7 ms·

> With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. This is the

by skulk 4y ago

> With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. This is theoretically expected of skill-based matchmaking systems.

ianbutler 4y ago
You are right about sbmm, but it doesn’t make for a good progression system imo. If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. It should only feel like a slog/be super competitive when the external rank matches the hidden elo. Not the entire time IMO. Some games get this right, others (looking at you Apex Legends Arenas Mode) does not and it just winds up being a terrible slog.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  Lol so true. Why am I being matched up against top 500 players when I am quite literally making my way through bronze. Just double my queue time until we find a good match at that point.
- cube2222 4y ago
  Actually, I think matching you against equal players would be much better in such a situation, but you should gain much more visible elo for wins than you lose for losses (thus going up even with a 50% win rate).
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. Or maybe you should stop making new accounts and stop smurfing? I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games. ------ I get it. A lot of people want to be matched up against weaker players so that they have an easy win. That doesn't make it fair for the losers in this situation. Furthermore, it weakens the community and turns it more toxic. Expert players (or even advanced/intermediate players) shouldn't seek out weak players and stomp them. 50% win ratios, for everyone, should be the default goal. You climb the Elo to keep 50% win/loss, and as you lose, you fall to 50% win/loss as well, or so the ideal is. That way, everyone is on fair grounds. If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? But a competitive game is zero-sum by default. Half the players lose, and half the players win each game. So community managers need to spread the wins and losses around in a fair way.
  - arthurcolle 4y ago
    > If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? Yeah this is easily solved - just go ratting in high sec in a nice specced out Drekavac or something.
  - ianbutler 4y ago
    Or maybe you're new to ranked and hidden elo takes in to account quickplay? I've never smurfed in a game so shove it.
  - grog454 4y ago
    > I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games. I used to think this way until I started to understand what it takes to become competitive at high levels. The most efficient way to improve is to play with and against people better than you. If you take your ego out of the equation and pretend everyone is there to teach you, it's hard NOT to learn something. Tangential to that, a lot of people would be honored to play against a GM in chess. Yet when placed against actual GMs doing some variation of a "3000 elo speed run", they throw a fit. What? Maybe its cultural. For a while in SC2 GSL, there was a side show where a random amateur for the audience got to play against a pro. You could clearly see the reverence most of the amateurs held for their opponent.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      > The most efficient way to improve is to play with and against people better than you. Unless the opponent is purposefully throwing a "teaching game" and/or giving an appropriate handicap of some kind, this is absolutely not the case. In Chess, games at the 1500 Elo level are won/lost due to a knight fork, a bishop pin, a skewer, and other such traps. GMs literally will give you _zero_ opportunities to find such mistakes from them, because they play nearly perfectly. Finding such mistakes (in yourself, and your opponent) requires an opponent who makes such mistakes at a roughly the same level as you. GMs who can see maybe 2 or 3 moves ahead of you will prevent such mistakes from even occurring, giving you no chance to learn. A "show match" vs a stronger player is to be honored, but its not a lesson learned. Its not a teaching game. ------ Sure, GMs make mistakes. But the mistakes they make are invisible to 1500 Elo players. There's no hope to ever see it, and no one expecting to learn to play the game studies GM-level chess. 1500 Elo players will improve far faster with skewer puzzles, fork puzzles, outposts, etc. etc.
- ajuc 4y ago
  For you to win more than 50% of the time requires that others lose more than 50% of the time. Which sucks. But what's more important, is that if you apply the same logic to other players from 1 league higher than your real ELO - you should be the one losing over 50% of the time to make them happier :)
ben_w 4y ago
Back when I was in game dev, I really wanted to find a way to make them fun even when you lost. I never managed to grok that magic, but I did see it in e.g. Settlers of Catan.
- mym1990 4y ago
  This becomes a different beast when you introduce competitive play. In non-ranked there is this feeling of freedom to try new things, have fun, etc... but in ranked it feels like things are on the line(despite those things being so trivial as a few points up or down). Settlers is so fun because you really feel like you're on a journey the whole game, and while it is nice to win, you remember the interactions and experiences in the game as the valuable thing(IMO).
