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On August 29 2010 21:57 Diks wrote:
Yeah i totally agree with OP.
Blizzard should really opt for an ELO-like system.
I wonder why they did this method ?
- Maybe in order to produce the effect "omg i'm getting stronger and stronger everyday !"
- Maybe they want to make people play more regulary
- Maybe both
- Maybe neither ?
I guess its both. Right now you can be a total noob but still feel pro being rank 1 gold getting more and more points every day. I mean, if you are that noob and have no clue, rank 1 gold sound actually pretty cool. Also the bonus points system will encourage you to keep playing. Otherwise the same guy would be place 560461 on ladder improving only veeeery slow, maybe not at all.
So, for most people that system is actually not that bad.
Of course as downside there are posts starting with "omg nerv da rauderzz, so op, i am top gold and cant beat mass marauders, even not without mass stalkers!!!!".
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On August 29 2010 20:35 JudoChopper wrote:Show nested quote +On August 29 2010 20:32 Sanguinarius wrote:
No, it tells you absolutly nothing.
A 50% top diamond player is a hell of alot better than a 60% gold player.
Win ratio just tells you if the system is working as intended. What about an 80% top Diamond player and a 65% top Diamond player, see what I did there?
What u did thar is completely miss the point. When you win a ladder game, the MM system will try to make you lose. When you lose it tries to make you win. It's constantly trying to force you to a 50% win/loss rate. You have to basically be Huk/TLO/Morrow caliber player to get even a 65% win rate
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The bonus pool is an incentive for players to keep playing. Players who do not keep playing will gradually drop their ladder ranking.
An ELO system would not encourage players to keep playing if they hit a prolonged win streak and the player thinks that he 'maxed out'.
In the end, bonus points make absolutely no difference. You just have to adjust your mind to determine what is good in terms of points. You can track yourself by global rank on sc2ranks or taking the difference between yourself and the top players in terms of points.
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So, this actually supports what i said on page 2:
The Bonus Pool accrues at a rate of 1 point per 2 hours, whether the player or team is active or not. The Bonus Pool also begins building based on when the ladder season began. That is, if Player A was placed into a division and started with a Bonus Pool of 100, then 24 hours later Player B placed into a new division, Player B's Bonus Pool would be 112.
Source, thanks to Yoshi.
So it absolutly doesnt matter how you spend your points, as long as you spend them. Its 12 points/day, nothing else.
Maybe we can suggest some kind of "true point value" on sc2ranks.com. It shouldnt be that hard to display another point value, like
true points= points-t*0.5
with t being hours since release.
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It could also be that with the influx of new players the points get increased since we get more and more newbies which would inflate everyones rating.
On August 29 2010 19:13 Inori wrote:
Why this bothers me is because this system has no stable grounds - a way to know what level a player is based on his rating in any given time. For example in chess 1500 is mid, 1800 - good and 2200+ is pro level. This was true 30 years ago. This will be true 30 years from now. In SC2, however, 2-3 months from now everyone will have 5k+ points. And in another 2-3 months, what? 9999 points? And after that? Sure, resets may come, but they don't really solve the core of the problem.
You don't know how the rating works, not at all. None does but the designers working for Blizzard. It could be that the bonus pool artificially inflates the ratings but we don't know that and we wont know that until either Blizzard makes an official statement or in at least a few months. And look at these arguments:
1. It takes a long while for the system to stabilize when everyone starts out at x rating. chess haven't had a situation like this in ages.
2. If suddenly the whole world started to play competitive chess then everyones chess ranking would get a huge increase simply because the system puts all new players at the same ranking and most of the world are way worse than the worst parts of the competitive chess community.
3. The top players scores increases faster than the bonus pool adds points.
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I agree with the OP, and personally i don't really like the current points system as it doesnt really show the true level of the player at first glance. I'm a big chess player myself and i like that system as it truely shows how good the guy is.
However , from blizzards standpoint , it's totally understandable for their points system to be as it is , it encourages much more people to play , and hence resulting in a bigger community/pool of players to play.
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The reason there is so much inflation in the ladder is that people aren't close to being maxed atm. At a certain level of ELO they'll start losing 20 points for a loss and gaining maybe 1-2 (2-4 with bonus) for every win. At that point, the ELOs will start stagnating even with Bonus Pool. They just aren't there yet.
