135 replies to this topic

[IraqiWalker]

EgoSlayer, on 25 September 2015 - 09:57 PM, said:

They have never said it's only +/-2, only that Tier 1 will never face tier 4 or 5. Tiers 2 and 3 can play anyone, Tier 1 can only play 1, 2 and 3s. And that only applies to solo queues, because in group queue players can create groups that include members from any tier and the groups are averaged.

I stand corrected then.

Karl Streiger, on 25 September 2015 - 10:22 PM, said:

And of course this works only when there are enough players - otherwise I'm pretty sure the typical Mm behaviour will remove those borders.
Result : the known ugly face - long wait times and bad games.
Think it would be simpler to analyse the current numbers of players - and of course PGI need an average number of players the MM need for a good game.

I'm pretty sure in one of the discussions they mentioned that the MM will never pit tier 1 players against tiers 4 or 5, regardless of release valves. This system seems to have fewer release valves than before.

[Xyroc]

Winterburn, on 22 September 2015 - 07:32 AM, said:

And what is wrong with that exactly? How do you "steal" a kill anyway?

Should people not attack someone, who is being attacked by their teammate?

Its not about someone supporting their team mate, its when they jump infront of you to block your shots on someone you single handedly beat down just to get the killing blow.

[Aussie Burko]

Flawed would be an understatement, they are supposed to be rated on personal achievement but all i've seen so far is if your team wins you go up , team looses you stop level with high damage or go down. No bearing whatsoever on game reality as per usual .

[Threat Doc]

Alright, so I did my search, and it lead me here... and I think this is probably the best place to put what I'm about to say and, hopefully, Paul will pay attention to it, though I seriously doubt it.

The explanation behind how Tiers are supposed to work is that the higher tier you are, the more like a team you and your fellows play. I'm running the ******** flag straight up the flag pole on this one, because I've seen it too often.

I am more of a team player than my oldest son is. I've watched him for dozens of matches, and I know how I play; my oldest son is not a team player at all, but he IS a better shot, and he DOES use brawling weapons, whereas I'll freely admit that, with direct-fire weapons, I'm pretty bad. I use all of the windage, drop and shift principles I learned in the Army, I lead my targets based on their speed, and I hit fairly often, but my fairly often hovers around 35-40% of the time, at best.

As you can see by my Tier identifier, I am Tier 4, but my bar in the game hovers at about 65%, I would say, and it stays between 50 and 70% of the length of that bar. I just got a look at my son's bar, and he's about 90% full, almost ready for Tier 3.

Paul, your supposition about climbing higher Tiers the more you play like a team is ********, and it is shovels full, buddy. The way you get to higher Tiers is by taking chances, going after every single kill you can get, make sure you use direct-fire weaponry, and keep moving; it has ****-all to do with being a team player, Paul, and I think you know that. LRM drivers don't do those sorts of things.

It's time to set bars based on the size of the community at the time of each match, and to otherwise divorce team play from personal play. You NEED to institute a four-level ranking system for Green, Regular, Veteran, and Elite players, and you need to leave rankings with an open-ended points system. Don't restrict by Elo -one on one- and either don't calculate team-play into personal PSR at all, or give it about half the weight it has, now.

(sarcasm) I'm just so happy you listen to your community. (/sarcasm)

Edited by Kay Wolf, 07 November 2015 - 10:21 PM.

[Triordinant]

What's interesting is even if the totally fixed the scoring system there aren't enough players for Tiers to matter.

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

The biggest flaw in PSR is that it's not a zero sum game.

[Oncoshi]

[color=orange]Clarification 2: The more games you play the higher Tier you're going to get.[/color]
That's partly true.
Anyone who has a slightly positive Win/Loss ratio should eventually end up in Tier 1 if they are consistent in their play and match performance.

[color=orange]Clarification 3: PSR changes are biased to make everyone move up.[/color]
There is a SLIGHT bit of truth here.

http://mwomercs.com/...-tiers-and-psr/


With the system how it is now you have 8 different values where your PSR changes. At 4 it goes up (50%) at 2 it stays (25%) and at 2 it drops (25%)

With ELO you had 50% raise and 50% drop at the moment you reached your personal ELO rating.

We need 2 ELOs

1 for solo
1 for group

I will give you an example:

In games like DOTA 2 you have ELO system.

Bad player could have an ELO of 1000 but a winrate of 56% because they play vs players with their own skill level.
The top 10 players could have ELO of 8000 with a winrate of 48%.

