43 replies to this topic

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

Im seeing games nowadays that are nothing but massive blowout after blowout. Was THAT the plan for elo or is it turned off?

[Darian DelFord]

ELO Does not Matter in a E-Sports Oriented Game.


Russ's line of thinking

[Goose]

There's a massive ammout of ECM new 'Mechs running around, reshaping the logistic curve, so it stands to reason even the games where the release valves don't pop, games are bad.

Edited by Goose, 15 August 2015 - 01:25 PM.

[Darian DelFord]

Games have been "Off" Since they based ELO on your W/L record and NOT piloted mech abilities

[Xetelian]

Most matches are blowouts. 90% of my pug queue matches or more end in 12 - 3 or less.

Actually having a close match is a rarity for the vast majority.

If you're someone who is having close games more often than blowouts and steamrolls you're either a liar or in a very strange elo.

[ScarecrowES]

Russ and the PGI team have gone on record and said quite emphatically that Elo just doesn't work for MWO. In fact, Elo's system was never intended to judge the skill of individual players on a team. It's not actually capable of doing that. Russ said they're dropping Elo and going to a proper skill-based ranking system sometime in the "near" future.

Until then, please try to understand that, as implemented in MWO, for players who largely play public solo queue, their Elo scores are effectively random. Further, Matchmaking only tries to make a team's cumulative score roughly equal to the other team's cumulative Elo score. Thus, it's possible to have players with very high Elo and very low Elo on the same team. As a result, it's possible to have one team consist of 4 great players and 8 terrible players, with the other team consisting of 12 average or better players. Guess which on is going to win? So yeah, effectively even team make-up by balanced Elo scores is a totally random thing.

[Nightmare1]

They ought to just go with some variant of the battle value system...

[ScarecrowES]

Nightmare1, on 15 August 2015 - 04:00 PM, said:

They ought to just go with some variant of the battle value system...

That works for balancing team mech composition, but not pilot skill. I think we could argue successfully that a great player in a bad mech will easily beat a bad player in an awesome mech, ton for ton.

There are already a lot of proper skill systems out there, and MWO already tracks the sorts of stats in-game that it'd need to to utilize such a system. Battlefield's system is probably the current gold standard, and an adaptation of that would work wonders for MWO.

[Deathlike]

Darian DelFord, on 15 August 2015 - 01:26 PM, said:

Games have been "Off" Since they based ELO on your W/L record and NOT piloted mech abilities

I think you're misunderstanding of Elo here is problematic.

The premise of Elo is simply this.

If you play against a stronger opponent and win, you gain quite a bit of Elo.

If you play against a stronger opponent and lose, you lose a little bit of Elo.

If you play against a weaker opponent and win, you gain a little bit of Elo.

If you play against a weaker opponent and lose, you lose quite a bit of Elo.

It's about who you play... so in the usual Chess analogy.. if you played against some Chess master.. losing to him won't make you gain Elo.. you'll gain quite a bit of Elo as you beat many Chess masters over time.

If you're losing to newbie chess players, maybe you're just not that good (and you'll lose Elo as a consequence).

The thing is, there is a flawed construction on how teams are made, as they are based on an AVERAGE sum of Elo (or total Elo, whichever is easier for you to understand).

So, a high Elo player will often get lumped with lower Elo players, and thus causes imbalances vs a group that has the same relative Elo.

In theory though... ASSUMING that the players don't totally derp (which happens ALL THE TIME in PUG Life™), the more players on a team that win more than they lose, regardless of opfor construction, you'll be winning more and gaining Elo. It's really as a simple as that.

Edited by Deathlike, 15 August 2015 - 04:34 PM.

[Nightmare1]

ScarecrowES, on 15 August 2015 - 04:06 PM, said:

That works for balancing team mech composition, but not pilot skill. I think we could argue successfully that a great player in a bad mech will easily beat a bad player in an awesome mech, ton for ton.

There are already a lot of proper skill systems out there, and MWO already tracks the sorts of stats in-game that it'd need to to utilize such a system. Battlefield's system is probably the current gold standard, and an adaptation of that would work wonders for MWO.

Yeah, there isn't really a way to balance skill easily though.

I noticed that Ghost Recon: Phantoms does a decent job of it. The game has a battlevalue system similar to BattleTech called the "Athena" system. Your loadout and your skill (elo) together contribute to your Athena Ranking. The game then matches you to other, similarly ranked players. It's not perfect, but I've seen the quality of my matches improve since it was introduced. PGI should investigate something similar for MWO, I think.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

ScarecrowES, on 15 August 2015 - 03:56 PM, said:

Russ and the PGI team have gone on record and said quite emphatically that Elo just doesn't work for MWO. In fact, Elo's system was never intended to judge the skill of individual players on a team. It's not actually capable of doing that. Russ said they're dropping Elo and going to a proper skill-based ranking system sometime in the "near" future.

link plz?

Nightmare1, on 15 August 2015 - 04:00 PM, said:

They ought to just go with some variant of the battle value system...

