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Pilot Skill Versus "leaderboard"

Achievements Skills Balance

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#41 Leone

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Posted 16 May 2021 - 08:32 PM

View PostMadDach5und, on 16 May 2021 - 08:09 PM, said:

But that doesn't take any "SKILL" - right? Evading fire from 3 to 6 mechs and STILL dealing out damage is simply lazy piloting because the match is "Over", right?


Okay. So why weren't they doing that in the match? When it could swing the victory? Probably because they were trying to say outta the fight and farm damage. For PSR or something.

https://mwomercs.com...g-like-a-light/

View PostMadDach5und, on 16 May 2021 - 08:09 PM, said:

I don't mind the challenge sometimes, but I did get really fed up with fatties placing their *** against a wall in a corner the whole match and then blaming ME for the tie game we BOTH got because they refused to engage. Please tell me where there was SKILL involved in THAT baloney...


Sure. Or are you saying you were unskilled in choosing not to run out in front of an assault?

~Leone.

Edited by Leone, 16 May 2021 - 08:50 PM.


#42 lsp

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Posted 16 May 2021 - 09:55 PM

I've been playing this game off and on since beta and never cared about any of this.

#43 Horseman

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Posted 17 May 2021 - 03:48 AM

View PostMadDach5und, on 15 May 2021 - 09:09 PM, said:

After years of playing for free, building skills and C-bills and a fleet of about a dozen mechs -- I sunk a few REAL dollars into the game - buying custom camo, paint jobs and such.

My skill rating moved to Tier 4 overnight. After 3 years or so without ANY real change. Then it changed again, and I was up in Tier 3 within a week or so. Odd. My game play was still the same. After developing some skill and growing with the game, I made it slowly into upper Tier Two over the next year or so.

Then about a year ago the Pilot Skills were re-negotiated. My creep to almost Tier one was demoted to Low Tier Three. One weekend struggling with trial mechs to get an achievement left me in high Tier Four.

Then, I started linking in to Twitch TV and the live streamers who broadcast gaming thru their online channels. It was fun - and still is. I'm a regular watcher of several channels. I realized the concepts of forming group lances and trying to sync drop with them into matching games. But then I realized I couldn't sync with a lot of them because they are Tier 1.

SO I started working harder at games.

Here is where the Leaderboard comes in.

For years, I also largely ignored the Leaderboard. Most times when I bothered to look up my name, my rank was usually somewhere in the three to six-thousand range. Meh. Didn't care.

For the last year I have been trying my damndest to game the most damage or kills I can and raise my skill rating. I have improved dramatically - at least, so far as the "Leaderboard" is concerned. My current Leaderboard ranking is 569, which isn't terribly high, but for most of this last year I have been, month to month, well above the 1,000 rank - and I believe a few times in the Top 100. So far this month I have played 305 matches with an average match score of 238.

Pilot Rating doesn't give a sh1t. I have wallowed along that line of purgatory between Tier 3 and 4 for more than a year now - never being more than few wins or losses above or below that transition. All I know that the harder I try to move up, the harder it gets to move AT ALL.
Your leaderboard ranking since last year show that you've improved MASSIVELY - leaping from the bottom 30% to roughly middle of the pack. https://leaderboard....h?u=MadDach5und
Thing is, with last year's change to the scoring you need to consistently beat the average player in your matches to rise up.
You're good enough to not slide into T5 but you're not consistently getting enough score to rise above T3. Your win/loss ratio and KDR show there's quite some room for improvement - if you manage to survive a little longer and deal a little more damage, your average match scores will improve, and with them your chances of rising up the ranks.

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Many Are Tier One or Two Players. If you go by Leader Board stats, their monthly ranks are freaking two thousand, six thousand, ELEVEN thousand - playing only 20, 40 matches or maybe 100 tops. Yet their freaking pilot skill bars are maxxed Tier One ALL the time.
*points to his T1 badge*
This is enough to get to T1 and stay in T1:
https://leaderboard....arch?u=Horseman
https://leaderboard....=Horseman%20IIC (this is my 100% F2P alt account; yes, it is T1, so I find the correlation between paying and ranking that you've implied to be questionable at best)

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It appears to me Pilot Skill has turned into a kind of personal Credit Rating that can be Gamed by Tier One Players --
1. By controlling drops with joined friends and coordinated others
2. Playing assaults or mechs designed for max damage and likely kills
3. Playing the bare minimum of matches to maintain that rating.
4. Using Alt accounts to 'slum' drop and practice alternative designs so as not to taint their primary account

1. That's playing the game as designed.
2. That's playing the game as designed. Taking out the enemy's combat capability faster gives your team a bigger advantage.
3. Many of us have played the game for freaking years. I used to grind it night and day, as you can see on my leaderboard history - but, just like many other long timers, I've burned out a lot of my early enthusiasm and these days rarely play outside events.
4. That would vary by player. I guess some might be doing it, but others like myself are simply doing all the testing on their main account - let's not forget there's MechDB, various spreadsheets, the Testing Grounds etc to analyze your design before you actually drop into a live match.