Now with PSR BOTH players would be in Tier 1 because ELO 1000 player has a positive w/l ratio and ELO 8000 player because he has so much skill that he always gets rank up while losing too.

Would you say both player have the same skill level only because both play in Tier 1?

I say NO!

And thats exactly the problem with Tier and Tier based matchmaking!

Edited by Oncoshi, 08 November 2015 - 02:13 AM.

[Threat Doc]

Oncoshi, you completely miss what the PSR system is about. First, PSR is NOT Elo, because Elo is about one-player-vs-one-player, where PSR is about you, as an individual improving, but it's based more on teamwork, and the outcome of teamwork, as opposed to actual personal performance. Unfortunately, in this particular instance, the ratings you gain for teamwork are dampened very badly by the values of your team. Last night, for example, I played in 6 matches, five of which turned out to be losses, four of which I died in. Granted, three of those times were my own stupidity, but the one time we were absolutely ambushed and I was the first one to drop because I was at the front of the slaughter boundary.

Except for the one game where I was at the front and died without really firing a shot, I scored no less than 350 damage each of the other games. In one of those games I got three kills, in another game two, and in two games one each. However, because my teams were **** my PSR dropped for the five games we lost. Last night's play is what prompted me to post what I did, last night.

Triordinant, on 07 November 2015 - 11:34 PM, said:

What's interesting is even if the totally fixed the scoring system there aren't enough players for Tiers to matter.

PGI could change that if they would act like a normal business and advertise a LOT more than they do; that IS their fault, and the fact they've not tried to get back more Founders, and more veteran players tells me they actually don't care about making money, nor about constructing this game in a fashion conducive to doing so.

Edited by Kay Wolf, 08 November 2015 - 08:30 AM.

[Wintersdark]

Kay Wolf, on 07 November 2015 - 10:19 PM, said:

Paul, your supposition about climbing higher Tiers the more you play like a team is ********, and it is shovels full, buddy. The way you get to higher Tiers is by taking chances, going after every single kill you can get, make sure you use direct-fire weaponry, and keep moving; it has ****-all to do with being a team player, Paul, and I think you know that. LRM drivers don't do those sorts of things.

No. Your theory here is flat out wrong.

The way you get to higher tiers is simple, and twofold:

One: play a LOT of matches. How many is determined by how good you are.
Two: score well in matches.

If you have a win loss ratio greater than 1, then you will go up in tiers, until the average skill levels prevent your maintaining a wlr of 1 or higher. With that said, your performance in those matches will determine how fast you gain rating.

Kills has so little to do with this it doesn't bear mentioning. What matters, for how fast you gain rating, is your score as high scores in losing matches can maintain or even still increase your rating, rather than decreasing it. Score is almost entirely based on damage dealt, where as things like kills are worth VERY few points.

Indirect weapons are arguably better (at least until T2ish) because they do a lot of damage without killing. Damage = score = rating gain.

But more important than everything is teamwork. Good teamwork wins games, because teamwork is OP.

If you win more games than you lose, you gain rating. Period.

Thus, to gain rating fastest, win games, and do more damage.

[Threat Doc]

I don't think you read my post as thoroughly as you might believe, but my suppositions are correct on this. My oldest son plays far fewer games than I do in any given time period, about 10% of the games I do, and his scores are, in general, lower than mine -not all the time, but most of it-, so what you're telling me has nothing to do with how PSR, or the Tiers, actually works. I would be willing to bet you money that there is another Tier 4 out there, or for that matter a Tier 5, with many more matches than I have under my belt -2700 since stat-tracking was started.

Otherwise, what you said in your post is what I said, just with different verbiage.

[Wintersdark]

Triordinant, on 07 November 2015 - 11:34 PM, said:

What's interesting is even if the totally fixed the scoring system there aren't enough players for Tiers to matter.

And this is why everyone's Beautiful Brainchild Of Battlevalue Systems won't work either.

Player populations are not terrible - I've shown the math before, even with 10,000 players playing concurrently, the actual available pool to chose from for a particular match is surprisingly small. As players tend to fall in a bell curve in terms of skill, if you're either very good or very bad, you're going to have most of your matches padded with average players.

That's simply unavoidable.

[Wintersdark]

Kay Wolf, on 08 November 2015 - 01:47 PM, said:

I don't think you read my post as thoroughly as you might believe, but my suppositions are correct on this. My oldest son plays far fewer games than I do in any given time period, about 10% of the games I do, and his scores are, in general, lower than mine -not all the time, but most of it-, so what you're telling me has nothing to do with how PSR, or the Tiers, actually works. I would be willing to bet you money that there is another Tier 4 out there, or for that matter a Tier 5, with many more matches than I have under my belt -2700 since stat-tracking was started. Otherwise, what you said in your post is what I said, just with different verbiage.

