Ranking Nonsense - Living in Parallel Universes

[calmon]

With this topic I try to explain the paradoxes around outwitters ranking system.

The big problem is that the game uses two completely different mechanism to reflect player ranking, one 'official' pointsystem for the ladder and one hidden Skillsystem were matchmaking and point increase/decrease is based on. This 2 systems drift away massively!

The big painpoints:

Players on Top of the hidden Skill List get matched up against each other and NOT against the players around his place in the pointlists! Wich means 1st of pointbased division may far worse than 15th and the 15th is not able to even get a matchup with 1st because 15th skill is far better to get matched with the worse 1st.
So if the 15th is in reality better, get match ups with equal skill level player why did he have a far worse official ranking? And why is it so much more difficult to increase his points (better players as opponents). A paradox!

Players like Reggae King in my division (13th with 284 points) is 7th in the top100 list. This guy is now in 7 games against me (3rd pointwise with 1.299 points, 8th in top100). So this means while the 1st in my division (wonderpug with 1.370 points and 94th in top 100) get machtups against players around his 94th-skill ranking the 14th of the point list needs to play against me exclusively? Reggae King is good so why the official ranking is not reflecting it (like the hidden list does!)?
Instead in case he will ever get matched with wonderpug and he would win 1 game and lose 1 game he would have a point increase near 0 while wonderpug would get some points out of it because the increase/decrease of points is based on the hidden skill ranking (in case of 2 equal skilled players one win and one loss would both give a small increase pointwise). 2nd Paradox.

Third problem and in moment MY biggest problem: I don't get any match ups at all! See this thread. I've 5 games now in queues since 36 hours! I even have less than 20 games now so I could fill more games in this queue.
Also I play 3 different players exclusively: (Alvendor, ReggaeKing and another one). Nobody else! The matchmaking seems far to strict.

In moment the best way to came out of this is... LOSING! Losing isn't bad here, it would help going top in my division! If I give up all my games I would lose a lot of points sure but after that I'm out of top100 probably and so I COULD play, have far better win chance and my pointloss get topped by a far better point win: remember the fact that winning give around 50% more points on avarage than the losing player lose.
When I need to lose to increase in ranking (or even to find opponents) this makes it clearly paradox number 3.

All in all I'm dissatisfied about this system actually and hopefully the developers get aware of the problem soon. In moment I feel like living in one prallel universe filled with some people from different divisions and random point rankings. Other parallel universes exists with other players with random points rankings as well.

[whoTookYoste?!]

This system reflects an actual perception into what you're complaining about. (most games do NOT take this take on the ranking system).

The game has just been released and TRULY tested.
Your criticism is necessary, but there's no need for being "disappointed" by the system.
This is how things evolve.

[calmon]

Well sorry. I exchanged the word 'dissappointed' with 'dissatisfied'. I'm not english native and I've often the problem to find the right adjective and 'dissatisfied' fits better.

Hopefully the rest is constructive enough because it was the sense of my post to make exisisting problems visible and to help getting things envolved.

[Kamikaze28]

Thank you for taking the time to put your thoughts into order. I sympathize with your situation even though I am not affected by the same problems you are.
Like whoTookYoste?! said, the whole ranking and matchmaking system could not be properly tested during beta because of the slot limitation of iOS. We do have a long thread in the beta forums about the confusing nature of the point system, leagues and divisions and the bottom line in that thread is just what I said: we have wait and see how it evolves after release - remember, this was during beta with ~70 players total.
Now that the system has been running for quite a while the devs can start to identify the weaknesses which would never have become apparent during beta and start to fix them. As far as I know, the league and matchmaking system can be tweaked without an update to the app itself.

I know this is no consolation to you, but we can all look forward to this system becoming better over time. Have patience.

[ArtNJ]

Time to go try Hero Academy again Calmon. The excellent ELO based League is Hero Academy's biggest advantage. Also keep in mind that Great Big War Game uses ELO, and Uniwar uses an ELOish system of undisclosed mechanics. So you can "vote with your feet" if you feel necessary, or, to put it less dramatically, just play more than one while you monitor the long term situation.

[Harti]

(08-05-2012 09:31 PM)ArtNJ Wrote:  Time to go try Hero Academy again Calmon. The excellent ELO based League is Hero Academy's biggest advantage. Also keep in mind that Great Big War Game uses ELO, and Uniwar uses an ELOish system of undisclosed mechanics. So you can "vote with your feet" if you feel necessary, or, to put it less dramatically, just play more than one while you monitor the long term situation.

-1 and reported for advertising. As a beta tester, you should rather support the game than tell the people to go away if they don't like it...


ELO is no better than the system we currently have. It's well established and works for SC2 as well.
I understand that the points are currently a bit off but that's due to the nature of the system. Before it can grasp our true skill, it feels that we should get 20ish points for winning. Some peeps' skills have been determined far earlier because they kept beating good players, so they get fewer points all in all.

