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On April 08 2011 21:15 [F_]aths wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2011 04:42 Dekoth wrote:
For that matter and to be perfectly clear, I hate the achievement system as well. I am utterly and completely opposed to systems that reward mediocrity like it is some kind of accomplishment. We don't need to shelter people from everything. Some of the best memories I have as a gamer are games that kicked my ass long hard and unmercifully until I surmounted it. Why was SC so wildly successful? Why is SC2 even more successful? Why would you "hate" achievements? If you don't care about them, don't care about getting them, but please let other people have fun in their achievement hunting. SC2 offers something for everyone. The largest userbase is mediocre by the very definition of that word. They have to have fun to keep the game on and rolling. The pros can try to get a shot for GSL Code-B or participate in a western online tournament to proof their worth. SC2 awards even the nubbiest casual weekend sunshine happy-go-lucky zeroskill gamers with portraits, decals and an achievement showroom. If you don't like it, you can keep the Kachinsky portrait like many GSL pros do. Starcraft 2 is not just about competition. It is an online gaming platform with a great soloplayer campaign and countless quality funmaps already. The new Blizzard funmaps even have their own sets of achievements. Time to play some Left2Die again!
I don´t think you got what he meant.
He is talking about a generall direction we take when conditioning our kids in a way that tells them "you did okay . . . you are a winner hurray".
It basically robs them of any kind of motivation to put more work into something than absolutely necessary.(The same reason why our school system is failing btw but that´s another topic)
Oh and btw i was D- back in the Iccup days and i did not feel miserably or ashamed.
/gaminghipster
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On April 08 2011 04:04 Bluerain wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2011 02:46 Zaqwert wrote:
The problem is Blizz's philosophy of protecting people from the ugly truth.
Why does SC2 have so few stats?
Look at a WC3 player's profile. You see a very detailed statistical break down, W/L record with reach race against each race. Furthermore you can see it broken down by individual map if you want to.
Look at SC2 stats... wait there are none, no stats whatsoever. All you have is total number of wins and "most played race"
How ridiculous is that? If a guy has 1000 wins I don't know if he has 1000 wins as a Terran or 501 as Terran and 499 as Protoss, it appears the same.
Post WoW/Activision Blizz has adopted the philosophy that they know best and giving players information is bad, it's up to them to decide what sort of information is best to give to protect people from themselves.
It's insulting and dishonest IMO. when i played wc3, i went to the wc3 bnet site multiple times DAILY. I would see whose on the front page of the top 20, check my statistics (some of the best/most interesting statistics ever ie. win % vs time duration, win% for each type of hero, win% for each matchup and map, etc) i've gone to the sc2 bnet site maybe once to vote for implementation of LAN. LOL. blizz u failed.
Thanks for reminding me....these stats were awsome. They were also really helpful for improving your play, because you could easily see were your weaknesses lie.
No offense to the BW-community at all, but I think the fact that many here have never played warcraft 3 competitively is the reason why they are not much, much more upset about the huge, epic fail which is the current ladder. SC2-ladder is ages behind wc3 VANILLA, not even talking about frozen throne-add-on....and many people accept it, since SC2-ladder is better than BW (hurr, durr).
By the way, why are there no weekly online tournaments, like in wc3? Where each and everyone would play against each other without regarding MMR....and where you'd play against more succesful players after you win? Meaning you go 1-0 and play against another 1-0-player. Then you play against another 2-0. Then against another 3-0...until you lose. Best 16 play in bracket, also created automaticly online. Is it really that hard to make a copy-paste of this code and implement it in the oh so improved bnet 2.0?
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Yeah I miss automated tournaments aswell, they were awesome. Especially because Archimonde is the best pic by far :p
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On April 08 2011 21:40 clusen wrote:
Yeah I miss automated tournaments aswell, they were awesome. Especially because Archimonde is the best pic by far :p
They are indeed missing out on so much stuff they could've done....I mean, they could have made a different "ladder-system" where only tournament-wins/losses were counted. In the end, if these tournemants were held on a regular basis, it could even resemble iccup.
Just for the record, for those who didn't play wc3: of course the tournament-wins were counted seperately there, for me it became even the "real" indicator of skill later on, since everybody was smurfing around anyways.
Notice that this is no "I want xyz introduced" since this stuff has been EXISTING already in warcraft 3 FOR YEARS. All I'm QQing about is, why bnet 2.0 can't have all the amazing stuff too that wc3 has had for such a long time.
