Anomalocaris, on 20 February 2021 - 06:00 PM, said:
I think there is a lot to suggest this statement is generally true. The distribution of skill in MWO doesn't look like a Bell Curve IMO, it's a short tail on the high skill side and very thick long tail on the low skill side, partially due to the skill level of incoming players.
From what I've observed, a low skill group aggregating in Soup Queue is likely to have a bigger overall effect on team success than a high skill group is. IOW, a low skill group is more likely to cause a loss/stomp than a high skill group is to cause a win/stomp. Anecdotal of course, and PGI will never share any data with us.....
Yeah. So the issue is, how much are stomps caused by the randomness of the matchmaker? And how much by randomness of player choices? Let's consider a couple scenarios:
Say we have a group of 24 people, 12 of which are good for their tier and 12 of which are bad. They are then randomly distributed into teams. The team which gets more of the better players will generally win, within some margin. This is the model of how things work that most people seem to be operating on when discussing this stuff on the forums. The solution is to find ways for the matchmaker to better identify who is good and who is bad, and then distribute them more evenly. But what if this isn't what's actually causing the stomps?
Now consider that we have 24 people of all the same skill level, so their distribution between the teams doesn't matter. You drop them into a match. Each player on each team then randomly decides to go in direction A or B. On one team, it splits about evenly. On the other team, it splits 75/25%. So you end up with part of the map where 50% of team 1 is fighting 75% of team 2, and then you have the rest of the players scattered about, perhaps fighting each other. Team 2 will pretty much always win this, even though all the players in the match are about equally skilled players.
Now think about matches you've all been in. How often do you know that you're probably going to lose within the first 30 seconds just based on who is leaving spawn in which direction?
Of course, we can say that good players will know to stick together, and very good players will stick together AND do teamwork. But we also know that even good players do lots of strange stuff for various reasons. (For example, my performance is based heavily on time of day and how much i'm drinking. If you tried to look at my data and draw some conclusions, it won't work without controlling for this. And this is true of a lot of players.)
So in other words, people talk and think about this issue as if matches are decided based on distribution of player skill without taking into account the possibility of random factors. It'd be great if we had more data about stomp rates at different tiers. Obviously, stomp rates of t1's playing t5's is probably mostly skill difference and doesn't need much explaining. But what's the stomp rate of t5's vs t5's, and t1's vs t1's?