103 replies to this topic

[Khobai]

The tier system does work for keeping new players isolated from veteran players.

thats literally all it does though.

[Skipmagnet]

Trissila, on 30 October 2017 - 05:30 PM, said:

I call out open CTs constantly, and still I see 'mechs with orange or worse CTs go on for MINUTES longer because nobody will shoot them

Really? All I've ever heard you say to your teams is 'kill yourself'.

Weird.

[Trissila]

eyeballs, on 31 October 2017 - 08:33 AM, said:

Really? All I've ever heard you say to your teams is 'kill yourself'.

Weird.

I have not once said such a thing. You may be confusing me with somebody else.

I have, upon occasion, noted "This match is over" when they finally decide to start coordinating when they're 5 'mechs behind.

[Trissila]

arcana75, on 31 October 2017 - 03:48 AM, said:

Anyone (like I) who has ever entered a new tier then immediately drop back to the old tier following a bad match, will know it's not a mere XP bar. What's happening though I think is that the rate of increase is much higher than the rate of decrease.

There are, IIRC, 8 possible outcomes for your PSR; four brackets each for Winning and Losing.

If you win, your PSR cannot decrease, period. It will stay the same if you manage under 100 Match Score while still winning.

If you lose, your PSR will decrease if you are below 250 MS, which covers the bottom two 'tiers' of MS (Tiers are <=100, 101-249, 250-399, >=400).

So out of 8 possible outcomes, only 2 lead to PSR loss, and those two are only if you get absolutely curbstomped. The 101-249 bracket only results in a very small loss, and is easily countered by a few wins even at lower MS brackets.

[Wolfways]

Viktor Drake, on 30 October 2017 - 02:42 PM, said:

I avoid meta builds like the plague and generally run more realistic battletech-ish builds but that wasn't a problem before hitting Tier 1 now it could possible be.

I also avoid meta and only run stock weapon builds because I like BT.

I've been away for a couple of years and came back about a week ago to see if anything had improved (the answer is no) and my Tier bars on both accounts (IS and Clan) are climbing again.
So thanks for letting me know what's coming soon

[HauptmanT]

The PSR is alright....

Just to clear up misconceptions... you CAN lose tiers. The "go ballistic" event dropped me from t2 back to t3, because I absolutely suck with ACs. I had a lot of matches with 20 damage... The problem is carries. If you do 20 damage, and your team wins... you lose no "xp". However, if your team loses and you dont do ~400 damage or more, you dont gain any either. It is so dependent on win/loss. That I dislike.

Would explain previous posters friend who just zoomed up into T3. Just luck. I'm sure the boot camp helped.

It took me roughly 800 hours to get T2, I'm now at 1000 hours, and it hasnt moved much. I have been moving myself out of LRM boats and that's killing my scores. I dont really see much difference in the player base... because most of my time in T3 was spent with T1s before the matchmaker change. So I already know what to expect. I just see fewer potatoes now, and that's a good thing. Fewer however is not zero... I still get a lot of matches that apear to be populated with absolute newbs.

[Noey Bunny]

CFC Conky, on 30 October 2017 - 05:19 PM, said:

Interesting stats Tarogato, according to my avg match score I should be in T3 but I'm still deep in T5.

*Shrugs and moves on*

Good hunting,
CFC Conky

It is interesting to see this plotted out i made a post about PSR about a week ago and said it felt arbitrary, and it still really does. Even match score is heavily swayed by wins and losses, it's easier to get a successful (high) match score in an environment where your team is already winning.

But I believe that PSR Reflects W/L Ratio more than any other statistic. While a high average match score will keep you from losing PSR on a loss, an average of 256+? you need 250 minimum to not lose PSR upon losing. That means even that average would need to float a fairly high win/loss ratio if they want to make any progress. (Unless I'm missing something! It's probably likely you also gain more PSR on wins than you lose on losses or something like that).

