76 replies to this topic

[Jman5]

For anyone who hasn't seen it: Paul Inouye has been kind enough to outline some of their plans for Phase 3 Matchmaking:

http://mwomercs.com/...65#entry1626065
http://mwomercs.com/...51#entry1639451


Creating a fair matchmaking system is always a struggle especially when you factor in a portion of your playerbase will do everything in their power to abuse it to their advantage.

A lot of it is still unknown, but I thought I would point out some of the issues PGI will have to consider before they release this to the public.

Purposefully sinking your ELO to fight noobs and win more.

In some games the term is called Lossbotting. Players will spam lose matches until the matchmaker starts placing them against legitimately bad players. He then wins 10-20 games in a row and then follows up by spam losing 10-20 in a row. Once they've made it to noob-ville, they maintain a 50% win percentage so they never leave.

Bringing in the dedicated loss botter(s) to sink your team's overall ELO average

So your team is starting to face off against the real opponents and you're struggling to get a win. What do you do? You all blame cheesy builds and bring in your buddy with the ELO score of zero to lower your team's overall average. Ideal scenario would be to bring in enough zero ELO people sink it down to 1300 where the noobs start. The fact that you have teams of 8, means it's easy to subtly switch one or two players in and out to keep your ELO artificially low.

If I were PGI, I would consider creating some sort of fudging effect where you take the highest and lowest rated players and give them less impact on the average.

Smurfing

Smurfing is the term for creating a fresh account so that your ELO is back to noob-level. You then face off against a bunch of legitimate scrubs and wipe the floor with them. I honestly have no idea how PGI could combat this, but it's something they should keep in mind. If this becomes rampant, it will just ruin the beginner experience.

Incentives to Abuse the Matchmaker

Basically, the more of these that exist, the more pressure there will be to abuse matchmaker:

• More Money/Experience for beating a higher rated team: if the game rewards upsets, people will artificially create upsets by lowering their team's ELO.
  
• Achievements/Fluff Rewards: In Starcraft 2, there were people who lost games to bring their ELO to the lowest point possible where only the ultra terrible and other farmers existed. They then traded wins with each other to farm achievements and portraits for their accounts. This trivialized many of the impressive achievements out there. If MWO creates stuff like bobbleheads for 1000 wins or something. People will farm them.
  
• Letting really good players match against mediocre players: If you have 4 really good players paired with 4 really bad players. They will almost always win against 8 mediocre players. be careful about people stacking teams.
  
• 4 man premade rated the same as 4 pugs: If a team of 4 premades are rolling an 8 man pug and are treated the same as 4 random pugs, you're going to have trouble with fair matchmaking. There should be some sort of temporary boost to their ELO to face them against slightly tougher PUGs. Of course ideally the matchmaker would try to split premades in the search queues up evenly and against one another.

[hammerreborn]

The one counter I see to smurfing is the fact that they'll be rolling in trial mechs unless they win/lose their way to the mech of their choice. A fully custom mech for 8 man premades will run 10-20 mil, and thats a lot of games to be racked up, especially with the new rewards system (if the guy plays so bad to lose everygame at 25k a match thats 400 matches minimum purposefully throwing the game doing nothing). The best bet would just be tagging for assists all game but as we all know a guy doing nothing but trolling brings down the entire team.

[Purlana]

I don't see the point? They intentionally lose matches so that they can win easy matches later?

Edited by Purlana, 20 December 2012 - 01:05 PM.

[DeathofSelf]

So people will purposefully lose in order to win more, then have to lose more to once again win more? Yeah doesn't make sense.

What advantage would you have to creating a new account and starting from scratch? Number one everyone starts at the middle (elo wise) and number 2 you can't transfer C-bills, MC, or mechs between accounts.

Edited by DeathofSelf, 20 December 2012 - 01:05 PM.

[Ozric]

We should call in the Urbanmechs before it's too late...

[themoob]

Smurfing is a non-issue for MWO anyway.

It's not like an RTS where everyone gets the same stuff anyway.

[IceSerpent]

I am at a loss too - all three "abuses" listed by OP make no sense whatsoever, in other words what's the point of going through all that trouble when equal ELO ratings already imply 50% chance of winning?

Edited by IceSerpent, 20 December 2012 - 01:11 PM.

[Jman5]

hammerreborn, on 20 December 2012 - 01:01 PM, said:

The one counter I see to smurfing is the fact that they'll be rolling in trial mechs unless they win/lose their way to the mech of their choice. A fully custom mech for 8 man premades will run 10-20 mil, and thats a lot of games to be racked up, especially with the new rewards system (if the guy plays so bad to lose everygame at 25k a match thats 400 matches minimum purposefully throwing the game doing nothing). The best bet would just be tagging for assists all game but as we all know a guy doing nothing but trolling brings down the entire team.

Well, thanks to the new Cadet Bonus feature, smurf accounts would get an accelerated 100% C-bill bonus for the first 25 game. Add to the fact that your ranking can only go up by a maximum of 50 points per game. Means you could kick *** at noob-level for the first 25 games or so and get 200k+ per round. That's over 5,000,000 c-bills.

So if I were smurfing, I would start by kicking butt in the first 25 games. Then bot-loss a bunch to bring the score back down.

[Elepole]

I do not care, i want this ELO thing in anyway, i don't to play only 2 battles a week because of bad team mate (which is what is happening for me in WoT)

[Trauglodyte]

I'd say that win trading might be the bigger overall concern. There will always be people trying to get past the system and they will always suck, regardless of what they really think.

