IraqiWalker, on 17 August 2015 - 05:06 PM, said:
But Elo doesn't provide a 50/50 chance here. It pits a team with 12 average pilots, against a team with 6 god tier pilots, each worth at least 3 average players, and 6 crappy pilots. Technically, both teams have close enough Elo, possibly identical. Yet that match is not fair in the slightest, or even close to 50/50 I'd say it's a 90% chance the team with the 6 god tier pilots will win without breaking a sweat.
I don't see the problem here. One system only counted wins and losses, which for the overwhelming majority of the time, were outside of the player's control. It assigned you a score regardless of how good, or bad you were.
The other focuses on your own performance, to better place you in teams closer to you in performance. Allowing for a significantly better chance of getting that fabled 50/50 match.
MMR is a secondary formula, on top of LP. Other than the original announcement, and a few forum posts from the devs, they keep a tight lip on the inner workings of their ranking system. I'll see if I can find more information, but I highly doubt it.
I don't see that as arbitrarily defined. An action's importance is reflected in it's match score. If an action brings too little to make a difference, on the score, people will steer away from it, and the ones that give you a better match score become the ones focused on.
I also don't think PGI is made up of lobotomized techs. They added in more rewards geared towards helping light mechs, a weight class that has long suffered from craptastic rewards, despite all the risk taken. So it seems they know what they're doing. Even if it's not fully.
I highly doubt they would reward something silly with more match score than something that's actually important.
On the other hand, do remember their formula. You are not going to be doing any one thing in the match, and that's it. You match score is a combination of all actions you make. This means that even in what are realistically impossible conditions, you can still get a high match score, IF YOU ARE GOOD. Whereas Elo doesn't care, and will bump you up or down, regardless of your skill.
Elo was a system designed specifically for measuring skill, when it fails at doing that for a game, then it needs to be replaced. This is something that has been talked about in the industry for years now. Many games refrain from using Elo for this reason. Some either use a ladder system with their own scoring method, or no MM instead of using Elo.
How is Elo good, when it puts tier 5 players against tier 1 players, in the same match?
In this case, Elo score is very arbitrary, because winning and losing is about random luck, rather than player control. Which is anathema to Elo, a system designed for a game with absolute and rigid control over every single detail (chess).
If Elo did what you say above ...
"But Elo doesn't provide a 50/50 chance here. It pits a team with 12 average pilots, against a team with 6 god tier pilots, each worth at least 3 average players, and 6 crappy pilots."
.. then I would agree with you. But the problem is that it DOES NOT do this on a regular basis. Period.
Here is a post describing how the Elo matchmaker worked ... what it did and what it does not do based on comments in the forums from the developer who wrote the code.
http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__4349777
Anecdotally, my win/loss since the stat reset is almost exactly 50/50 at 487 wins and 490 losses. I don't TRY to get that .. it is simply a result of the matchmaker generally working in my case and on average dumping me in matches with a 50/50 chance to win. Of course some of those are stomps, both wins and losses, but that is usually due to TEAMWORK being better or folks being in the right place rather than a bunch of bad players or 12 average vs 6 gods.
The new system may be better, I certainly hope so. However, I think using the "match score" as the basis for rating players is fundamentally flawed since the mechs being used to generate these scores are comparable.
I see far more assaults and heavies with scores over 100 than I see light mechs. Does this mean that "tier 1" will have more players that use heavies or assaults over lights? Will they try to normalize the match score to exclude this factor? Then what happens when you compare performace of a locust to a firestarter? Or compare an awesome to a Dire wolf, or a 60 ton heavy to a timberwolf?
Is the pilot a higher tier if they get a higher score in a timberwolf than a locust or cicada or trebuchet? Or is it the mech? A player rating system MUST NOT include effects of the mech being used. It is supposed to represent ONLY the player skill for generating a balanced match.
Anyway, as I said I hope this new system works better but I am quite prepared to be sadly disappointed since PGI often implements things without thinking or caves to pressure from interest groups. I agree that Elo based on predicted win/loss for a team may not be perfect but this concept is at the basis of most player rating systems in team based online games. Why? This is because the ONLY common factor in every game you play in a randomized set of match conditions is YOU. Over time it is quite possible to work out mathematically what your average contribution to a match is based on the outcomes over many matches. Your contribution is represented by your Elo.
The new system appears to be more like an Elo system weighted by match score since in the example they cited in the patch notes, win/loss was still the primary factor in determining your change in rating ... the amount of the change was weighted by the match score so that even in a loss your Elo could still rise with an exceptional score.
Another aspect of the new system that they need to be careful with is that it MUST be conservative. This means that for everyone who gains a rank score someone loses it. If it doesn't have this feature then the overall ranks will rise over the long term and the system will be broken. (unfortunately, if I had to guess, I would say that PGI hasn't even considered this ...)
Edited by Mawai, 17 August 2015 - 07:01 PM.
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