I agree with this because youre NEVER gonna accurately juggle player skill and it might actually help the 8/12 ECM matches where you dont get more than 30 damage as LRMs

[Nik Reaper]

I think it was in the last town hall, the idea being that when you win but have a low game score you get a little or no elo and when you lose but get a high score you will only lose a bit of elo so that personal performance means more than a team win or loss.
Paul also admited that elo doesn't really change much unless you play in a group that is succesful.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

Nik Reaper, on 15 August 2015 - 05:47 PM, said:

I think it was in the last town hall, the idea being that when you win but have a low game score you get a little or no elo and when you lose but get a high score you will only lose a bit of elo so that personal performance means more than a team win or loss.
Paul also admited that elo doesn't really change much unless you play in a group that is succesful.

mind you im not saying its not true, Im just wanting a link to be able to point to lol

[ScarecrowES]

Nightmare1, on 15 August 2015 - 04:56 PM, said:

Yeah, there isn't really a way to balance skill easily though.

I noticed that Ghost Recon: Phantoms does a decent job of it. The game has a battlevalue system similar to BattleTech called the "Athena" system. Your loadout and your skill (elo) together contribute to your Athena Ranking. The game then matches you to other, similarly ranked players. It's not perfect, but I've seen the quality of my matches improve since it was introduced. PGI should investigate something similar for MWO, I think.

It's actually very easy to balance skill. If you look at games like the Battlefield series... everything you do that might result in scoring is recorded and weighted, and then considered comparatively to derive an actual skill score. MWO actually tracks a LOT of actions. Look at all the things you can get scoring for in a match. Games like Battlefield know personal skill factors like what your average score per minute is... how much damage you're likely to do per minute per class,overall accuracy, whatever. It also knows how well you play with others, tracking things like assisted damage, how often you remain with your unit, how often you perform team-assistive actions, and so on.

MWO knows these things too. But it doesn't care. It cares about whether you won or lost. That's it. If MWO actually put use to all the things it tracked, weighed how important those factors are to your team's overall success, and then produced an overall score for that... THAT would be an actual skill score. If it actually adjusted your score based on the actual results of the match you're in, by weighing your performance against that of your team AND the enemy team, it'd be about as accurate as it could be.

It'd also have the benefit of helping balance match rewards to correspond with the skill system. That would let rewards better reflect the sorts of actions players engage in to win a match. We could get away from a reward system based almost entirely on damage and kills, which would be nice.

[Kodyn]

As far as I can tell it's the normal weekend match behavior. On weekends, especially Sundays, though it starts Friday night, the Weekend Warriors come out.

It's all the guys who don't play all week, then get in their time on weekends, and kinda suck as a result.

Went from having extremely fun and close matches all week to the usual weekend stomps, one way or another. Have seen one close game thus far this weekend, otherwise all 12-4, 12-2, 0-12, etc.

Sometimes we have events to blame, but this pattern repeats itself with or without the presence of a weekend event, thus, my theory is it's the players.

[KHETTI]

Current Match making turns this game into a painful, unrewarding waste of time.
MWO currently for most part, isn't actually any fun.

[ScarecrowES]

Mechwarrior Buddah, on 15 August 2015 - 05:59 PM, said:

mind you im not saying its not true, Im just wanting a link to be able to point to lol

The town hall was hosted by No Guts No Galaxy on Twitch. There may be a recording of that townhall.

[DAYLEET]

ScarecrowES, on 15 August 2015 - 06:11 PM, said:

It's actually very easy to balance skill. If you look at games like the Battlefield series... everything you do that might result in scoring is recorded and weighted, and then considered comparatively to derive an actual skill score.

Thank god there's no elo in Battlefield. Instead they have this crazy technology called Servers that commoners can rent and when you join one that has players way too good for you or always stacking one team then you change server. When you find a server with people you like you favorite it(another insane idea). You can even find server with level locked so a 100 wont come farm a level 10. Well that was when bf3 launched, since then bf3 and bf4 died.

ScarecrowES, on 15 August 2015 - 06:21 PM, said:

Haha, you also have normal servers with skill-based matchmaking. But it's nice to have choices too.

Wait, that's true they have a match making thingy, ive ever ever used it once. Can't imagine anyone using it.

Edited by DAYLEET, 15 August 2015 - 06:23 PM.

[ScarecrowES]

DAYLEET, on 15 August 2015 - 06:19 PM, said:

Thank god there's no elo in Battlefield. Instead they have this crazy technologies called servers that commoners can rent and when you join one that has players way too good for you or always stacking one team then you change server. When you find a server with people you like you favorite it(another insane idea). You can even find server with level locked so a 100 wont come farm a level 10. Well that was when bf3 launched, since then bf3 and bf4 are dead.

Haha, you also have normal servers with skill-based matchmaking. But it's nice to have choices too.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

Kodyn, on 15 August 2015 - 06:12 PM, said:

As far as I can tell it's the normal weekend match behavior. On weekends, especially Sundays, though it starts Friday night, the Weekend Warriors come out.

It's all the guys who don't play all week, then get in their time on weekends, and kinda suck as a result.

Went from having extremely fun and close matches all week to the usual weekend stomps, one way or another. Have seen one close game thus far this weekend, otherwise all 12-4, 12-2, 0-12, etc.

Sometimes we have events to blame, but this pattern repeats itself with or without the presence of a weekend event, thus, my theory is it's the players.

so the tournament players lol