  - andrepd 4y ago
    Unless the dice fuck you over extra hard x)
    - rintakumpu 4y ago
      Play with a deck of cards instead of dice! 36 cards, six sevens, five eights and sixes and so on.
      - jack_pp 4y ago
        How is that supposed to help? A bad run is a bad run no matter the randomizer. Also cards need to be shuffled which wastes time if done correctly
        ben_w 4y ago
        A deck of cards behaves the way the gambler's fallacy expects everything to behave: after enough bad luck, you're sure to get a good result.
        4y ago
mym1990 4y ago
And I actually only truly grasped this recently(the concept makes sense). My paranoid self always thinks that in a game like League, there are artificial matchmaking things going on to keep you at 50%, apart from a stagnation of skill. In truth, I probably just need to get better(at whatever, doesn't have to be League).
- jrockway 4y ago
  Yeah, if you win 50% of your games it means the matchmaker is working perfectly. People really have a lot of trouble understanding that. Also, to improve, you probably have to lose a bunch of games while you're unlocking that new knowledge. The toxicity of teammates kind of steers people away from that. Thus people get stuck at where they place and never go up or down significantly.
  - bick_nyers 4y ago
    Unless of course if a team full of me would have a 70% winrate, and the system is compensating (because hidden ELO) by sticking me with teammates that each have 45% winrates. It still averages out to 50% winrate. Just because you can force a point of convergence does not mean it is the correct point of convergence.
    - jrockway 4y ago
      Yeah, I definitely feel this variance in matchmaking. play games with my friends every Saturday night and 8 hours in after 5 beers, I doubt our MMR is quite as high as it was when we started the session. (The first game probably isn't great either!) But the matchmaker doesn't really know these subtleties, so sometimes the enemies get an easier than expected game. So it goes. The competitive ladder climbing meta is really about recognizing when you shouldn't be playing and not playing then. Interesting angle to optimize.
      - bick_nyers 4y ago
        Yeah, if I want to climb a ladder I have to play first thing in the morning (with physical exercise as well as warmup games), and make sure I quit at the right time.
bick_nyers 4y ago
There can still be issues. For example, how does the ELO system view previous wins/losses when calculating ELO gain/loss from future wins? Anecdote: My friends played the first few ranked seasons on my Xbox Overwatch account, they started at Bronze and eventually got to Silver. I decided to pick it up and play ranked with a different friend, we won 9/10 of the placement matches. I got ranked Silver, he got ranked Platinum. A month later, I make a new Overwatch account on PC and rank Platinum with ease. In these systems, if you gain a lot of skill in a short amount of time, or have bad luck early on in your ranked career, you can be held back in rank gains to the point that you are essentially stuck in place. Creating a new account generally allows you to advance significantly faster through the ranks.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
The issue is that riot has designed it so the 50% has become the target rather than the metric. The result is that you'll go on win and loss streaks and if you play long enough it becomes obvious it's being manipulated that way. Winning 1 or 2 and losing 1 or 2 are just fine. winning 10-15 followed by losing 10-15 just feels bad and isn't worth it. And if you've played long enough you can start feeling when the tipping point is about to happen. The wins will start getting more and more difficult as more people on your team obviously don't belong in the game. Or vice versa, and you'll start getting people on your teams consistently such that nothing you do matters because you'll just win. Then you add in a dash of streamers and people doing "bronze to plat" challenges and it's just not fun. Either they're losing on purpose to tank their rank or they're pubstomping people far below their skill level. The end result is that it all just feels bad and the only people that end up playing a significant number of games are actively addicted to it.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Goodhart's Law!
- amatecha 4y ago
  Yeah, I've absolutely noticed those long win/loss streaks and it reduces the value of the game by far. It's like, by the time I get a win, it's such a total stomping, it's not even fun. I slog through like 8 losses in a row, and then suddenly get a totally uneven matchup (in my favor) and the game is like the shortest possible game, because the matchmaking finally tossed me a bone (or whatever). Great, I finally won a game, and it was basically just a free win. I don't find it fun, and the losing team definitely doesn't either. The concept of "winning"/"losing" is diluted or made irrelevant by a crappy underlying system. After this long you'd think there would be a better system devised? I'd rather wait longer than have to get these constant poorly-balanced matchups.

