46 replies to this topic

[RavenKnight86]

What is the community's opinion on this topic? Is it cheating to give yourself an unfair advantage over a bunch of Solo players. Isn't this why they have a group queue. Course maybe they just aren't good enough to hang in the group queue.

[thievingmagpi]

"friends" have the same chance of being on your team as the enemy team. there is no advantage.


dropping with a unit mate, randomly or otherwise doesn't confer any advantage either. I'm just as likely to link up and wolfpack with X or Y player than I know and play with as I am with someone with an arbitrary unit tag. And you'd better believe if I see player Z on my team I'm going to endeavour to keep them alive and support them as their survival will be invaluable to the win.

"Sync dropping" is a non existent boogeyman. It's only the visibility of player unit tags that stands out.

Edited by thievingmagpi, 27 May 2019 - 10:35 AM.

[John Bronco]

There is no advantage.

[RavenKnight86]

When going up against a 3 man and 2 man that admit to sync dropping and you get rolled 12-1. Yeah totally no advantage. Course guess this will bring out the obvious sync droppers.

[thievingmagpi]

RavenKnight86, on 27 May 2019 - 10:47 AM, said:

When going up against a 3 man and 2 man that admit to sync dropping and you get rolled 12-1. Yeah totally no advantage. Course guess this will bring out the obvious sync droppers.

They have the exact same chance of dropping with each other, as they do with any other random assortment of players.

[Y E O N N E]

12-1 rolls happen with or without sync dropping.

[FupDup]

Being able to hand-pick a competent teammate or teammates in a normally randomized matchmaker is an advantage when it does occur (you have to be daft to think that having a comp guy on your side is not an advantage over having a random potato in his place), but the kicker is that it doesn't occur very frequently and thus is not a particularly big issue in the grand scheme of things.

The larger issue is that the MM is unable to properly segregate player skill levels due to both a very flawed PSR system (namely the upward bias) and a low population. In theory, if both issues were fixed then high-skill sync-droppers wouldn't be dropping against potatoes and thus the issue would be entirely extinct. It's only a (rare) issue now because the MM puts potatoes and compies all in the same space.

[Novakaine]

Seriously now just stop.

[justcallme A S H]

RavenKnight86, on 27 May 2019 - 10:47 AM, said:

When going up against a 3 man and 2 man that admit to sync dropping and you get rolled 12-1. Yeah totally no advantage. Course guess this will bring out the obvious sync droppers.

And what if they are on opposite sides? Which has a 50/50 chance to happen.

Wooppsie. Found the gaping hope in your argument!!!



Thread gonna be locked soon anyway. Stop complaining about it. There is no advantage.

[HammerMaster]

Its a scumbag move.
PGI have said it IS an exploit then locks the thread.
Same people defend it time and again citing that nothing has or can be done.
TRASH.

Edited by HammerMaster, 27 May 2019 - 12:18 PM.

[Bulletsponge0]

justcallme A S H, on 27 May 2019 - 11:54 AM, said:

And what if they are on opposite sides? Which has a 50/50 chance to happen.

Wooppsie. Found the gaping hope in your argument!!!



Thread gonna be locked soon anyway. Stop complaining about it. There is no advantage.

There is an advantage when it works, none when it doesn't. Still doesn't stop some people from trying

[thievingmagpi]

Dropping with Joe Butt from my unit confers the same advantage as dropping with any other dude I may recognize who understands basic teamplay.

[Mister Glitchdragon]

I dunno, I think the important takeaway about it is that the population has hit such a low that it's viable to even try.

[justcallme A S H]

Bulletsponge0, on 27 May 2019 - 12:34 PM, said:

There is an advantage when it works, none when it doesn't. Still doesn't stop some people from trying

Prove it.

What you've said it just anecdotal, at best.

I regularly see units in Oceanic sync dropping. Might be as many as 3 or 4 of them on the same side.
And guess what? They still lose. I'm sure I've got plenty of screenshots to back that one up.

[East Indy]

I think it's a solid piece of evidence that one 2-man group on each side won't break Solo Queue, allowing a lot of players to introduce a lot of buddies to MWO in a low-pressure, enjoyable way.

