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On May 02 2010 07:16 kei-clone wrote:Show nested quote +On May 02 2010 07:02 solistus wrote:On May 02 2010 06:58 kei-clone wrote:and the main reason that points between different divisions and leagues are not at all comparable: when you move divisions, your points reset. I just moved up yesterday to plat, and started at rank 9. your points are not reset (pre-server reset i moved up from silver to gold, and i lost a significant portion of my points but i wasn't set back to 1000 either) Mine have always been reset in the past, but it's sort of irrelevant. If you lose a significant portion of your points, it doesn't resolve any of the problems I discussed: score is still not comparable across divisions. The fact that your score has to change dramatically when you rank up means that score is only meaningful within the context of your league placement; the fact that people enter and exit at unpredictable point values still means that cross-division comparisons are meaningless. not sure how blizzard is doing things but my most recent league change (yesterday) didn't have any changes to my points at all. maybe they're trying both ways out, and most recently they decided to not reset points. just fyi.
My most recent league change was within the last two hours and, while I was not set back all the way to 1000, I lost around 400 points.
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You guys are forgetting that there's an important hidden variable (similar to ELL aka Expected Ladder Level in War3 if you're familiar with that ladder system) which tracks your ACTUAL skill level as perceived by the matchmaking system. It is not related to your ladder score or win % or total wins or whatever, but this is what determines who you are matched up with and whether or not you're favored (This is why a 50% silver player can be favored vs a 60% plat player if he's been beating a lot of platinum players). Now I'm not sure about this but the amount of points gained or lost seems to be determined by the actual point difference and not the "ELL".
If you think about that for a second you'll realize that "point inflation" won't have any real downsides and the only consequence is that you can't get 3000 points in the first week then retire and expect to be ranked 1 forever because the average player score will keep increasing. This is a good thing! The system they had for this in war3 was experience point decay that actually subtracted points for inactivity which was kind of a pain in the ass but amounts to the same thing
Consider that if a player plays 500 games in the first month he might get 3000 points, but if he registers another account a year later and plays the same 500 games he might get 5000 points. Point inflation ensures only active players stay at the top of the ladder which is what you want.
The ladder system is really good and gives me good matches against equally skilled opponents after as little as 10-15~ish games. The only thing wrong with the ladder system is the lack of a league-wide ranking but i assume they'll add sometime after chatrooms.....
Also they seem to be tweaking it a lot still. Apparently every time they change the matchmaking system there's a reset so we'll see if they decide to change it up again~
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If someone wants to reformat and shorten my arguments, I'd be plenty grateful and would happily edit them into my OP if it was an accurate summary. I wrote this up off the top of my head on the Blizz forums (thus the references to Blizzard reps as 'the Blues', etc.), it was too long so I C/Ped it here and linked to it. It seems a good number of people had the patience to wade through it and many of them have left very thoughtful feedback on the issue. It's increasingly silly to have an extended debate about how much shorter my OP could be. If it bothers you enough to spend so much time on it, please make yourself useful and write that easy 1/5 length summary.
Perhaps instead of trying to re-summarize what I've already written, I'll just work on a more organized OP focusing specifically on the point system and problems with point adjustments. I was trying to insert that discussion into the larger discussion of bonus point inflation, leagues being stupid, etc. and the overall call for a 'real' global ladder, but apparently that's too much for one thread worth of attention span.
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United States12235 Posts
On May 02 2010 05:53 Asta wrote:
This is only speculation but in the last big thread on the topic the op assumed that there is a second hidden rating, which is used to match players together. This is probably the "best there is" ranking system that some Blizz guy talked about at some point.
This assumption makes a lot of sense, because the publicly displayed rating is obviously not a good ranking, for the reasons you mentioned (although I think that the second point should be name "leagues and divisions").
Edit: Actually, I just remembered that the op I was referring to had the Idea with two rankings from WoW, where apparently both rankings are public? Idk.
