Kjudoon, on 24 August 2015 - 09:27 PM, said:
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For now, there are 2 critical flaws to the ranking system. I like PSR and what it's going to score on even though it is still too heavily weighted to damage for my tastes.
1. It is too easy to go up in PSR. There is like only one condition in which your psr goes down and that's doing very badly on a loss. There is no way for it to go down on a victory. The Loss scale should be the inverse of a Win scale. That way it does not have a natural buoyancy that will ultimately create the same Elo hells we are used to of people bouncing off the ceiling like flies trapped in a jar and ultimately quitting the game in frustration because their losses do not take them back down fast enough to where they are balanced. This is also known in business as "The Peter Principle". Promoting someone beyond their capacity to do well and leave them stuck at a job they are incompetent at.
Well I disagree that there should be any reason your PSR goes down when your side wins. There's just too many circumstances in a WELL performing team where 'doing well' may not be possible because all the enemies are dead by the time you get catch up to everyone else.
My understanding is that it won't go up if you perform badly yet still win. This SHOULD prevent most people from rising to tiers they don't actually qualify for, OR AT THE LEAST, not staying in that Tier for very long.
With PSR you have to have some pretty strong downward inertia before you move downward, that's a lot of consistent losses doing very badly score-wise. This keeps you from being overly punished for getting matched with a lot of bad/not serious players on your side.
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2. With low population, you cannot lock the tiers. I acknowledge that fact. The problem is you are not going to grow the population when you have seal clubbing going on. New players who have a bad experience will not play the game. The same way a kid who joins a baseball team and sucks will quickly quit and usually hate the sport from then on out. This is not new. Sure, you're not seeing Tier 1 when you start, because you are seeded at Tier 4. Okay, we get this. The problem will be in how fast you rise (which looks to be quite fast really) till you're tier 3 and facing those tier 1 thugs AND being teamed with the same people derping up the joint. Just not all at the same match. This will lead to an unsatisfactory gaming experience and drive the player away as quickly as a kid who sucks at baseball is teased and ridiculed for his bad playing and inability to hit the ball. Kids are cruel, and it seems the internet doesn't help em grow up.
Tiers ultimately need to be locked once the population grows enough. But without allowing for fast matches, nobody will play so we're in a vicious circle. The compromise is not piling everyone together. You can loosen the tiers to maybe the neighboring tier only, but any more than that, you're better off saying "Match not found, Search again?" than to inflict a horrifying game experience. It's the lesser of two evils. Yes the "neighbors" level of Tier matching tells Tier 5 and 1 to suck it, but really, I don't have a problem with ignoring these edge cases. The tier 1 players are probably in organized groups playing in CW and tournaments anyway and getting their match on that way. They don't have many peers left because they beat them all. Tier 5s are either declining to the point of being out the door (since your psr only declines under doing extremely bad with losses) and they make for easy victims for the Tier 4 new guys and just blah casuals. Nobody likes being the omega food stockand Tier 5s are it through their own effort or lack their of. Otherwise, they'd improve as it's currently weighted. Right now it takes effort to be bad. Lots of it. Even when new.
To be honest, I think the bigger problem is going to be the Tier 2 tryhards. They'll get upset their not Tier 1, and take it out on everyone else... except tier 1s who will beat them pretty consistently when matched. When matched with Tier 3's they're going to beat the tar out of them pretty bad and be the worst sports about it since their power has been thwarted. It's a big reason why locking the tiers is best. Right now, Tier 2s can also face anyone. Just not Tier 4-5 and Tier 1s mixed. They will usually crow their easy victories and kvetch endlessly when beaten by the betters, and have an apoplectic fit if they lose to the lower tiers and fire off endless accusations of cheaters. Knowing my luck I'm probably a Tier 2. Gawd, that'd be horrifying!
So you can see why I am the originator of the "Lock the Tiers" movement, and all for protecting the mechanisms, that if we get the population will incubate and grow this game. It's horrid while we're so low, but PGI only has to look in the mirror for much of that, and look at the forums to see the results of their well... less than stellar choices. Games get the gaming populace they deserve.
And yes, the forums represent a small, vocal minority of the game population.
Your concerns, while noted, I don't think are all that critical.