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High Pilot Skills are based on controlling their environment before the match ever starts, not dealing with whatever gets tossed into the mix.
You're not wrong, it just doesn't mean what you think it does. They control their choice of a mech and build, they control their map vote and they control their knowledge of the map and likely enemy tactics.

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Leaderboards at least show an individual pilot's effort in their accomplishments, and are blind to history since they re-set every month.
You can view historic leaderboards both here and on leaderboard.isengrim.org (which scrapes the leaderboards from here and presents them in a format more suited for review of changes over time)

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The biggest hypocrisy being fed into this audience is that lower tiers are more 'fun' because of their unpredictability -- when many of them at the same time are doing everything they can to control their pristine primary accounts.

Hardly. High skill players dropping in low tier games stick out like a sore thumb. Let me point you again to the scores seen on Horseman IIC during my first few months with that account: the same performance that put me in the 80s on my T1 main account was enough to catapult my alt into top 1% when playing against T3-5 opponents and top 10% when playing against T2-4 - and I'm hardly a high skill player myself, it's just that the skill disparity was so large.

Edited by Horseman, 17 May 2021 - 03:50 AM.


#44 Horseman

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Posted 17 May 2021 - 05:01 AM

View PostMadDach5und, on 16 May 2021 - 10:01 AM, said:

Tier 1 games are "faster" is really a false statement. Lower tier matches may take longer to finish on average, but there has been plenty of Low-Tier matches that were pretty much over in the first minute and a half, due to predictably bad team movements and such.
Low-tier players will not exploit such mistakes as consistently and as hard as high-tier players tend to do.

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Four elite players 'slum' drop into lower tiers ALL the time, especially late at night when N American players are getting sparse. So that's not an an entirely true assumption, either.
You're T3. That means the current matchmaker WILL match you against T1 players - it's working as designed.

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Something to point out about these databases that can be gleaned from a quick scan ---
-- Top Pilots tend to be more strongly assault based than other sizes, so more credit is STILL given to more damage and kills versus scouting / objective / teamwork play
Damage and kills remove enemy assets from the board. The other aspects you've mentioned just put your team in a better position to do so but by and large will not win matches on their own (except playing the objectives if the rest of your team is able to hold out long enough against the enemt)

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-- I'm still on my ORIGINAL account with 15,000+ matches - MANY of those high ranked players are not near that kind of total, and I suspect many of them have started NEW accounts AFTER they established their game play. Not ALL, but many of them.
Entirely irrelevant after the PSR reset that took place last year.

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If Pilot Skill was all I cared about, I would open an ALT account and start anew. THAT IS key to making these averages push higher.
You'd stomp the T5 pugs for your first few weeks, then once you hit T3 you'd be in exactly the same position as you already are.

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Skill ranks SHOULD be timely to more recent performances, and not tied like a boat anchor to what we did as noobs years ago.
(...)
I want there to be a vector for improvement that can REALISTICALLY be achieved through more than just sheer damage and kills, and is NOT anchored down by performance while learning the game or play done years ago.
See: PSR reset. May 2020.
Your skill change is tied EXACTLY to your CURRENT performances against your CURRENT opponents and teammates. If it's not increasing fast enough for your liking, that's because you don't outperform them in the terms the game "understands".

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One stat that doesn't show anywhere - and I claim this with at least a crumb of pride - is that I have been the last player standing on my losing team far more often than not. Nobody gives a damn about surviving anymore. In fact, it's treated with a vast amount of disdain from impatient dead pilots who are mad about me not killing myself instead of figuring out a way to possibly win or at least do more damage to their team before I get taken down. I've entertained the crap outta people watching me survive, and I love them for their positive feedback. But the game itself doesn't do that. In ANY way whatsoever.
There are many things to unpack here. A lot of us have seen matches where a lone ******* assault in Zimbabwe is the last man standing simply because he took the wrong turn and never got in combat.
We have ALSO seen players who do this deliberately to farm KDR off surviving opponents, which is not a situation that should be in any way encouraged or rewarded.

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I really wonder how the game play would change if there was incentives to be the "Last Man Standing" or an "Alamo" award for getting kills while being pursued by half a team. THAT takes pilot skill, and it's certainly not easy to do with a 100 ton fatty that can barely move
If you are getting kills, you are getting rewards for those kills already.