That's right Asta. In my comparison, the only difference between the WoW MMR and the SC2 one is that the WoW one is visible which therefore makes it trackable. It does get confusing which is why the OP here is so flustered, but I don't think there's a reason to necessarily make the SC2 MMR public because it's ultimately unnecessary information.
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On May 02 2010 13:10 andyrichdale wrote:
The best rating system for an RTS I've ever experienced was Age of Empires 2. Straight up ELO.
Everyone started on 1600 and if you beat another 1600 you go up 16 and he goes down 16. If you beat an 1800 for example you'd go up something more like 28 and he'd go down 28 but if you beat a 1400 you'd only go up something like 8 and he'd go down 8.
You know about how good someone was at a very quick glance. Noobs / casual players were 1300 - 1500, intermediate players were 1500 - 1700, good players were 1700 - 1850, very good players were 1850 - 1950, great players were 1950+ and the best of the best were 2100+.
I like the idea that Blizzard are trying to make things more interesting by splitting up the ladder into leagues but everyone should have a rating that can be compared directly to another player. IE - everyone shouldn't start at 1000 in whatever league they get put in.
Yes it was, it was indeed.
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On May 05 2010 08:11 Mindcrime wrote:Show nested quote +On May 02 2010 07:16 kei-clone wrote:On May 02 2010 07:02 solistus wrote:On May 02 2010 06:58 kei-clone wrote:and the main reason that points between different divisions and leagues are not at all comparable: when you move divisions, your points reset. I just moved up yesterday to plat, and started at rank 9. your points are not reset (pre-server reset i moved up from silver to gold, and i lost a significant portion of my points but i wasn't set back to 1000 either) Mine have always been reset in the past, but it's sort of irrelevant. If you lose a significant portion of your points, it doesn't resolve any of the problems I discussed: score is still not comparable across divisions. The fact that your score has to change dramatically when you rank up means that score is only meaningful within the context of your league placement; the fact that people enter and exit at unpredictable point values still means that cross-division comparisons are meaningless. not sure how blizzard is doing things but my most recent league change (yesterday) didn't have any changes to my points at all. maybe they're trying both ways out, and most recently they decided to not reset points. just fyi. My most recent league change was within the last two hours and, while I was not set back all the way to 1000, I lost around 400 points.
And now that the servers are back up, I got all of those points back and am now #1 in my platinum division without playing a single 1v1 as platinum
rofl
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Nice post, I agree, the ranking system is broken. It's too "feel good" and doesn't in anyway summarize how good of a player you are. Everything about it feels too ambiguous, and while I know it's still beta, it would be nice to know how they plan on transitioning to release, especially bonus pools. Looking at it, advancing in leagues seems little more than win %, but there's a guy in my ladder that is way ahead in points and has been for a week, but still hasn't placed out of it.. But
I got placed in gold, won 3 of 5 games while laddering and on my last win I got knocked down to silver. How does that make any sense? The guy cannoned up all of his bases and I finally had to tech to broodlords just so he'd see there was no way he could still win. 40 minutes to get knocked down a league is pretty lame, and I refuse to play ladder until they sort it out. The way it is now, it's just confusing how anything works concerning ladder. Points? Performance? Win %?
It'd be damn nice if they explained any portion of how ladder movement or placements worked.
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I'm 39-15 in my division. There's a guy 28-17 who's above me. There's also a guy 28-17 below me.
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I was honestly going to post in here about 10 minutes ago to defend the ranking system, but I just got back from a game that I played after being transferred to platinum and after winning that first game - I am now ranked first in my division.
So now it shows: Division Rank 1 Platinum League.
GUESS THAT MEANS I CAN STOP PLAYING LOL IM THE BEST IT SAYS SO
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The problem isn't just point inflation. Presumably the true underlying score behind each player isn't affected by bonus points. A player who plays less (and thus reaps the rewards of bonus points more, relative to the number of losses they receive) gets a point advantage. If this is true, then #20 in a division could actually have an underlying matchmaking score higher than #1 of the same division. The current system actually rewards not playing once you hit your equilibrium rating (points lost = points earned over the long term).