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On August 29 2010 22:50 Takkara wrote:
The reason there is so much inflation in the ladder is that people aren't close to being maxed atm. At a certain level of ELO they'll start losing 20 points for a loss and gaining maybe 1-2 (2-4 with bonus) for every win. At that point, the ELOs will start stagnating even with Bonus Pool. They just aren't there yet.
I read something similar on broodlings.com, but the reasoning has a weak point. I mean, mathematically it is absolutly possible to reach a situation, where you lose much more points as you get for winning. So with 50% win/loss you would lose way more points overall. But with the bonus point system it could equal out, so your points remain stable.
So far i agree.
But as you always fight opponents of roughly the same skill AND you lose always as much as your opponent wins (without taking bonus points into account!) its not possible to reach a situations where most peoples points are stable and everyone gets bonus points.
Of course i could be wrong with "you lose always as much as your opponent wins (without taking bonus points into account!)". I am actually not sure about this.
As a new player without many games you will get way more points for winning than for losing, no matter if you get bonus points or not. Right now i always get the amount of points my opponent loses (after subtracting bonus points) , but that could change with more games, too, as it did after the first 20 games or so.
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Inori, I'm a statistician, and I'm trying to understand your beef with this. First off, point inflation is not really an issue, since numbers can go on infinitely. Unless there were some ceiling to how high numbers went (i.e., Blizz might have pulled a stupid and only alloted 8 digits to hold the points of each player, by the way, I have no knowledge of any such thing, who knows though), then inflation isn't a big issue.
However, if you're wanting some linear combination of these scores that maintain an equating characteristic throughout the ends of time, then I do get what you're saying. Yet again, Blizz does allow you to know relativistically, with some limitations of course, how you stack up to others in your ladder. Though, in agreement with you, I would like to know a z-score(relativistic measure in units of standard deviations, eg. z=0 means you're average, z=2 means approx better than 95%, z=-2 means approx bottom 5% of skills. For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score ) of my abilities, such that I have a clear idea as to where my skill set is in comparison to others.
The problem though, is that all of the non-statisticians complain and fight and program games and such without consulting us. Just look at the shameful, not-guided-by-statisticians policy of No Child Left Behind in the U.S, where non-statistician Bush thought it would be a good idea to make a policy, without consulting statisticians, where schools whose scores go from, say, 15-20 get lots of $$, but schools whose scores go from 99-98 have to fire half their staff. I don't necessarily mean you the gamers are stupid, but all of the people out there, programmers and gamers alike who try to squabble about stats yet don't know a thing about them. I know, I'm nerd raging, but meh...
The only explanations I can come up with are these: Either Blizz is not worried about equating scores over time (perhaps they've done studies and found that little kids playing sc2 would rather see that they have 5k points than that they havea z-score of -0.56667432), or Blizz doesn't have statisticians on their paid staff.
I don't know, and honestly, I've given up caring about the stupidity of the ruling non-statisticians of the corporate world. Everyone has an opinion, but no one wants to do their rigorous research, and instead they just implement their stupid ideas...
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The broodling site simply states the displayed rating will converge to the MMR because with an inflated rating you will end up in that gain 4 for a win, lose 20 for a loss situation. But that assumes the rating change depends on the displayed rating which it imho doesn't. I had games where I played as 650 Diamond against a 550 plat (high win-%) and it displayed him as favored and I also got 15 points for the win*. That only makes sense if the rating change is calculated from the MMR and he had a higher one then I did. But the MMR shouldn't inflate over time so as soon as you hit your "ceiling MMR" the displayed rating will just creep upwards at the rate at which you get bonus points.
* ignoring bonuses i usually gain/lose 10-14points for an even match which suggests the system is similar to a ELO rating with a k-value of 24...
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On August 29 2010 23:09 DuncanIdaho wrote:
The only explanations I can come up with are these: Either Blizz is not worried about equating scores over time (perhaps they've done studies and found that little kids playing sc2 would rather see that they have 5k points than that they havea z-score of -0.56667432), or Blizz doesn't have statisticians on their paid staff.
Blizzard have a PHD statistician doing their ladder, they know better what they are doing than just about anyone in this thread.
