8 replies to this topic

[Redoxin]

Supposedly next Tuesday the 3^rd phase of matchmaking will be enabled. As described by the devs (http://mwomercs.com/...79-matchmaking/) every player will get an Elo score. The average Elo of a team describes its probability to win. If you win against players of similar Elo, your Elo rises and you get matched against better opponents, the other way around if you lose. The final goal is to get everybody to a win probability of 50%, so that there are more even games.
So far there don’t seem to be any plans to generate a ladder from this Elo or even show it to the players.

My issues with this are as follows:
If the system works as it should, players will always win about 50% of their games, no matter what they do. If you try hard and play better, you just get better opponents until you lose again. If you don’t give a **** , mess around and lose, you get weaker opponents (or opponents that don’t care themselves) so that you will soon win again. What’s the point of even trying to win then? With this system there is literally no incentive to try to do your best.

This also means that your income of C-bills no longer depends on your performance. Over a longer period of games, everybody will roughly earn the same amount of C-bills per game, irrespective of what he does in the games. Time invested will be the only major factor that influences C-bills earned. This is a huge difference from now, where your performance is very important for your C-bill income. It is also an important issue, because C-bills are in a way worth real money, as you can pay for a C-bill bonus.

What has to be done about these problems in my opinion:

• The minimum thing that has to be done is show the Elo to the player. This would mean the player would at least know how well he is doing. If he improves, this will be reflected by rising Elo. Without this, he would never know if he improves or not, as his win percentage would always stay at around 50%. He might actually do really good, get better and better opponents, but not even realize this and feel bad about losing so often, if the Elo is not shown.

• Even better would be to create a ladder from the Elo, which comprises all players. It doesn’t need to be a ladder of Elo per se; some point system that derives from it might also be ok. Some kind of ladder is used in all games that I know of that use an Elo system for matchmaking (for example Sc2 or LoL). This would create a much bigger incentive to win and would increase competition by a lot.

• Even with a ladder that provides incentive to try to win, the problem remains that every player will earn about the same amount of C-bills per game, no matter if he tries to play well or not. To alleviate this, there could be a (maybe small) bonus in C-bills earned for the player the higher his Elo is. For example, for every 100 Elo above the average 1300, the player would get a bonus of 5% on the C-bills earned per match. So players at 1600 Elo would earn 15% more than the average players at 1300 Elo. This would still be a way smaller C–bill advantage for the good players than now, but it’s something at least.

These were all my points about this; I hope PGI will address some of them. Please share your own opinions.
Also, excuse my mediocre wording and grammar, English is not my first language.

Edited by Redoxin, 16 February 2013 - 08:07 AM.

[Regrets]

I don't think there are enough players for there to be a true 50/50 chance of win, taking in mind the weight class matching. The goal of an elo system is to reward players for winning matches they shouldn't, aka trying to win. It is a positive move.

The current matchmaker is bad for pubbers. Hopefully the new queue pairs teamers with nubcakes and something resembling reasonable matches commence. Maybe ELO isn't perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than the 'stomp the noobs' system. Even if you argue that teaming is not as common as everyone suggests, it is for sure a huge advantage. Do you want a very easy method for giving one team a big advantage in your game? Even if it isn't abused, it is an abuse-able advantage.

While I don't mind the idea of a ladder, just make a elo +whatever rating, so only players who 'want to win' will queue up. This way the normal queue works as intended. If there are enough high elo players then they can queue the ladder, similar to an 8v8 queue.

In the ELO system can you zerg every match, die, weight your team down, eventually get paired with stronger teammates that have to carry you? Sure, but what the heck is the point in that. You will also still be penalized in cbills/xp for damage, kills and so on. ELO system doesn't give you any incentive to team kill to get to 0 ELO as fast as possible, because you will have wasted a bunch of time where you could have gotten more by playing the dang game and trying to win.

Also, I don't know if you have tried laddering in Starcraft, but the match maker there assures you will often get whooped. While this isn't good for soft minded teamers who want to get their stomp on every match, tell themselves how great they are - that they win every match. The starcraft matchmaker however is quite good for all skill level players who want to have competitive and challenging matches. A silver player is a challenging opponent to a bronze level guy. Yes they are both noobs, but they will be challenged by the game and their opponents most matches.

What is better, lots of uneven matches where one team farms the other team for 15 minutes, or lots of matches where both sides have to work for their win? It isn't a tough choice for me. If someone comes up with something better than ELO, I'm all for it. Until then Merry Christmas, ding dong the teamers are dead, free at a last free at last, thank god almight, we're free at last.