by skulk 4y ago

ianbutler 4y ago

You are right about sbmm, but it doesn’t make for a good progression system imo. If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. It should only feel like a slog/be super competitive when the external rank matches the hidden elo. Not the entire time IMO. Some games get this right, others (looking at you Apex Legends Arenas Mode) does not and it just winds up being a terrible slog.

bick_nyers 4y ago
Lol so true. Why am I being matched up against top 500 players when I am quite literally making my way through bronze. Just double my queue time until we find a good match at that point.
cube2222 4y ago
Actually, I think matching you against equal players would be much better in such a situation, but you should gain much more visible elo for wins than you lose for losses (thus going up even with a 50% win rate).
dragontamer 4y ago
> If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. Or maybe you should stop making new accounts and stop smurfing? I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games. ------ I get it. A lot of people want to be matched up against weaker players so that they have an easy win. That doesn't make it fair for the losers in this situation. Furthermore, it weakens the community and turns it more toxic. Expert players (or even advanced/intermediate players) shouldn't seek out weak players and stomp them. 50% win ratios, for everyone, should be the default goal. You climb the Elo to keep 50% win/loss, and as you lose, you fall to 50% win/loss as well, or so the ideal is. That way, everyone is on fair grounds. If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? But a competitive game is zero-sum by default. Half the players lose, and half the players win each game. So community managers need to spread the wins and losses around in a fair way.
- arthurcolle 4y ago
  > If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? Yeah this is easily solved - just go ratting in high sec in a nice specced out Drekavac or something.
- ianbutler 4y ago
  Or maybe you're new to ranked and hidden elo takes in to account quickplay? I've never smurfed in a game so shove it.
- grog454 4y ago
  > I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games. I used to think this way until I started to understand what it takes to become competitive at high levels. The most efficient way to improve is to play with and against people better than you. If you take your ego out of the equation and pretend everyone is there to teach you, it's hard NOT to learn something. Tangential to that, a lot of people would be honored to play against a GM in chess. Yet when placed against actual GMs doing some variation of a "3000 elo speed run", they throw a fit. What? Maybe its cultural. For a while in SC2 GSL, there was a side show where a random amateur for the audience got to play against a pro. You could clearly see the reverence most of the amateurs held for their opponent.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > The most efficient way to improve is to play with and against people better than you. Unless the opponent is purposefully throwing a "teaching game" and/or giving an appropriate handicap of some kind, this is absolutely not the case. In Chess, games at the 1500 Elo level are won/lost due to a knight fork, a bishop pin, a skewer, and other such traps. GMs literally will give you _zero_ opportunities to find such mistakes from them, because they play nearly perfectly. Finding such mistakes (in yourself, and your opponent) requires an opponent who makes such mistakes at a roughly the same level as you. GMs who can see maybe 2 or 3 moves ahead of you will prevent such mistakes from even occurring, giving you no chance to learn. A "show match" vs a stronger player is to be honored, but its not a lesson learned. Its not a teaching game. ------ Sure, GMs make mistakes. But the mistakes they make are invisible to 1500 Elo players. There's no hope to ever see it, and no one expecting to learn to play the game studies GM-level chess. 1500 Elo players will improve far faster with skewer puzzles, fork puzzles, outposts, etc. etc.
ajuc 4y ago
For you to win more than 50% of the time requires that others lose more than 50% of the time. Which sucks. But what's more important, is that if you apply the same logic to other players from 1 league higher than your real ELO - you should be the one losing over 50% of the time to make them happier :)

ben_w 4y ago

Back when I was in game dev, I really wanted to find a way to make them fun even when you lost. I never managed to grok that magic, but I did see it in e.g. Settlers of Catan.