I still feel that when it comes to actually representing a pilots skill, PSR is quite arbitrary, since the system is detailed heavily towards rewarding only wins, and being 1/12th of a team, you can't really be held accountable for the results of an entire game.

Though, the system isn't entirely without merit, it's going to likely put people in their appropriate skill tier after 'a period of time' it's just, very very inconsistent and probably shouldn't be used to speak to a persons actual skill tier, but more their time spent in the game. This is, anyways, my feelings on it.

Edited by Kittenkawa11, 31 October 2017 - 10:40 AM.

[L0stA1m]

HauptmanT, on 31 October 2017 - 10:23 AM, said:

The PSR is alright....

Just to clear up misconceptions... you CAN lose tiers. The &quot;go ballistic&quot; event dropped me from t2 back to t3, because I absolutely suck with ACs. I had a lot of matches with 20 damage... The problem is carries. If you do 20 damage, and your team wins... you lose no &quot;xp&quot;. However, if your team loses and you dont do ~400 damage or more, you dont gain any either. It is so dependent on win/loss. That I dislike.

Would explain previous posters friend who just zoomed up into T3. Just luck. I'm sure the boot camp helped.

It took me roughly 800 hours to get T2, I'm now at 1000 hours, and it hasnt moved much. I have been moving myself out of LRM boats and that's killing my scores. I dont really see much difference in the player base... because most of my time in T3 was spent with T1s before the matchmaker change. So I already know what to expect. I just see fewer potatoes now, and that's a good thing. Fewer however is not zero... I still get a lot of matches that apear to be populated with absolute newbs.

PSR is broken as ****. You have to be utter trash to dont move up in a decent amount of time.

[Nameless King]

El Bandito, on 30 October 2017 - 04:11 PM, said:

Just get better, and you'll have fun again. When PSR was first implemented in 2015, I hit T1 after 2 weeks of play from T2, and I sucked in T1 queue (in the earliest days of tier system T1 was brutal). Instead of complaining, I ditched my LRMs, used meta-mechs/meta builds, and improved my aiming and positioning.

I find this interesting, I have never found tier 1 brutal and I dont consider myself all that good. I generally refuse to play meta anything and have fun in every match I play weather I win or lose.

[ocular tb]

PSR is probably okay, it's just that tiers aren't what they should be. But I'm not sure what to do about that. I mean even if the best players, the top 1%, were given their own tier they would still have to be grouped up with lower tiers due to low population. Matchmaker already has to use the release valves to find lower tiered players to fill in the gaps. Making an exclusive tier for only the best players would be plagued with ridiculous wait times. (8v8 could ease that a bit I suppose)

Edited by ocular tb, 31 October 2017 - 02:06 PM.

[Admiral-Dan]

CFC Conky, on 30 October 2017 - 05:19 PM, said:

Interesting stats Tarogato, according to my avg match score I should be in T3 but I'm still deep in T5.

*Shrugs and moves on*

Maybe recheck your score.

https://leaderboard....php?u=CFC+Conky

[Angel of Annihilation]

El Bandito, on 30 October 2017 - 04:11 PM, said:

Just get better, and you'll have fun again. When PSR was first implemented in 2015, I hit T1 after 2 weeks of play from T2, and I sucked in T1 queue (in the earliest days of tier system T1 was brutal). Instead of complaining, I ditched my LRMs, used meta-mechs/meta builds, and improved my aiming and positioning.

I wish that was the case but I have a feeling I have reached me peak as a player. I mean I might be able to eek out a bit better performance by analyzing my mistakes. I could also start going with meta builds <shutters> which we all know are more effective in competitive matches but really hate meta mechs. I could also only play my absolute best mechs or rather the mechs I do extremely well with but part of the fun for me is randomly playing through my 179 mechs. Of course, I am sure that my randomly jumping around mechs contributes to a lower performance overall as well since I have to constantly shift to a different playstyle with each different mech I play.