Edited by Regrets, 16 February 2013 - 08:44 AM.

[Redoxin]

Oh well I know some would misunderstand my post, no matter how clearly I tried to word it.
I dont have a problem with an Elo system. I think its a great improvement for MWO. Its great if everybody has a challenge and wins about 50%.
The problem here is that the Elo is not shown to the players, and that there is no form of ladder. This means there is zero incentive to try to rise in Elo.

Maybe you understand the problem better, if you imagine your Starcraft example with a total absence of any ladder. Players would still win and lose, everybody about 50%, no matter if bronze or diamond. They just would not know how well they are doing. They would float in some kind of vacuum, without any knowledge about their level of play.

If a player continuesly improves and rises from bronze level play to gold level or whatever, he would never know, because he would still only win 50%.

Edited by Redoxin, 16 February 2013 - 09:06 AM.

[Regrets]

I think by definition when you go up or down above the starting point you have won or lost >50% of matches. So if the starting was 1200 and you have 1201 then you have won more points than lost. If your ELO is higher than your skill, then your ELO will go down. If better than it will go up. If it's accurate and both teams paired are even, then yes you should break even on ELO points.

For example, lots of hardcore SC2 players are still laddering, but about 6 months ago many of the noobs left. My league went down cause of this. If the Diamond player isn't in the top 18% of players, he will not be a diamond player for long even if its just because worst 50% of players left the game. If the players in the top 10% don't stay in the top 10% then their ELO goes down, it is as simple as that.

If the low ELO player doesn't win as many as his weighted opponent, then his ELO will go down further. If I have a high ELO and I don't carry my team then I'm not going to be a high ELO player much longer.

[Regrets]

Redoxin, on 16 February 2013 - 07:59 AM, said:

So far there don’t seem to be any plans to generate a ladder from this Elo or even show it to the players.

Ah I see this point, I agree players should know their ELO score.

[Stringburka]

I do not agree that there would be no reason to try to play (I'm of the naive belief that people play the game because they enjoy playing the game, not because they enjoy looking at the end of the game screen) and do not agree that c-bill gain would be equal for those doing nothing (since you get c-bill bonuses based on damage, kills, component destruction etc), but I agree that knowing one's ELO would be nice. I like checking my K/D ratio even though I know it affects nothing.

Edited by Stringburka, 16 February 2013 - 09:34 AM.

[Donas]

I dont really care to know the Elo number of me or anyone else, I want to have fun challenging games. If I have a 50/50 win ratio for the rest of my life, but all of the games are challenging and fun? I'm good with it. I'm a good enough sport to understand that the guys across from me are working just as hard as I am. I can also appreciate when the guy across from me pulls off something (whether its marksmanship or tactically) that completely changes the tone of a given fight to his teams advantage and praise him for it. With an effective Elo/tonnage combo-matchmaker, the chances of having close fought, tough matches goes way up. There will still be blowout matches because things happen, and those will be fun from time to time.

On a side note, there is a real validity to the 'not knowing where you stand' within the whole of the fighting community based on wins/losses. I train fighters ( not MWO ) and effective matchmaking is a double edged sword. One one hand, fighting an opponent that is very close to your level speeds your learning curve DRASTICALLY, but it also provides little immediate measurable feedback to where you are in the pecking order. It all boils down to ego. Are you here to have fun, fight in hard fought, challenging, dramatic matches? or are you here so that you can carry the patch of 'lambaster of all I survey' on your sleeve... Cuz the guys down at the superlow end of the Elo scale, when fighting among their peers are having a GREAT time. Just as the guys on the top end are when fighting among their peer group.

[Woska]

I'm not sure how having more challenging opponents removes your incentive to try harder? Wouldn't it be the other way around? What would your reason to try harder if half the time you ended up against teams so bad they shot each other to death before you got there?

The reason they're not showing everyone the rankings is to provide some flexibility in matchmaking. If your rating was particularly high compared to your team, they wouldn't be able to put you in that team if you were right away going to look at your team mates rankings and give up.

Either way, I think it will be an improvement over the current system. Will it need to be adjusted? Probably, but that's all part of the process.

[Void2258]

We are forgetting the huge scew generated by the lack of universal, integrated voice chat. Those teams that have it are virtually guaranteed to win a match against a team without it, regardless of skill level. No person without at least 8 friends they can regularly launch with using teamspeak, Skype etc. can possibly maintain a good W/L ratio while this factor is in play. Without integrated chat, ELO is meaningless as anything other than a system for giving people with friends good scores and people who PUG bad ones.