LINK
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The system currently in place rewards players for massing games without taking into account whether or not they are any better at the game. Every win is worth like 3 losses, as long as you stay around even (as the system is designed to try and keep you) you will always go up.
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what i want to know is why check prime has 200 more wins than choya, 50 more losses, higherwinrate but is lower
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On August 30 2010 00:10 Klockan3 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 29 2010 23:09 DuncanIdaho wrote:
The only explanations I can come up with are these: Either Blizz is not worried about equating scores over time (perhaps they've done studies and found that little kids playing sc2 would rather see that they have 5k points than that they havea z-score of -0.56667432), or Blizz doesn't have statisticians on their paid staff.
Blizzard have a PHD statistician doing their ladder, they know better what they are doing than just about anyone in this thread. LINK
Nice link there, Klockan3. I'll admit, I'm just a grad student working towards my PhD at the moment, however I will point out that your link says this:
"Competitive Arena for Everyone
Another feature is improved automated matchmaking. Blizzard hired a PHD statistician to come in and develop a system even better than TrueSkill, though Blizzard is not going to go out and create fancy labels and trademarks for this system. The goal is to offer play options for everyone to enjoy; battle.net needs to make sure it's easy for people to find their friends in organized games."
It's good to know they hired a statistician. It troubles me that it's only "a" statistician, not "a team" of statisticians, but meh. However, the link also is in reference to the matchmaking system. I'm not complaining about that, I'm complaining about not getting to see my z-score, yet admitting that others are likely to not want to see it or be able to understand it, thus we're told "you have 10 umbagiliion points and that's big, so you must be awesome or something..." As days go onward, b-pools will cause our scores to inflate, and so those with 1k points today may have bragging rights, but 6 months from now, everyone will have that much or more, thus the equatingscores over time problem. I trust blizzard is giving me good games, but I just wish I'd know how I stack up a little better, as the thread starter, I believe, was getting at.
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On August 30 2010 01:09 GobIin wrote:
what i want to know is why check prime has 200 more wins than choya, 50 more losses, higherwinrate but is lower 'cause he's zerg ofc.
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it needs ELO rating. That would be very effective and possibly make laddering worthwhile for top tier players. Also a division above diamond would be nice.
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If Blizzard intended the point system to be a "skill indicator," they would not have made a division system and instead would have one large ladder per region of all players based on points. For reasons that I do not fully understand, we instead have 500 point bronze players and 1000 point platinum players. The matchmaking system does a pretty good job of matching you with people in a league above you if you are winning and a league below if you are losing (obviously if you are at the top or bottom then the system runs out of options to match you with). The system is designed to reward players who either win a lot or play more often. Sure, if you play with only bonus points, you will gain more points with fewer games, but you will still have fewer points than another player if they play many more games than you (unless they lose a lot more). The presence of bonus points really has no effect on a players points relative to someone who has used all of their bonus points. Both players had to win approximately the same number of games to use their bonus points as someone previously pointed out in this thread.
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Bonus points only increase the volatility of your score, not where your rating will converge to when you play more and more games. If Blizzard gave you 1000 bonus points for free tacked onto your score you would lose them very quickly and they will leave the system forever. This is because matchmaking and scoring on matches is asymmetric: You match your hidden MMR against your opponent's Rating and vice versa.
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Bonus pool seriously needs reworking. Favored system needs reworking or removing.
On the inflation thing though, whenever they reset the ladder, which I'm sure they will periodically, everyone goes back to 100 or whatever you start at.
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On August 29 2010 20:00 japro wrote:
To me it looks like bonus points are nothing but a "fluff" feature so everyone can be happy about his ever increasing rating. If I understand it correctly it just offsets all ratings by some factor proportional to the time since the last reset (except for people that don't play or don't win a single game). So except for changes on small timescales the system would be equivalent without bonus points.
Edit: one could argue it discurages rating camping (building up a huge rating somehow and then stop playing ladder to not risk losing it) but as it is now, having a lot of points doesn't really have any "real" benefits...
Sure it does, having lots of points will get you invited to the 16-player tournament at Blizzcon on October 22-23 where you could win part of the $40,000 prize pool and earn some recognition.
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/600593
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EPT