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On April 08 2011 21:46 sleepingdog wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2011 21:40 clusen wrote:
Yeah I miss automated tournaments aswell, they were awesome. Especially because Archimonde is the best pic by far :p They are indeed missing out on so much stuff they could've done....I mean, they could have made a different "ladder-system" where only tournament-wins/losses were counted. In the end, if these tournemants were held on a regular basis, it could even resemble iccup. Just for the record, for those who didn't play wc3: of course the tournament-wins were counted seperately there, for me it became even the "real" indicator of skill later on, since everybody was smurfing around anyways. Notice that this is no "I want xyz introduced" since this stuff has been EXISTING already in warcraft 3 FOR YEARS. All I'm QQing about is, why bnet 2.0 can't have all the amazing stuff too that wc3 has had for such a long time.
Beacuse streamlining the experience is the #1 priority for all developers nowadays. The less complicated things are, the more mouthbreathers they can draw in to play the game. People get intimidated by numbers, for some reason. That's why there's less number crunching in almost every game nowadays.
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i also would prefer being rank 34934034 rather than being rank20 in any division because i personally would think of a) how many similar leagues are there and b) how are the points distributed in other leagues
sure it is a huge number but i dont see why it wouldnt let you set goals - if you are rank 53596 your next goal could be top 40k; the only thing i have been interested in leagues is to leave them as fast as possible and get promoted
also as the point system is insanely flawed atm nothing but grandmaster leagues will be a good indicator
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On April 08 2011 21:54 Alphasquad wrote:
i also would prefer being rank 34934034 rather than being rank20 in any division because i personally would think of a) how many similar leagues are there and b) how are the points distributed in other leagues
sure it is a huge number but i dont see why it wouldnt let you set goals - if you are rank 53596 your next goal could be top 40k; the only thing i have been interested in leagues is to leave them as fast as possible and get promoted
also as the point system is insanely flawed atm nothing but grandmaster leagues will be a good indicator
WC3 also managed this brilliantly by 50 levels. Yes you might have been #25302759 but you were in fact level 15. Getting to 16 or 14 was WAY more easier and transparent than moving from silver to gold.
You are exactly right, only the grandmasters get a "real" ladder after all. Since I'm nowhere near achieving that....well, I'll just have to shit TL up with my QQ some more. JK don't worry, I'm gonna stop now, don't want to annoy you any longer.
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The reason why there is little common with a game appealling to both elites and the noobs is because of the learning curve. what the elite cherishes is difficult gameplay, allowing for fine tuning of the process, giving a complex artistic result. the noobs also cherish this result, but are unable to achieve it through difficult gameplay, hence the necessary automation must be added to please them.
The critical point is, is it possible to design a game that has both the mechanisms of achieving an artistic result through simple gameplay and through complex gameplay. My experience in gaming seems to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. Hence the goal described by OP cannot be achieved due to the problem.
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United States12235 Posts
On April 08 2011 21:19 sleepingdog wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2011 06:20 Excalibur_Z wrote:
It may have been a secondary reason, but the official explanation of "it doesn't really have much relevance" has merit. Just on that. While this is true, this would've justified not implementing it...but actively taking it away can't be explained by a lack of relevance. Why not keep it in, nobody would've gotten hurt by having an "irrelevant" number in the game. Just my 2 cents. Also we have Division-rankings, which are irrelevant by definition. [/sarcasm]
I think that for most players, division rankings aren't completely irrelevant. For people whose MMR has stabilized, divisions do a pretty decent job of showing you where you stand among 99 other players who are around your skill level (they're in the same tier as you). Division rankings just don't have much meaning for people who are outperforming or underperforming in their league, which is pretty rare after playing enough games, which is where you'll usually plateau.
About not implementing it at first, I don't think Blizzard expected such a heavy community focus on W/L ratios. I sure didn't. When you look at posts from people who are talking about the ladder, the vast majority of them say something like "when am I getting promoted, I've won X games and lost Y" with a complete disregard for the quality of their opponents. Hey, congratulations, you're a Silver player who's won 9 out of your last 10 games... oh but they've been against Bronze players because you're not Silver material. Stuff like that is extremely common and can be blamed on how confusing the ladder is for the layman to understand, and the focus is always on getting promoted as though leagues were levels in War3. People need to reinterpret what they're seeing from the ladder, and there are ways to do that, we just don't have anything that's exact (though hopefully that will be changing in the not too distant future).