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On May 05 2010 09:20 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +On May 02 2010 05:53 Asta wrote:
This is only speculation but in the last big thread on the topic the op assumed that there is a second hidden rating, which is used to match players together. This is probably the "best there is" ranking system that some Blizz guy talked about at some point.
This assumption makes a lot of sense, because the publicly displayed rating is obviously not a good ranking, for the reasons you mentioned (although I think that the second point should be name "leagues and divisions").
Edit: Actually, I just remembered that the op I was referring to had the Idea with two rankings from WoW, where apparently both rankings are public? Idk. That's right Asta. In my comparison, the only difference between the WoW MMR and the SC2 one is that the WoW one is visible which therefore makes it trackable. It does get confusing which is why the OP here is so flustered, but I don't think there's a reason to necessarily make the SC2 MMR public because it's ultimately unnecessary information.
It's been over a year since I played wow. But back then match making for arena was based on a hidden rating also.
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I really like how Blizzard implemented the ladder. Divisions and Ranks gives positve incentives for people to move up, and motivates. The division and ranks also make everything more neat and conformed.
If it was an overall ladder you would have less incentive if you were 40000000th. People would have less incentive to play ladder less.
Although I am indifferent about the bonus pool it offers a kind of positive reinforcement or reward which I guess makes the player feel better.
AND No freakin overall ladder
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The bonus points hardly matter. Anyone that is on every day, playing 10+ games a day is going to get better, faster than anyone skipping days trying to get "bonus" points.
What, or who, they are good for, is people that work, or go to school during the week, and get their gaming in on the weekend. I tend to drop a position or two just overnight while I sleep. I haven't taken a week off from sc2 since I got into the beta (haven't skipped a day really) but I would *think* that someone that did could easily drop 20+ places in 5 days.
In these types of cases all the "bonus points" are going to do, is allow said player to regain some of those places. After you win the first game, most of those points are gone anyway, and they are completely gone after 3-5 games. Meaning said player is unlikely to get back to where they were, just because of bonus points.
Another hypothetical situation: If we did have giant 100K+ person ladders, then your place would fluctuate so much it wouldn't even be funny. Those few positions you move overnight now, would be replaced by hundreds. Every time you won or lost a game, your position would change drastically, to the point that it wouldn't even mean anything anymore.
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I agree with most of the OP. I don't think the points reset, though. I got placed into Gold after my placement matches (thanks to 10 pool easily crushing 4/5 people I played against for some reason), and then I lost maybe four matches because I was outmatched. Pretty quickly the system dropped me down a league and put my point total at about ~600 in Silver league. Bottom of the league. I'm continuously getting matched against people that are "Favored" (which I imagine means that are ranked more highly than me) and winning 80% of my games. I talked to some of these people in the games and they said they were in Bronze league. So, what league you're in might not be 100% about your current skill level. All in all, something's definitely off here...
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Ok, the OP has one really big problem in it: he keeps confusing the terms "division" and "league". These terms have specific definitions, and confusing them only leads to a confused point for the OP.
Leagues are named groupings of players that an unknown algorithm has determined have similar skill. Divisions are arbitrary groupings of 100 people within the same league that you mentally pit yourself against. The only thing it is used for is to compute your division ranking (#nth of 100); it has no meaning on your point score or anything else.
You never change divisions. At least, not unless you're also changing leagues.
Now that the pedantic point is out of the way:
On the surface, it looks like you have basically an Elo system for the points, a silly Division system tacked on for no apparent reason, and the problem is that rankings are based on the silly Division system instead of the more rational Elo system. Depending on how divisions are used with the matchmaking algorithm, there may be additional undesired effects there, but at least we have the points system, right?
I'll assume by "silly Division system" you actually mean "silly League system." Since the Division system is just a psychological aid and has no real meaning for anything.