But with the planned seasoning this shouldn't be much of an issue. Once the ladder points are reset and your rating stays the same it will deliver a much more significant result.

With an ELO system, I'd be completely afraid to play ANY more when I read something about being the 5th best player out of like 200k. I'd be afraid to get paired against an ELO 1500 player and if I lost I went down from like 2100 to 1900 or something. That sucks.

[ArtNJ]

(08-05-2012 09:58 PM)Harti Wrote:  

(08-05-2012 09:31 PM)ArtNJ Wrote:  Time to go try Hero Academy again Calmon. The excellent ELO based League is Hero Academy's biggest advantage. Also keep in mind that Great Big War Game uses ELO, and Uniwar uses an ELOish system of undisclosed mechanics. So you can "vote with your feet" if you feel necessary, or, to put it less dramatically, just play more than one while you monitor the long term situation.

-1 and reported for advertising. As a beta tester, you should rather support the game than tell the people to go away if they don't like it...


ELO is no better than the system we currently have. It's well established and works for SC2 as well.
I understand that the points are currently a bit off but that's due to the nature of the system. Before it can grasp our true skill, it feels that we should get 20ish points for winning. Some peeps' skills have been determined far earlier because they kept beating good players, so they get fewer points all in all.

But with the planned seasoning this shouldn't be much of an issue. Once the ladder points are reset and your rating stays the same it will deliver a much more significant result.

With an ELO system, I'd be completely afraid to play ANY more when I read something about being the 5th best player out of like 200k. I'd be afraid to get paired against an ELO 1500 player and if I lost I went down from like 2100 to 1900 or something. That sucks.

-1 me all you like, caring about that is silly. There are *at least* 20 people here because of me, can you say the same? http://www.robotentertainment.com/forum/...11-PM-EST.

[Eijolend]

TL;DR - The current system is only a reliable measure for activity. I advocate changing it to a system that is really like SC2 and not only looks like it.

(08-05-2012 09:58 PM)Harti Wrote:  ELO is no better than the system we currently have. It's well established and works for SC2 as well.

The current system looks like the one SC2 uses but actually it really is not! It is very different in what it achieves and it totally lacks the comparability SC2 has. I'm not a big ELO-fan (for all the flaws that were repeatedly pointed out), but pure ELO would be better than the current system, since the current system ONLY measures activity:

SC2's system with the bonus pool mixes activity and skill, so you have to keep playing. Once you used up your bonus pool your points correlate with your rating!
In SC2 you can directly compare players in the same division if they both used up their bonus pool. The one with the higher point value actually has the higher MMR and therefor the order in the same division means something.

The current Outwitters system ALWAYS rewards the winner with some additional points more than the loser loses. Assuming the system had perfect MMR that exactly matches your skill, you would gain as many points as you'd lose over time, if not for said additional points for each win. So the rating inflates for absolute number of wins and the MAIN thing that influences division ranking is ACTIVITY. #1 in a division will be the player that is the most active and is within the skill boundaries of the respective league without regard to his actual skill compared to others in the division. (Until you hit the MMR-barrier you will accumulate more points than someone with less skill, but from then on it's only activity that generates points and nothing else. The current influence of skill is already slim and the longer it goes on the less relevant it will become and eventually turn into ONLY activity.)

While the SC2 bonus pool is a inflation over time, the Outwitters system has inflation over number of games played, which completely eliminates the meaning of the points. I'd like to see Outwitters adapt a bonus pool system - it still motivates players to play more (contrary to pure ELO), every player has a constant rise in points over time (motivating!) but it retains the meaning of a rank.
-------------------------------
On a more detailed note:
There is a flaw in the SC2 system that I'd rather not carry over:
Different divisions within the same league are not comparable. (This was during the first seasons, I don't know if it was changed since then) It was discovered that in the higher leagues some divisions had a certain number of points added or subtracted from the value they should actually have, to artificially make the divisions in the same league uncomparable. It was suspected that this was done for lower leagues too, but to my knowledge couldn't be proven because of the huge amount of players.
I'd rather have a system where the comparison of points means something - at least within the same league.

[jaesonwu]

I was going to bring up bonus pool issue but eijolend already has that covered. Once BP is implemented this will no longer be such a big issue. Currently the points really do mean nothing but this will be fixed.

But yea it is too bad points are meaningless for now... My friend is about 300 points in gifted with 20 games played and he beats players with way more points all the time. His latest win was over a 1500 point Master league player...

This brings up another issue, points should be lowered upon promotion. Points in lower leagues should be worth less than upper leagues. This 1500 point rank 1 masters lost to a gifted player (granted my friend is probably high masters level), he most certainly isn't top masters material (I watched the replay and he wasted a lot of wits). In Starcraft you points are reset to 73+bonus pool upon promotion. That's just one possibility, but whatever the solution something should be done to reduce points on promotion.

[Eijolend]

Of course, points should be adapted upon promotion to the new standard - it shouldn't be a big problem if the correlation of MMR and points(minus BP) is known for each league.