Keep in mind, it's matches since IIRC January this year, not matches overall.

But ultimately, the score movement is not zero sum - you at worst break even in rating on a win, and you can easily break even or even gain rating on a loss. If you win and lose equal numbers of games then, a 1:1 WLR, you're simply going to gain rating. This isn't my interpretation of how it works, it's been spelled out in a fair bit of detail.

This doesn't mean everyone will be Tier 1 in no time at all. That movement can be pretty gradual, if you rarely get high scores. But if you have a WLR above one, you will gain rating overall.

Note that there's a qualifier there: Winning as much as you lose, or more. If you do that, the math is very simple: You will continue to gain rating overall.

Of course, even if you lose somewhat more than you win, you can still continue to gain rating, you just have to score highly in the losses.

I'm SURE there are lots of people in T4 and even T5 with LOTS of games. They just lose a lot of games, score very poorly in the losses, and not very high in the wins.


But you said teamwork wasn't important, that getting kills was. Kills has precious little to do with your score - it doesn't matter who gets the kills. But teamwork does matter, because teamwork gets wins. If you win more than you lose, your rating goes up.

The only way to lose rating in a situation where you've got a 1:1 or higher WLR is if you somehow manage to win a majority of games and do extremely poorly in those wins, so poorly that you don't gain rating... AND do poorly in the losses too. But the likelyhood of that happening is extraordinarily small. If you're contributing that little overall, you're simply going to lose a lot more battles than you win.

[Inveramsay]

The problem as I see it is that PSR is only a slightly tweaked version of ELO. Yes your individual performance will influence the PSR more than it would ELO but it is still skewed heavily towards win/loss.

PSR makes much more sense than ELO however this incarnation not so much. For it to be useful and true it needs to be based on your relative performance compared to the rest of the players in you team and the match in general. If the system was set up so the 12 best players in the match gained PSR points and the bottom 12 lost the individual skill would matter far more. The match score is flawed as well but that is an entirely different matter. PSR needs to be returned to the drawing board

[WOULD YOU LIKE SOME TOAST]

I think the "tier" system is just a vehicle to produce cannon fodder for the 5-man and up teams out there.
Last weekend I played 9 games and we were..(my surly and non communative teams that I was thrown in with), (tier 4), TOTALLY ANNIHILATED as if we went to war with no weapons.Time and time again focused and highly cooperative "teams" simply destroyed us like children..occasionally I would get a kill or two...if he did`nt call his mates in to quickly jump in front of him and gang me to death.
I began to see a pattern..high tiers are for 12 man groups..share in the group effort.. mid tiers for 4-man to 6-man groups.
5 and four 4 tiers are for their target practice!! How else to explain boasts of "too **** easy again" and "that`s our 10th win in a row against *******"
So...I am trapped in 4 unless I join a group and give up my independence to the time of others...or become a walking bullseye for you hotshit killers who live off gang kills...great...

[Bluttrunken]

The PSR is a mere indicator to feed the matchmaking. It's sufficient as such. Tiers aren't tiers in the sense I know them. Tiers are like experience levels first and foremost. It's no real skill divider because by just playing alot and not sucking too much you will slowly rise. Real tiers would divide the player base by ratios. Like Top 10% is Tier 1 of bottom 10% Tier 5. As it is now everyone could be Tier 1 theoretically. Let's assume no new players join the game, and no current player leaves: after some time 80-90% of the playerbase will be Tier 1.

With my mediocre results in the recent times, I mean even with them I slowly climb up Tier 2. And we're talking about like 300 damage average. I'm doing really bad recently. Leveling the Zeus surely didn't help, either.(God I hate that mech.)

My rank is worthless. Tiers are without meaning whatsoever. Everyone who thinks elsewise is a tool.

Also: there will be no magical electronic data gathering tool which will measure "skill" even slightly accurate, all we gonna get is an indicator of our average performance. Damage dealt is a major part of our average performance because, deal with it, there's not much importance in anything besides doing damage in this game. You get your minor increases for Tagging, Narcing, countering ECM, ECMing etc. but in the end a game is won at the end of a smoking barrel. Deal with it.

Edited by k05h3lk1n, 14 November 2015 - 05:31 AM.