However we are starting to venture into the realm of trying to eek out every bit of performance to be competitive at the expense of just playing for fun. I want to be able to fool around in my sub-optimal but fun mechs or builds and at least have a half way decent, somewhat competitive match where I am not holding the team back by doing so. It seems like I lost that ability when I hit Tier 1.

[Tarl Cabot]

With the current PSR, it should be reset every quarter using the previous quarter info then PGI uses the averages like they did when they changed from Elo to PSR, with a specific amount of percentile in each tier. X amount of games would have to be played or no change in Tier.

And for there to be a separate Solo and Group PSR.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 31 October 2017 - 02:45 PM.

[Angel of Annihilation]

King Alen, on 31 October 2017 - 01:31 PM, said:

I find this interesting, I have never found tier 1 brutal and I dont consider myself all that good. I generally refuse to play meta anything and have fun in every match I play weather I win or lose.

I actually felt this way as well but like I said, I just can't explain why all of a sudden my performance has tanked. The only thing that has really changed was the tightening up of the MM but since then I can't seem to get a good match for the life of me.

A lot of times I just feel like the MM is trolling me cause I am looking around me going, "What the hell is my team doing" as I watch them scatter half way across the map or NASCAR out of the perfect position to destroy the enemy just for the sake of performing the NASCAR maneuver but the MM can't troll me each and every match can it? If I put my tinfoil hat on, I want to think that the reason I am doing so bad is because I am such a good pilot, the MM wants to put me on a team of scrubs against a team of superstars with the thought process being I will carry the scrubs to victory but the tinfoil hat has to come off here and we need to get real hehe.

So yeah honestly I can't figure out what the deal is, the only thing I know is that since the hitting Tier 1 and the MM changes, my performance is down damn near to potato level. Either the change screwed up the MM royally or I am just not good enough to be playing at Tier 1. The latter option seems most likely because people like you seem to not see anything as being off and if it isn't everyone then that just leave me.

[Davegt27]

one of the devs said in a pod cast that when they tightened up the MM

that resulted in more stomps

OP PGIs computer controls are at the core of the problem

[C E Dwyer]

People that think resets the way, sorry, but it will make it a lot worse then it is now for months, and with a reset every month you might as well not have a tier system.

What P.G.I need to do is remove the upward bias and then leave as is.

That way the worse offenders that shouldn't be in those tiers will drop away after a few months play, they will fall back into T2, the people that the upward bias keeps in T2 will fall back out of T1 game play.


This with the population this game has is the best to hope for.

[SFC174]

Viktor Drake, on 31 October 2017 - 02:57 PM, said:

A lot of times I just feel like the MM is trolling me cause I am looking around me going, "What the hell is my team doing" as I watch them scatter half way across the map or NASCAR out of the perfect position to destroy the enemy just for the sake of performing the NASCAR maneuver but the MM can't troll me each and every match can it? If I put my tinfoil hat on, I want to think that the reason I am doing so bad is because I am such a good pilot, the MM wants to put me on a team of scrubs against a team of superstars with the thought process being I will carry the scrubs to victory but the tinfoil hat has to come off here and we need to get real hehe.

If I wore a tin foil hat, I'd think the devs were trolling me for talking badly about the MM. I post a bunch in a thread about it and proceed to go on a 10 match QP losing streak this afternoon. In several matches, little old average me was the top scorer on my team and had the highest average match score (or at least top3) on the leaderboards of my team. But I'm up against guys like hammercoleman, edmeister, ghogiel, daruwind, nick drezary and many more. Often times 2 of them on the opposing team. Naturally they pull off 1000dmg 3-4 kill matches each and my team gets stomped.

It's not their fault (well, it is, but you know what I mean). But if 2 of those guys are in the match, they should be on opposing teams. Kind of like when you were kids you didn't let the best two players be on the same flag football team (or whatever your favorite sport was). You split them up to make a game of it. As I've said before, I like playing against better players so that I can get better, but when you stack em like that, ughhh.

edit - I just realized that the seasons reset sometime in the last hour. I have noticed that I seem to get stomped at the beginning of the season and have to work my way back to a 1.0 or better W/L ratio. Interesting.