[Jman5]

Elepole, on 20 December 2012 - 01:13 PM, said:

I do not care, i want this ELO thing in anyway, i don't to play only 2 battles a week because of bad team mate (which is what is happening for me in WoT)

I want ELO as well. I'm just listing some potential pitfalls the developers should look out for.

Purlana, on 20 December 2012 - 01:04 PM, said:

I don't see the point? They intentionally lose matches so that they can win easy matches later?

Yup. The point is you lose quickly potentially through bots. And when you feel like actually playing, you are only faced up against noobs. Just look at all the people who could easily get an 8-man premade together, but instead go for the 4-man pugstomp. A lot of people want easy wins and they will use any excuse to justify it.

Edited by Jman5, 20 December 2012 - 01:19 PM.

[PANZERBUNNY]

That's a lot of energy being spent on thinking about things you can't effect, like people making new accounts and people losing on purpose, if they are really determined.

Play with people you know. Problem solved.

Many issues are solved by you acting.

[IceSerpent]

Jman5, on 20 December 2012 - 01:12 PM, said:

Well, thanks to the new Cadet Bonus feature, smurf accounts would get an accelerated 100% C-bill bonus for the first 25 game. Add to the fact that your ranking can only go up by a maximum of 50 points per game. Means you could kick *** at noob-level for the first 25 games or so and get 200k+ per round. That's over 5,000,000 c-bills.

So if I were smurfing, I would start by kicking butt in the first 25 games. Then bot-loss a bunch to bring the score back down.

What's your gain? You would normally win about half of the matches at your true ELO level. In your scenario you first win a bunch, then bot-lose a bunch, which gives you roughly the same 50% W/L ratio.

[hammerreborn]

Jman5, on 20 December 2012 - 01:12 PM, said:

Well, thanks to the new Cadet Bonus feature, smurf accounts would get an accelerated 100% C-bill bonus for the first 25 game. Add to the fact that your ranking can only go up by a maximum of 50 points per game. Means you could kick *** at noob-level for the first 25 games or so and get 200k+ per round. That's over 5,000,000 c-bills.

So if I were smurfing, I would start by kicking butt in the first 25 games. Then bot-loss a bunch to bring the score back down.

25 rounds should amount to 8 million by dev math with the new economy, but that's not even enough for an atlas. And if you get a jenner even, not nearly enough to even put in the XL engine. You just have to do so much extra work just to get to the starting point that I don't think smurfing will really effect anything.

Now, when CW is released, I'm sure people will abuse that by having multiple accounts and win trading cities away from their main ones, but I'm sure that will be addressed at some point.

[DeathofSelf]

Jman5, on 20 December 2012 - 01:12 PM, said:

Well, thanks to the new Cadet Bonus feature, smurf accounts would get an accelerated 100% C-bill bonus for the first 25 game. Add to the fact that your ranking can only go up by a maximum of 50 points per game. Means you could kick *** at noob-level for the first 25 games or so and get 200k+ per round. That's over 5,000,000 c-bills.

So if I were smurfing, I would start by kicking butt in the first 25 games. Then bot-loss a bunch to bring the score back down.

To what end though? I mean think about it. The purpose of the match maker is to put you on a level playing field, a 50/50 chance of winning. So why would you purposefully lose a bunch of games just to win a bunch, it makes no sense.

Edit: my brain hurts

Edited by DeathofSelf, 20 December 2012 - 01:20 PM.

[Broceratops]

hopefully there wont be that many of these guys. or if there are, they'll end up playing each other.

[Elepole]

Jman5, on 20 December 2012 - 01:15 PM, said:

I want ELO as well. I'm just listing some potential pitfalls the developers should look out for.

Not of them concern me, i attend as soon as the stage 3 is in to win and kill as much as possible to get matched against good player so i can have a blast thinking and finding efficient way to drive my mechs. I won't noobstomp since it's boring, and people faking their ELO to noobstomp won't see me anyway.

[Buck Cake]

Once elo is in it becomes the main feature of the game.

[Broceratops]

Jman5, on 20 December 2012 - 01:15 PM, said:

I want ELO as well. I'm just listing some potential pitfalls the developers should look out for.




Yup. The point is you lose quickly potentially through bots. And when you feel like actually playing, you are only faced up against noobs. Just look at all the people who could easily get an 8-man premade together, but instead go for the 4-man pugstomp. A lot of people want easy wins and they will use any excuse to justify it.

I dunno man I think that's mostly because they value their stats so much, so losing intentionally will still be pretty bad for them. I guess we'll see.

Edited by Broceratops, 20 December 2012 - 01:28 PM.

[Jman5]

DeathofSelf, on 20 December 2012 - 01:19 PM, said:

To what end though? I mean think about it. The purpose of the match maker is to put you on a level playing field, a 50/50 chance of winning. So why would you purposefully lose a bunch of games just to win a bunch, it makes no sense.

Edit: my brain hurts

You are putting too much emphasis on win percentage. These people don't care that their win percentage is 10%, 50%, or 100%.

The point is to sink their ELO so that when they are playing to win, it's against bad players and beginners. When they start facing real competition, they lose on purpose to sink back down.

Look, I'm not just pulling this out of my ***. I have seen this so many times in competitive online games. What is going to happen is that people who want to abuse it will most likely create an alternate account that is their "casual account" and use it to bully noobs. Or bring it along to lower their 8-man's average ELO.

Edited by Jman5, 20 December 2012 - 01:30 PM.