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Just to explain a term used here - the Elo rating system is used to give a rating to individual chess players. It works well - if you defeat someone, you gain p

Just to explain a term used here - the Elo rating system is used to give a rating to individual chess players. It works well - if you defeat someone, you gain points and they lose an equal number of points. The bigger the difference in rating, the bigger the change in points. A 1200 player defeating a 1250 player gains +7 points, but defeating a 2000 player would be more like +30. This system has also been adapted to team games like League of Legends and Dota 2. Teams are constructed such that most players in the game have the same rating. The winners gain +25 each and the losers lose -25. A significant minority feel that this is unfair. Clearly they only lost because of incompetent team mates so they lose points even when they play well. If only they could gain 200-1000 rating points, they would be playing with people at their own skill level, and they would win way more. Turns out this theory is a bunch of horse shit, as proven countless times. These whiners play high ranked players to temporarily take over their account, win 1000 more points and then start playing at their new higher rating. And then they proceed to lose 40 games in a row because they have no idea what they’re doing. Source - played Dota 2 for years. Rating was 3000 (top 5% at the time). I saw countless posts from whiners and losses from account buyers.

jfim 6y ago
Part of it is due to the game design though. There's a non-zero amount of games that are lost not because of skill, but because of another player trying out a new hero or build, someone having an off day, poor team composition, or the team chat degenerating into an all out flame war. If that happens, there isn't much that can really be done, and one is stuck in that doomed game for another half hour of unpleasantness. That's definitely a frustrating experience. As you point out, the ELO system is fair, but it's also a rather noisy metric. Players can be skilled with some heroes while being completely awful at others, and the ELO rating is only a singular value that has to capture this range of player ability.

jfim 6y ago

Part of it is due to the game design though. There's a non-zero amount of games that are lost not because of skill, but because of another player trying out a new hero or build, someone having an off day, poor team composition, or the team chat degenerating into an all out flame war. If that happens, there isn't much that can really be done, and one is stuck in that doomed game for another half hour of unpleasantness. That's definitely a frustrating experience. As you point out, the ELO system is fair, but it's also a rather noisy metric. Players can be skilled with some heroes while being completely awful at others, and the ELO rating is only a singular value that has to capture this range of player ability.