First we really won't know how 'quickly' an average ACTUAL new player will move up or down tiers, we don't know and PGI apparently won't tell us, how they're actually generating the PSR scores. We know the components of the scores, and have a general idea on how those components are weighted, BUT, we don't know what's going on in the background. We really don't know for sure where the "+points to PSR score" and "-points to PSR score" triggers are. All we know is that it's based off performance, a winning match with 'good' score means a bump. A winning match with a non-good score means little if any change. A losing match with a 'great' score means a bump up, though again, the criteria for a 'great score' we don't know, and a losing match with a bad score means a bump down.
The scoring seems to me to indicate that the rise between tiers is designed to be very gradual, even if you are winning 100% of your matches. So seeing new players rocket to tier 3 or 2 seems, unrealistic, though again, I admit I could be wrong, as pointed out earlier, we really don't know the algorithms behind the scene and PGI won't tell us (to prevent gaming the system obviously). Though if you think about it, it's probably why all NEW players are put in the upper portion of Tier 4 by default instead of Tier 5. We're going to get new players that once they learn the basics are going to be THAT good. There's a lot of MMO FPS's out there to have built up the ability to aim, understand tactics and strategy and how to cooperate with other people on your team.
'Quickly' moving to the next tier up may be a matter of perspective, but it WILL give them more opportunity to lose bad, BUT learn the game, before they subjected to being stuck in Tier 5 and having to work their way all the way back up again.
If we HAD the population necessary for locking like tier to like tier or even the single tier up/down spread as you mentioned, hey, that'd be awesome, and I agree we'd probably want to do THAT first, but EVEN THEN, we'd still want to include CW as part of the PSR growth or shrinkage.
The problem of generating too many 'Match not found messages' is that, that too is a bad player experience, wait 5 minutes to try and get a match only to be told to 'try again' isn't the sort of thing you want to be doing to existing or new players. At least by locking the elite vets to the first three tiers, THEORETICALLY, they're committed to playing the game anyway (and have long since gotten used to long MM searches anyway, even the bald old elo hell days, you could wait 5 minutes to get a match that ended in 2 minutes).
I'll agree PGI and (more originally IGP) made some pretty bad gaming decisions when it came to the development and progression of this game. It has gotten better and certainly the faux pas of late are not some the more cataclysmic variety that they've had in the past.
Again on this one I think we're going to end up seeing a big win for us and PGI in the long run.
Vlad Ward, on 24 August 2015 - 09:58 PM, said:
I don't even know if he can read this, but there are several issues with the assumptions presented above.
1) PSR values are integer values with no known limit. Tiers are simply delineations defined by certain percentages of the population. For example, let's say Tier 1 is the 90th percentile. This could be 500 people or 500,000, depending on the total population of MWO. Their Pilot Skill Scores could also be anywhere from 600 points to 573,000,000 points, as long as they're the top 10 percent of the population.
The important takeaway from this is that your PSR doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's very possible to go up or down a tier without ever playing a match, so long as enough other people either surpass you or fall below you.
This means 2 things:
1) Probably the single most important factor in determining your overall ranking is number of games played. People who turn the game off for months at a time will come back to find their Tier 3 account has slipped into Tier 4 as other players have surpassed their Pilot Skill Score. This is good, because no one's going to retain all of their mecha fighting ability after a 6 month break. Likewise, it prevents all but the most tryhard of tryhards from taking a Tier 1 spot and holding on to it indefinitely without continually expending effort. There is no gold star for being good at the game at some arbitrary point in the past. Trust me, I'd know.
2) Consistently winning games is not enough to actually cause you to go up a tier. In order to move up the rankings, you have to not only win, but win more often and more thoroughly than the rest of the population of your tier.
Tiers are big places. They're huge swathes of a huge population. We're talking tens of thousands of players. Just because someone wins a game doesn't mean there aren't hundreds of other players also winning games at the exact same time. This will prevent all but the strongest of players in a tier from making the move into a higher bracket - exactly the way it should be.
I didn't interpret what PGI had disclosed on this as meaning what you've posted, HOWEVER, I am willing to acquiesce due to an EXTREME ignorance of how they're doing it.
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... they are less likely to drop to tier 4 or 5 since they will still score pretty well even when they lose.
