277 replies to this topic

[Broceratops]

i expect a lot of complaints from pugstompers about the intelligence of the matchmaker, and a lot of praise from pugs

[Mackensen]

Wispsy, on 17 February 2013 - 06:28 AM, said:

Yeah lets put loads of really really bad players in with a few people who headshot a stationary mech every time they see it......Great thing to base matchmaking on!

Damage must be the best base for Elo. I want to get rid of players that are unable to make more than 100 damage points.

[Wispsy]

Mackensen, on 17 February 2013 - 06:33 AM, said:

Damage must be the best base for Elo. I want to get rid of players that are unable to make more than 100 damage points.

I have seen people kill 2 mechs solo under 100 damage.

You want to get rid of people who cannot aim at all...damage is not the best way for that, win/loss is better, people underestimate the difference one person makes :/

Edited by Wispsy, 17 February 2013 - 06:39 AM.

[Goose]

Mackensen, on 17 February 2013 - 06:13 AM, said:

Damage should be a better measurement of individual performance than win/loss that depends on the performance of the team.

Stay out of Conquest: You don't Get It

[Mackensen]

Wispsy, on 17 February 2013 - 06:37 AM, said:

I have seen people kill 2 mechs solo under 100 damage.

It is easy to move in and make the kills when others have done the damage.

[arghmace]

Let's assume I win 55% of pug battles. Let's further assume that I've only played 4 man premades since the last patch winning 95% of battles. Now my friends move to another game and I start pugging. Due to playing in a group my ELO is sky high and I'll be thrown against elite groups, really?

W/D is so highly influenced by groups that they should certainly be noted in the ELO calculation to avoid ridiculous outcomes.

EDIT: I guess I gotta buy some new untrained 'Mechs and pug like hell for the next couple of days to keep my ELO down.

Edited by arghmace, 17 February 2013 - 06:42 AM.

[Wispsy]

Mackensen, on 17 February 2013 - 06:39 AM, said:

It is easy to move in and make the kills when others have done the damage.

nono I mean solo kill, 2 people, without any help at all, with under 100 damage, on more then one occasion.

On another note, lrm and ssrm users would always be highest rated, does that mean people are more skilled for using lrms and ssrms?

[MischiefSC]

Vlad Ward, on 16 February 2013 - 10:34 PM, said:

People said all of this when Phase 2 was introduced. Then people realized they didn't actually want to be challenged, they just wanted to win games where there were "real bragging rights". When they found those opponents and got mercilessly beaten into the ground, they cried Cheese and went back to business as usual.

Granted, they won't have much of a choice with Phase 3, as the only way to reset your ELO is to make a new account that you can't transfer anything to/from. I just find the symmetry ironic.

Not only is this true but it's funny.

What makes Elo so brutal is that the only way to escape it is to completely start over with a new account. Give up everything; all stats, rating, MC purchased, all of it to start over.

The most competitive teams, the ones who actually do well in 8 mans, they are going to serve as infernal imps minding over the true layer of Elo hell.

See, I don't think the bubble is going to fit quite like 80bit suggests. A lot of pugs already keep a 50% win rate and with Elo they may play against better opponents but they'll also have a team full of better players. I think the buffer zone between higher end pugs and lower end teams will be pretty wide and comfortable.

No, it's the pug-farmers who will end up in the worst area of the bubble.

See, Elo generally has a cap. It also has diminishing returns based on relative skill. So a skilled opponent beating an unskilled one gains little while the unskilled losing to the skilled loses very little. What this will do is result in a top tier that is genuinely competitive against other competitive teams constantly farming the old pug-farmers who are now stuck in a trap of their own creation from which there is no escape.

Pug-farmers will get constantly demolished by the people they wanted to avoid in 8mans, game after game after game. They will lose very little and the elites will gain very little so this will play out for literally hundreds of games. When the pug-farmers lose enough they'll drop into matches against less skilled teams and pugs again, but a tiny number of wins (since they'll be against more equally rated opponents) will send them back up into the grinder of the elite teams.

This is a cycle that will just continue. The top teams will perpetually win more than 50% of their games since they are very few and won't effectively fill their own queue. They will be dropped against the tier 2 folks who got there via pug-farming and not actually talent or effort. It'll be a slaughter that never ends.

Result? Top folks win >50%, the old pug-farmers will be the only people in the game in a position to consistently lose more than they win.

Only way to escape?

Give up EVERYTHING. Everything they gained via pug-farming, sync 8-mans, all that.

It will be GLORIOUS.

[Broceratops]

arghmace, on 17 February 2013 - 06:39 AM, said:

Let's assume I win 55% of pug battles. Let's further assume that I've only played 4 man premades since the last patch winning 95% of battles. Now my friends move to another game and I start pugging. Due to playing in a group my ELO is sky high and I'll be thrown against elite groups, really?

W/D is so highly influenced by groups that they should certainly be noted in the ELO calculation to avoid ridiculous outcomes.

they are only taking into account the games since the last patch

[Manny Rhyde]

i had problems with ELO in the past. After roughly 150 matches in and unlocking my first character the game got really difficult. I was being dropped with people who actually knew how to play the game while i was switching between characters trying to keep up. I never want to experience this hell again but luckly i know this game alot better than any dota or LOL metagame. If anyone goes into this ELO hell i went though, please ask in game chat, the only bad thing you could experience is ridicule.