View PostMadDach5und, on 16 May 2021 - 11:43 AM, said:

Sorry, but there's been disdain for not committing suicide by crossfire no matter WHAT condition. Play abut 10,000 more matches and you get to see practically everything - including YOURSELF becoming that same whiny jerkwad who accuses someone of 'not participating' because they are not a glowing red stick hopping on one leg.
That's down to idiots who don't understand that sharing armor / tanking in this game is more about attracting enemy fire than getting hit by said fire. This said, someone who is one hundred percent fresh and out of position where they could contribute anything to the match probably deserves every little bit of hate coming their way.

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Light mechs survive by NOT getting hit. At all. Scouts help the teams with spotting, tagging, NARCs and several other subtle distraction moves that don't deal damage or add to damage statistics. This game awards NONE of that with any real significance. I freaking love pairing a good NARC launching scout with a couple heavy missile boats. it's devastating to the other team. But it means one pilot gets NO love, aside from the seasoned pilots that bother to recognize the significance -- and it's practically impossible to GET that arrangement from a random free quick match without pre-setting a group drop to make it work.
If you're trying to run pure support in solo QP, that's a user error. Group up with other players, pack some weapons, skill for double arty strikes and equip them.

View PostMadDach5und, on 16 May 2021 - 12:37 PM, said:

Most Light mechs that get 400+ damage get it by scavenging already banged up mechs, not by scouting or any other team based strategy. I've played that way. It's not fun.
... or by dropping a well placed arty strike onto enemy positions.

View PostMadDach5und, on 16 May 2021 - 08:09 PM, said:

The surviving mech, provided they are a skillful enough pilot, can continue to evade AND shoot at multiple targets because they are all converging on them at once. Often with whiny crybabies complaining over coms that those extra 45 seconds are wasting THEIR time. Been there. Done that. And took three or four more mechs down while doing it. Often after half my team disconnected in disgust.

But that doesn't take any "SKILL" - right? Evading fire from 3 to 6 mechs and STILL dealing out damage is simply lazy piloting because the match is "Over", right?
It takes skill, certainly. The question is whether you did enough before it got to that point to make a difference - and your stats say you most likely don't.

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Dealing large damage from lights happens from positions of stealth and evasive angles, not by full frontal brawling.
Sure, so... why not do that?

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I have made the leaderboard on Solaris Division 7 (the Annihilator Division) in an Arctic Wolf. It's a ***** to do. Please take note how many pilots in the top 50 are piloting anything less than 80 tons in that division. I don't mind the challenge sometimes, but I did get really fed up with fatties placing their *** against a wall in a corner the whole match and then blaming ME for the tie game we BOTH got because they refused to engage. Please tell me where there was SKILL involved in THAT baloney...
It's a tie. Half of the blame IS yours for not figuring out a way to bait them out of position.

#45 Commoners

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Posted 18 May 2021 - 03:23 PM

I regularly drop in actual violently unreedemable trash mechs like gauss rifle piranhas, lbx20 firestarters, dual AC20 blackjacks, single machine gun atlases, no leg armor stealth fafnirs, all back armor kodiaks, rocket archers, etc. Sometimes I get into a game and I start yelling "I AM SCOUTING" while beelining directly into the enemy team's NASCAR loop alone and do 200 damage before dying an ignoble idiot death.

I still maintain a full tier 1 bar because despite my shortcomings in good decision making I still understand the fundamentals of the game and run a positive win rate and kill/death ratio. I feel most effective when I'm piloting lights and light mediums like the cicada, though I feel comfortable in pretty much all of the mechs. I've not dropped in a group for actual years now.

The old PSR system was literally just an experience bar where you would only go up and never down, so anyone with enough time and gumption could reach tier 1 regardless of actual player skill or contribution to games.

The current one actually seems to function like a tier system where you will settle where you settle in a pretty accurate way. You have to snatch the skill rating out of someone else's hands to add to your own, it's closer to a zero sum game. I got to reclimb the ladder from T5 when PSR was reset and I can very honestly say that the sliding scale of player skill felt extremely tangible on the way up.

T5 I could take literally anything into a match and score kills, and if I took anything close to resembling a meta mech it tore through the masses like wet tissue paper. My 20-25 tonners were actually invulnerable because no one could aim unless they had streaks, and sometimes they couldn't lock onto me if me wiggled around enough.

A T1 game a few hours ago I had Bows3r snap headshot me in my firestarter with dual light gauss and dual ppcs in his torso mounts while I was jumpjetting and twisting and he was also twisting, and only lived to slap him a few more times because I had the armor maxed out on my face. He is just one of several players that I often see that pull off tricks like that regularly enough that they stop feeling like tricks.
As to your conclusions:

High pilot tier ratings CAN be based on controlling the environment before ever dropping. You are correct. Some matches are won out of the mechlab because some pilots drop in an atlas with one machinegun and all back armor while some are bringing actually proven and tested optimized mech builds. Some people make well-coordinated group drops with their mechs and playstyles synergizing well together.