So, exactly what is so "silly" about leagues? By grouping people broadly by skill, you get essentially the same thing that you get with ICCUP's letter grade rankings, only with a more controlled metric. This system quickly segregates highly skilled players from lower skilled players on a server reset/season change. Whereas ICCUP's season changes basically became a week of hell for lower skilled players, where they could expect to be face-stomped regularly.
Remember: this isn't ICCUP. Everyone who plays SC2 in multiplayer will be on this ladder. It needs to serve their needs too.
In an Elo-based point system, the idea is that you eventually stabilize once the system has accurately placed you. Blizzard claims they want their system to achieve this, where people will stop moving around chaotically after enough games and have a ranking that somehow reflects their skill level.
Wait: when did Blizzard claim that they wanted ELOs to stabilize? I felt that the general idea was that the in-division rank would stabilize to some degree, but that your point total would keep changing.
League Changes: this one I hear very little about, but IMO it's the single biggest problem, and the main reason that points between different divisions and leagues are not at all comparable: when you move divisions, your points reset. This is, quite literally, destroying the information about your previous point total.
Yes; that would be the point.
Each league is supposed to be a self-contained entity. After the initial placement matches and first few games, league changing should be rare. It should be done only in the case of a substantial improvement (or disimprovement) in a player's skill.
The idea is supposed to be that, once you're in your league, you're in your league.
As far as I understand it, the way SC2 battlenet is set up for beta is the system will hunt for players to give you a quicker match, so it's tuned to find you a match faster, and not find you someone closely matched to your skill level. Come launch I'm expecting the system to change so it will find you someone closer to your rating and change the ELO "hunting" range when pairing people for matches much more slowly, as well as reducing the max deviation.
Actually, that's quite the opposite. One of the first patches that came out changed how the match-making worked so that it would take longer to find you a match, just so that it would find you a more appropriate opponent. In Beta, when there aren't hundreds of thousands of players on at all times of the day and night, that means it takes a while to find you a match. But once the game ships, finding matches should be much faster, simply by virtue of more players.
You're telling me this would be a less appealing motivation to you to compete in a ranked ladder environment than a system that only compares you to 99 essentially random other players and makes no serious attempt to find where you "belong" as a stable ranking but rather bounces you around through a combination of undisclosed formulas and ill thought-out unpredictable variations within and between divisions?
Psychologically, yes. Because most players don't obsess over exactly how well they're doing vs. everyone else. If they're told that they are #76th in their division, and after a game, they see that they're #74, that's progress. They don't care how that #74 came to be. They don't care whether point inflation due to bonus points cause it or whatever. All they see is that they've made progress.
I got placed in gold, won 3 of 5 games while laddering and on my last win I got knocked down to silver. How does that make any sense? The guy cannoned up all of his bases and I finally had to tech to broodlords just so he'd see there was no way he could still win. 40 minutes to get knocked down a league is pretty lame, and I refuse to play ladder until they sort it out. The way it is now, it's just confusing how anything works concerning ladder. Points? Performance? Win %?
Stop being so hung up on exactly why something happened. After all, you're not going to get kicked back up to Gold by not playing the game.
I went 2 of 5 in my placement matches because I hadn't played SC2 in a while. I got placed in Bronze, where I utterly dominated. I'm now near the top of Silver, and I suspect another League change will be forthcoming when I play some more.
The longer you play, the more likely the system is to put you where you belong. The random variables factor out, and your skill shows through.
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Bonus points will affect lower level leagues mostly - where people play rarely - anyway
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i really don't think most of u guys understand the ladder system. it works pretty darn well, actually.
the biggest problem is the disparity of skill level in the platinum ranks. they let anyone that's played a video game before in there.
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On May 02 2010 05:15 solistus wrote:
1) Bonus Points: This one is pretty widely understood to be a cause of point inflation. Since bonus points are basically 'created' out of thin air...
Hey! Perhaps they modeled this after the world financial system. You know, creating money out of thin air sounds like a good thing, right?
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EPT