[Goose]

Carping about "kill stealing" in a game where Phocus Phire is a Pheature serves no purpose …

[Moonsavage]

As usual, everyone's forgotten that self-opinion of skill is always overrated.

Now the "I'm the best unless something's wrong with the game" people will blame ELO for not letting them stroke their egos.

[Broceratops]

Elo Hell is a myth. The concept that there is a level of low elo where results are so random that you cannot have any effect on them just means you are at your elo level. The term exists only because players at this level don't have the deductive reasoning to understand they're bad and they're being protected from higher ranks.

[Mycrus]

MischiefSC, on 17 February 2013 - 06:41 AM, said:

Not only is this true but it's funny. What makes Elo so brutal is that the only way to escape it is to completely start over with a new account. Give up everything; all stats, rating, MC purchased, all of it to start over..... Only way to escape? Give up EVERYTHING. Everything they gained via pug-farming, sync 8-mans, all that. It will be GLORIOUS....

or they can use joystickzzz to end up in the "under hive"... this is what i was secretly planning all along while gimping myself with a stick rather than pew pew with my G9x...

[MischiefSC]

Side note;

Expect the complaints on tiny balance issues to come by months end. All of a sudden all the people who think balancing is fine and perfect but suddenly find themselves literally dropping match after match against people who have utterly min/maxed the system to exploit every tiny advantage to win will come here and QQ brutally.

Mark my words.

Three months from now will come the 'remember the good old days....' threads. All the people who were winning 80% or more and KDRs over 4 or 5 are suddenly stuck, forever unless they put in a ton of effort, at about 40% win rate and a KDR of barely 1. Endlessly, relentlessly, inescapably unless they throw it all away and start over. They'll try to find some way to complain about it without coming out and saying they miss pug farming.

It'll be the rise of the pugs too. I drop with a couple of pug friends sometimes. Sometimes we even get 4 of us together. No VOIP, just chat. Last two days we played a little over 60 total games, of which we lost 8. 5 of which were due to us just screwing around with funny mech builds. We crushed premade teams and found that the other pugs we dropped with happily fell in with us since we were filling chat with communication.

Decent pugs will find they're dropped only with other decent pugs or premades. No longer hamstrung by rogue suicide squads, pigeon-scatter tactics and the like, people who refuse to use chat... no, I strongly suspect that you'll see the better pugs come into their own. All a premade group without VOIP does is act like pugs who use chat a lot. That'll spread and grow. It'll make the whole game better - except for the old pug farmers, for whom their is no escape.

Mycrus, on 17 February 2013 - 06:48 AM, said:

or they can use joystickzzz to end up in the "under hive"... this is what i was secretly planning all along while gimping myself with a stick rather than pew pew with my G9x...

lol. If someone has a high Elo from pug farming and wants to gimp themselves down they'd have to lose something like 150 or 200 games *back to back* and then never win more than 50% of their games again. If you play with a joystick that's fine - you'll end up playing with people you can still beat 50% of the time

[arghmace]

Broceratops, on 17 February 2013 - 06:42 AM, said:

they are only taking into account the games since the last patch

That's exactly the problem. This is a very short period of time. Maybe someone hasn't played at all in the last two weeks? Maybe someone has just pugged or just played premades lately even though usually he does both? The ELO that people start with is completely random when it's based on such a short period. Why not check the W/D ratio since the start of open beta?

[Goose]

Heh: So should Alt-F4'ng count as a loss, or a win?

[Mackensen]

arghmace, on 17 February 2013 - 06:39 AM, said:

Let's assume I win 55% of pug battles. Let's further assume that I've only played 4 man premades since the last patch winning 95% of battles. Now my friends move to another game and I start pugging. Due to playing in a group my ELO is sky high and I'll be thrown against elite groups, really?

W/D is so highly influenced by groups that they should certainly be noted in the ELO calculation to avoid ridiculous outcomes.

EDIT: I guess I gotta buy some new untrained 'Mechs and pug like hell for the next couple of days to keep my ELO down.

Yes, W/D is obviously not a good measurement of individual skill as you say. Elo should be calculated from other data.

[arghmace]

...or as an alternative let's everyone start with the average 1300 ELO. I really think that precalculating ELO within a period of just 2 weeks is a huge mistake. It's gonna throw people all over the scale regardless of their actual skill.

Mackensen, on 17 February 2013 - 07:02 AM, said:

Yes, W/D is obviously not a good measurement of individual skill as you say.

Well it would be if not for premades messing everything up.

[Jabilo]

I guess if the system works as intended everyone will have a win /lose ration of about 50% (apart from the very best and very worst players).

On this basis if you currently win less than 50% of your games you are going to love ELO.

If you currently win more than 50% of your games you are probably going to hate it.

This means we will see a lot of tears before bedtime no matter what. Expect forum hell next week one way or another!



Question:

Will the new matchmaker look at tonnage as opposed to weight class.

I.e. can you finally take a Dragon or Awesome without gimping your team by giving them a Catapult or Atlas?

Edited by Jabilo, 17 February 2013 - 07:19 AM.