Edited by SFC174, 31 October 2017 - 05:02 PM.

[Sjorpha]

Tarogato, on 30 October 2017 - 03:59 PM, said:

I used to think that PSR was just irrevocably bad, and that's why my matches were of poor quality. But then I started looking at just pure matchscore,







I noticed that if you divided the playerbase into 5 tiers of equal size, then the "Tier 1" players would be matchscore 236 and higher (at the time of the data I looked at). I found this deeply concerning, because I didn't consider somebody to even be a good player until they were at least 280 or 290 match score, and that's where I expected "Tier 1" to be. That's about where I was, and I barely considered myself what I would call "Tier 1". I really expected I should be Tier 2.

So my new conclusion was that the number of "good" players in this game, by my definition, is just drastically lower than I expected it to be. Put simply, everybody is bad, except for a couple people who are just so much better that they prey on everybody else. It's not a PSR problem, it's a skill gap problem.

Don't get me wrong, I still think PSR doesn't accurately reflect skill level. The skill gap among Tier 1 players is simply massive, people like Viktor Drake don't deserve to be in the same tier as Proton, it's just misleading, not accurate. But then the skill gap between Tier 2 and Tier 3 is absolutely tiny... these players are almost indistinguishable in terms of capability. So I definitely think there needs to be a tier higher than Tier 1, or that the tiers maybe shouldn't be equally distributed across the playerbase, or perhaps not even normally distributed.

But I don't mean that adjustments to the PSR system or the definition and balance of tiers is the solution. No, I think the solution we need is player education. I think new players need a better introduction to the game, a better foundation. And we need more advanced tutorials for the people with a desire to learn and improve further.

It would be self defeating to tier by average matchscore though. If you put players of equal skill in the same match the average match scores are going to be, well, average no matter if they are 24 good or 24 bad players. 24 Protons would get about the same average match score as 24 Sjorphas, despite Proton being many times better than me at the game.

So looking at matchscore is fairly accurate now precisely because good players are mixed with bad players, that is the only reason good players have high averages. Matching based on match score would eventually get circular and after an initial increase in matchmaking quality match score averages would start approaching each other for bad and good players and the system would stop working as well since it can no longer differentiate between them, though it would be partly self regulating as the averages would start separating again when the matchmaking gets worse and then get better and then worse again. But I don't think it's ideal.

[arcana75]

Trissila, on 31 October 2017 - 09:55 AM, said:

There are, IIRC, 8 possible outcomes for your PSR; four brackets each for Winning and Losing.

If you win, your PSR cannot decrease, period. It will stay the same if you manage under 100 Match Score while still winning.

If you lose, your PSR will decrease if you are below 250 MS, which covers the bottom two 'tiers' of MS (Tiers are <=100, 101-249, 250-399, >=400).

So out of 8 possible outcomes, only 2 lead to PSR loss, and those two are only if you get absolutely curbstomped. The 101-249 bracket only results in a very small loss, and is easily countered by a few wins even at lower MS brackets.

The PSR then needs to be tweaked to make it just as easy to lose points. If there are indeed 8 possible outcomes, then make it such that 1 results in large increase, 2 in small increases, 2 in no change, 2 in small decreases and 1 in large decrease.

[The Cyberserker]

HauptmanT, on 31 October 2017 - 10:23 AM, said:

The "go ballistic" event dropped me from t2 back to t3, because I absolutely suck with ACs. I had a lot of matches with 20 damage...

20 damage isn't "sucking with ballistics". It's 'Michael J Fox blindfolded during an earthquake playing on a Guitar Hero controller with his feet'. How did you even manage to do that? 20 damage is only like 1 or 2 bullets. O_o

Edited by The Cyberserker, 31 October 2017 - 08:05 PM.