mym1990 4y ago
This becomes a different beast when you introduce competitive play. In non-ranked there is this feeling of freedom to try new things, have fun, etc... but in ranked it feels like things are on the line(despite those things being so trivial as a few points up or down). Settlers is so fun because you really feel like you're on a journey the whole game, and while it is nice to win, you remember the interactions and experiences in the game as the valuable thing(IMO).
- andrepd 4y ago
  Unless the dice fuck you over extra hard x)
  - rintakumpu 4y ago
    Play with a deck of cards instead of dice! 36 cards, six sevens, five eights and sixes and so on.
    - jack_pp 4y ago
      How is that supposed to help? A bad run is a bad run no matter the randomizer. Also cards need to be shuffled which wastes time if done correctly
      - ben_w 4y ago
        A deck of cards behaves the way the gambler's fallacy expects everything to behave: after enough bad luck, you're sure to get a good result.
        4y ago

mym1990 4y ago

And I actually only truly grasped this recently(the concept makes sense). My paranoid self always thinks that in a game like League, there are artificial matchmaking things going on to keep you at 50%, apart from a stagnation of skill. In truth, I probably just need to get better(at whatever, doesn't have to be League).

jrockway 4y ago
Yeah, if you win 50% of your games it means the matchmaker is working perfectly. People really have a lot of trouble understanding that. Also, to improve, you probably have to lose a bunch of games while you're unlocking that new knowledge. The toxicity of teammates kind of steers people away from that. Thus people get stuck at where they place and never go up or down significantly.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  Unless of course if a team full of me would have a 70% winrate, and the system is compensating (because hidden ELO) by sticking me with teammates that each have 45% winrates. It still averages out to 50% winrate. Just because you can force a point of convergence does not mean it is the correct point of convergence.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Yeah, I definitely feel this variance in matchmaking. play games with my friends every Saturday night and 8 hours in after 5 beers, I doubt our MMR is quite as high as it was when we started the session. (The first game probably isn't great either!) But the matchmaker doesn't really know these subtleties, so sometimes the enemies get an easier than expected game. So it goes. The competitive ladder climbing meta is really about recognizing when you shouldn't be playing and not playing then. Interesting angle to optimize.
    - bick_nyers 4y ago
      Yeah, if I want to climb a ladder I have to play first thing in the morning (with physical exercise as well as warmup games), and make sure I quit at the right time.

bick_nyers 4y ago

There can still be issues. For example, how does the ELO system view previous wins/losses when calculating ELO gain/loss from future wins? Anecdote: My friends played the first few ranked seasons on my Xbox Overwatch account, they started at Bronze and eventually got to Silver. I decided to pick it up and play ranked with a different friend, we won 9/10 of the placement matches. I got ranked Silver, he got ranked Platinum. A month later, I make a new Overwatch account on PC and rank Platinum with ease. In these systems, if you gain a lot of skill in a short amount of time, or have bad luck early on in your ranked career, you can be held back in rank gains to the point that you are essentially stuck in place. Creating a new account generally allows you to advance significantly faster through the ranks.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

The issue is that riot has designed it so the 50% has become the target rather than the metric. The result is that you'll go on win and loss streaks and if you play long enough it becomes obvious it's being manipulated that way. Winning 1 or 2 and losing 1 or 2 are just fine. winning 10-15 followed by losing 10-15 just feels bad and isn't worth it. And if you've played long enough you can start feeling when the tipping point is about to happen. The wins will start getting more and more difficult as more people on your team obviously don't belong in the game. Or vice versa, and you'll start getting people on your teams consistently such that nothing you do matters because you'll just win. Then you add in a dash of streamers and people doing "bronze to plat" challenges and it's just not fun. Either they're losing on purpose to tank their rank or they're pubstomping people far below their skill level. The end result is that it all just feels bad and the only people that end up playing a significant number of games are actively addicted to it.

mym1990 4y ago
Goodhart's Law!
amatecha 4y ago
Yeah, I've absolutely noticed those long win/loss streaks and it reduces the value of the game by far. It's like, by the time I get a win, it's such a total stomping, it's not even fun. I slog through like 8 losses in a row, and then suddenly get a totally uneven matchup (in my favor) and the game is like the shortest possible game, because the matchmaking finally tossed me a bone (or whatever). Great, I finally won a game, and it was basically just a free win. I don't find it fun, and the losing team definitely doesn't either. The concept of "winning"/"losing" is diluted or made irrelevant by a crappy underlying system. After this long you'd think there would be a better system devised? I'd rather wait longer than have to get these constant poorly-balanced matchups.