[Sjorpha]

I personally have no problem with people doing some casual sync-dropping, it's just not a big deal.

But to claim "there is no advantage" I think is wrong. I depends on the numbers a bit but consider the following example:

2 players are sync dropping, they get on the same side about 50% of the time and opposite sides 50% of the time. There is no foul play such as throwing or information feeding or the like going on, they only coordinate when on the same team.

That means 50% of the matches there is 0 advantage, and 50% of the time there is advantage X, where X is the impact of their coordination. The net average advantage during their play session would be X/2, which is more than 0 so in the end sync dropping confers an advantage to them over time.

You can compare it to flipping a coin and getting a dollar for each heads and nothing for each tails, after 10 flips you'd have on average 5 dollars, which is more than 0. It will always be more than 0, there is no risk

If you add more players to the mix the maths become more complicated, but since there is no chance of a disadvantage the logic still holds. If you sometimes get an advantage and sometimes not the net result remains positive. And since the maximum possible advantage goes up with more players it compensates for the fact that you will get it less often than 50% with more players.

Compare to throwing a d6, you get 5 dollars on each roll of 6 and 0 on 1-5. You will always net positive amount of dollars.

Basically in terms of advantage gained sync dropping is a 0 risk small reward lottery with unlimited tries and a guaranteed positive outcome over time.

In order for the net average advantage to be 0 there would have to be a corresponding risk of a disadvantage, which there isn't.

Still, my position is that sync dropping is a complete non-issue and not worth complaining about or policing, I'm just pointing out the logical flaw of claiming there is "no advantage" because it's easily demonstrated that there is as per above.

[Y E O N N E]

There isn't typically any more coordination among syncs in the same team than among those syncs and randos. The only factor here us that people who sync are typically above average to begin with and actually respond to info and look at their minimaps, things they do anyway.

[HammerMaster]

You wan't to run with your unit buddy or stream buddy.
PRESS THE CREATE GROUP BUTTON.
PRESS THE LAUNCH GROUP BUTTON.
Regular quick play is a sewer to start. You're just adding more human waste.
Just because OTHER people are doing it with impunity doesn't make it right.

Edited by HammerMaster, 27 May 2019 - 01:14 PM.

[justcallme A S H]

HammerMaster, on 27 May 2019 - 01:12 PM, said:

You wan't to run with your unit buddy or stream buddy.
PRESS THE CREATE GROUP BUTTON.
PRESS THE LAUNCH GROUP BUTTON.
Regular quick play is a sewer to start. You're just adding more human waste.
Just because OTHER people are doing it with impunity doesn't make it right.

Once again showing how little you understand about the MWO landscape.

For approx 10-14hrs every day, group queue is so dead you cannot find games because of the issues surrounding the population, group size and matching.

[Sjorpha]

Y E O N N E, on 27 May 2019 - 01:07 PM, said:

There isn't typically any more coordination among syncs in the same team than among those syncs and randos. The only factor here us that people who sync are typically above average to begin with and actually respond to info and look at their minimaps, things they do anyway.

First of all, again, I agree that sync-dropping is a complete non-issue in MWO. It's always casual, doesn't cause any measurable damage, and on top of that even if we all thought it was a problem there would be no way to enforce a rule against it as there is no way to distinguish between a sync-drop and people randomly getting into the same match.

However, as fairness in understood in sports you only need a potential advantage for a practice to be considered unfair. Sync-dropping would be considered unfair in any serious competitive venue because there is the potential advantage of superior coordination, the fact that most sync-droppers are just casually bantering and playing and not really using that potential wouldn't be a factor in a strict evaluation of the fairness of sync-dropping, only potential advantage assuming maximum tryhard coordination would be considered, and as I demonstrated above that potential is a guaranteed positive value.

It's a non-issue because MWO quickplay is not a serious competitive venue, because the practice is too casual to cause problems, because there is no realistic way to enjoy quickplay with friends when GQ and FW is dead other than sync dropping, and because enforcing a rule would have more negative than positive consequences. It is not however a non-issue because there is "no advantage", because strictly speaking there is, just not enough to be a problem.

Edited by Sjorpha, 27 May 2019 - 01:27 PM.