Tombs Clawtooth, on 30 December 2016 - 09:28 PM, said:
Ehhhh... Trying to use W/L ratio from the leaderboards is kind of screwy. Thousands of people high in that leaderboard have 1 and 2 matches.
Mine is 1.15 after 932 matches. Meanwhile I have a 2.28 W/L ratio over 118 games in one of my heavies that all the forum warriors try to tell me is inferior to a more meta mech.
It is largely luck whether you have an assault that thinks 8 ERLL is a viable build, or have a 100 tonner decide to disconnect at the start of a match. It's largely luck whether you get a team that will listen to orders and do objectives instead of buggering off throughout the map spreading out as far as possible against the words of the better players on that team. War is largely a matter of luck, in some cases plans can be made and executed, and in some success depends on the actions of a few.
You can always bump things in the right direction, but without being able to create consequences for people disobeying orders, there's not a whole lot you can do when they decide to throw the match.
Try playing any competitive level game just joining by yourself. Unless you're a LARGE deal better than the competition, you aren't going to carry. You can get lucky, sure. People can ignore your actions, you can get into the perfect positions every time, and always make every shot count. That isn't reliable or skill dependent though, especially not with good match making where everyone knows that positioning and you have to play it on an even level.
So far from my experiences here, if you're doing your damage, and you're doing it to focused locations, you're making the difference you need to make. You can do more and help, you can do less and harm your team... But in the end, you're 1 mech that can only do a specific amount of damage in a specific amount of time. If you're focusing it all where it belongs, and you're hitting for your tonnage, there's not much else you can do if your team completely fails to hit for their tonnage.
When I get 5 solo kills in a match and we still lose, what exactly do you expect me to do? Call out targets that the team consistently ignores? I've also had plenty of games where I've done basically nothing, didn't even make it to the front line in time, and we still won. That's luck.
Except the odds of your team being scrubby is exactly 100% equal to the odds of everyone else having a scrubby team.
Think of it like this - suppose you want to swim across the English Channel. There's a billion things that can go wrong or right. So much of that event would be beyond your control.
However suppose you could survive doing it again and again and again. And that thousands and thousands of other people were doing it, every single day. Trying, anyway.
While in the context of, say, your last 10 attempts (you are generally remembering, anecdotally, less than your last 10 matches when you think of what your experience is like. Usually it's about 3 and that's if they're back to back) you can see big swings in the 'odds', over 40 attempts those odds start to even out relative to everyone else. After 80 attempts the random ups and downs of events beyond your control functionally wash themselves out when your results are compared to everyone elses.
Another example. Flipping a coin. If you flip a fair coin 1,024 times you're almost certain to get 'heads' 10 times in a row. That is just as likely to happen with your first 10 as it is on flips 1,014 to 1,024. However out of those 1,024 you're going to have, give or take just a couple, 512 heads and 512 tails. You may have had a stretch of 10 heads (or tails) in there in a row and you'll probably remember that and think 'wow, this coin isn't balanced! I get heads all the time!' but odds say you'll end up almost right at 512/512.
There are few less reliable means of measure as human memory. You don't really even remember an event more than one time; every other time you remember it you're actually remembering the last time you remembered it. You'll also remember things that confirm your opinion (at the time) more than you'll remember things that don't. There's a ton of biases in how people think and remember.
Which is why we ignore anecdotal experience and opinions and just look at the math. We're all playing the same game with the same potentialities. By the time you've got 80 matches you've washed out all but a couple percentiles of random variance.
As such, when comparing players success, if they've had a sufficient number of games, W/L is a very solid indicator of how someones behavior impacts the odds of their team winning or losing based on their presence. Sure, people with below standard sample size (people with less than 40 matches) can be washed out or viewed as questionably reliable results but people with a lot of matches? You can reasonably view their results as indicative of their ability to drive wins (or not as the stats indicate).
arivio, on 31 December 2016 - 12:44 AM, said:
Wow! So you guys tried to master the amazing and challenging LRM Deck! That's what the people with *real* skillz do. You should keep with it so you can dominate the competitive scene with the most skill-oriented weapon system. Show us how it's all done.
Or run 4x LRM decks in FW. Then post screenshots of all your high damage, high kill matches in the Clans FW subforum. You'd generate less rage by going to a Star Wars memorial convention dressed as Zombie Slave Leia.