stomps ... those games are pretty boring and uninteresting for both sides.

In fact, you will learn more facing opponents that are in your skill range (since it includes some better players) than you would stomping a team of much weaker players ... and with a random matchmaker that is what you might get.

[Xmith]

DaZur, on 15 June 2015 - 02:00 PM, said:

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.

Huh? I Play to win every match. I play to win in any team based game. It's my competitive nature from playing team sports most of my life. I can't help. It's like... breathing.

[DaZur]

Xmith, on 16 June 2015 - 01:39 PM, said:

Huh? I Play to win every match. I play to win in any team based game. It's my competitive nature from playing team sports most of my life. I can't help. It's like... breathing.

No doubt that you do play to win. That said, even when you personally play to win, the rest of your team might not... And by that you lose even when you believe you should win.

[Kristov Kerensky]

Mawai, I am the Executive Officer of Shadow Rat's Marauders, as my sig indicates, and have been the XO since 1999 for MW games and even some other games over the past decade+, so I'm not really interested in joining another team. I drop solo PUG because it's part of my duties as XO to look for potential recruits, part of the job I enjoy mostly, hate some days, PUG Life...

Lower level players aren't something I actually want to face all the time, matter of fact, 1 in 10 would be pushing it for me. I'd much rather face my betters the other 9 drops. I really don't get better facing my equals, I already know this, I get better facing my betters, as they force me to perform higher and harder than my equals do, and unless I'm doing that, I don't get better.

I do get to face my betters in CW, and that's probably the ONLY reason I still do CW drops, as they are otherwise a waste of time. I make more cbills, xp and gxp doing non-CW drops in less time. Taking a planet in CW gives me absolutely nothing in terms of rewards or incentives. And until there's something INVOLVED in CW, most of SRM isn't interested in it at all, we're a planetary conquest oriented team, tactics and strats for long term large scale planetary combat is our thing, we're really good at it, logistics and all that fun stuff, we love that. And CW right now is just team death match with limited respawns that doesn't pay as well for the time as non-CW does, so...

I've been playing online games for 20+ years, and most of that time, I had to start off facing better players and getting my ass stomped into the dirt until I could hold my own. That was the standard from the early days of online gaming and still is for most games, seems that MWO has a very special class of players though, players who think facing your betters is wrong and a punishment. They raise hell about it constantly, with the constant stream of 'groups are ruining the game' 'I'm tired of getting stomped' and so forth. If you are in the group que, WTBF do you expect to face but groups? And if your drop was a stomp, odds are the teams were actually very evenly matched, the other team just happened to take advantage of the first presented opening and with equal teams, that means a stomp happens very quickly. That's actually how evenly skilled teams work in a game of this sort, loss of 1 man quickly snowballs because more fire can be focused on the next guy and so on down the line.

PGI is catering to the participation trophy crowd, fact, because there's a lot more of them than any other type of player. I hate it, drives me up the effing wall, but I understand why they do it and applaud it for the commercially smart decision it is. It still sucks, and I wish they'd give us more options when it comes to who we face in random drops skill level wise, but I realize that's not going to happen.

Hopefully they'll actually give us what they promised with CW and I can avoid the non-CW ques except for when required by my duties as XO. I'll get to face my betters more often at that point, since we're a Merc unit and we can always get a contract where ever the top teams are. Till then, I'm just playing because it's Mechs and they are my first true love for online gaming.