High pilot tier ratings can also be because the player in question understands game fundamentals and executes well on them, where it doesn't really matter what happens in the mix because they have that large of a magnitude on the game outcome.

The leaderboards don't really mean too much because you can interpret whatever information you want out of the data. It has a whole lot of people with sample sizes small enough that they can't really normalize. It doesn't take a lot of things into account and just ends up being a bunch of gobbledygook numbers.
The lower tiers end up being more 'fun' for higher tier players because they can just let loose and watch crazy **** happen while on a tier-safari that they would never see happen in games where people understand what they're doing in the mechlab.

Edited by Commoners, 18 May 2021 - 03:53 PM.


#46 Doctor Fission

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Posted 18 May 2021 - 05:08 PM

I got fully maxed tier 1 by running 85% solo, and doing 60+ matches a day. I was stuck bouncing between tiers 2 and 3 for a few weeks, then suddenly I got traction and zipped up. No gaming of the system at all, just a lot of practice.

That being said, if I could stay at Tier 5 and club seals all day... I might consider it. You can have my Tier 1 if you want. :)

#47 Jackofallpots

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Posted 18 May 2021 - 05:18 PM

i'd go insane (more so) if i played 60 matches a day

#48 Vxheous

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Posted 18 May 2021 - 05:43 PM

View PostDoctor Fission, on 18 May 2021 - 05:08 PM, said:

I got fully maxed tier 1 by running 85% solo, and doing 60+ matches a day. I was stuck bouncing between tiers 2 and 3 for a few weeks, then suddenly I got traction and zipped up. No gaming of the system at all, just a lot of practice.

That being said, if I could stay at Tier 5 and club seals all day... I might consider it. You can have my Tier 1 if you want. :)


Yikes, 60+ games a day. I hit Tier 1 with 60 games played total.

#49 Doctor Fission

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Posted 18 May 2021 - 05:51 PM

View PostJackofallpots, on 18 May 2021 - 05:18 PM, said:

i'd go insane (more so) if i played 60 matches a day


Well actually... *twitch*

#50 Vlad Ward

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Posted 18 May 2021 - 05:54 PM

The folks who got reset in December had a much longer slog up to T1 - especially given they also increased the max PSR to 5000 (and thus the spread in each tier).

Edited by Vlad Ward, 18 May 2021 - 05:55 PM.


#51 Vxheous

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Posted 18 May 2021 - 06:23 PM

View PostVlad Ward, on 18 May 2021 - 05:54 PM, said:

The folks who got reset in December had a much longer slog up to T1 - especially given they also increased the max PSR to 5000 (and thus the spread in each tier).


Testing this with an Alt right now, I hit Tier 2 at 115 games played from Tier 5 start. Estimating I'll hit tier 1 at about 145-150 total games played at current Average match score (the alt has been playing tier 1 games since hitting tier 3, and as solo, my matchscore is >450 average) Win or lose, I think i've down arrowed a grand total of 3 times during this test.

Edited by Vxheous, 18 May 2021 - 06:27 PM.


#52 Vlad Ward

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Posted 18 May 2021 - 06:55 PM

View PostVxheous, on 18 May 2021 - 06:23 PM, said:


Testing this with an Alt right now, I hit Tier 2 at 115 games played from Tier 5 start. Estimating I'll hit tier 1 at about 145-150 total games played at current Average match score (the alt has been playing tier 1 games since hitting tier 3, and as solo, my matchscore is >450 average) Win or lose, I think i've down arrowed a grand total of 3 times during this test.


150 sounds about right.

#53 Horseman

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Posted 19 May 2021 - 04:12 AM

View PostDoctor Fission, on 18 May 2021 - 05:51 PM, said:

Well actually... *twitch*
Sanity is for the weak.

#54 martian

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Posted 19 May 2021 - 05:10 AM

View PostHorseman, on 19 May 2021 - 04:12 AM, said:

Sanity is for the weak.


"I feel the warp overtaking me... it is a good pain!"

#55 Grus

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Posted 20 May 2021 - 05:11 AM

Slow clap* well put OP.

#56 Vxheous

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Posted 20 May 2021 - 06:35 AM

View PostGrus, on 20 May 2021 - 05:11 AM, said:

Slow clap* well put OP.


I tried to convince Carl Vickers to ask PGI for his posting perms back so he could post a pic of a potato for old times sake, but he didnt want to.





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