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On April 09 2011 00:14 xarthaz wrote:
The critical point is, is it possible to design a game that has both the mechanisms of achieving an artistic result through simple gameplay and through complex gameplay. My experience in gaming seems to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. Hence the goal described by OP cannot be achieved due to the problem. SC2 proves that it can be achieved. SC2 attracts both korean gosu players as well as the guys who play with a friend vs. AI.
I would go so far and saying that everone with exception of Top-Diamond or above is not actually playing Starcraft. He plays a game with the same UI and graphics. But he plays a strategy where he think that it might work. True understanding of the game is hard to achieve. But it still is fun for the rest of us.
I admit that I suck hard. As I began to grasp very few basics of the game, I realized that I know nothing really. I lived and still live in a world with my interpretation how Starcraft works. The real game is still beyond me. Repeating the "macro" mantra does not prove any understanding of the game.
I am a nub. I still want to climb that ladder.
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On April 08 2011 21:29 Clamev wrote:
I don´t think you got what he meant.
He is talking about a generall direction we take when conditioning our kids in a way that tells them "you did okay . . . you are a winner hurray". Not even in SC2 everyone is a "winner", only skilled and/or active people are.
On April 08 2011 21:29 Clamev wrote:
It basically robs them of any kind of motivation to put more work into something than absolutely necessary.(The same reason why our school system is failing btw but that´s another topic)
Oh and btw i was D- back in the Iccup days and i did not feel miserably or ashamed.
/gaminghipster Solid D-? Yeah I know the feeling, I was D- too.
The SC2 ladder however does give the normal guy something to put some work in. You want to be in Top-25 from place #30? You can do that if you play. If you play, you will get better somehow. It should not be the goal of a gaming service to tell the folks how to play (ie practice micro, learn to macro, analyze your replays, watch Day[9], discuss strategies on TL, ...) If someone catches the fire or if he suddenly realizes that playing on a higher level is more fun than keeping the all-in-gimmicks, he will put some efforts into it. The other guys who paid the money for SC2 just want to play around. Get to some fancy tier 3 units and blame the loss to imbalance.
There is nothing wrong with that. There is not the only one way to enjoy Starcraft. We absolutely don't need the elitists who say "So you want to play this game, nub? Well, quit your job and practice 6 hours per day, and you may be get at least mediocre, nub! SC2 is only for the guy who live for the game, not for you, nub, for which Starcraft is just one game out of many."
We need it the other way round. "So, you still playing minesweeper when you feel bored? Did you saw the last TSL match where [put in an upset]? Here, *starting VOD* is how [Pro #1] pulled off this strategy versus [Pro #2]. What that is? A buggy car with a flamethrower, ready to roast some zerg. Oh this is zerg creep. Zerg are a bunch of distugsting bugs like in Starship Troopers. That line? That indicates the rally point. The user interface is very neat, you can change where the units rally before you attack."
Show the beginner some love for the game. "You did not manage the second mission in the campaign? Oh yeah, I had some troubles, too. How many SVCs did you build? May be five?" (Here him out.) "Ok, you can try to build some more SVCs and collect some marines before you move out. Wait until you get 15 marines and 5 medics. Then move out and roll over Arcturus's puppets!"
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On April 09 2011 00:31 Excalibur_Z wrote:
About not implementing it at first, I don't think Blizzard expected such a heavy community focus on W/L ratios. I sure didn't.
I think the problem comes down to people wanting to know the statistics without having the tools to understand what they mean. I see a lot of people who actually read your well-written threads and come away clearly not understanding what they've read, instead substituting alternative interpretations that usually serve some goal of self-image preservation. I say this from the point of view of being a silver-league player with no ego to preserve. 
As you point out, for players who play a lot and are in similarly active divisions, division ranking does correlate roughly to performance. One tweak to the system I might like to see would be consolidating active players into active divisions as the season goes on, but then you'd have people asking why they went from 2nd in their inactive division to 55th in their active one.
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ye blizzard should start making decent macro achievements, make xx Workers before xx Time, expand x times before x minute mark, be maxed in xx minutes, etc x]. instead of warping in a twiclight council, or encouraging a freaking 6pool D:
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On April 08 2011 21:35 sleepingdog wrote:
No offense to the BW-community at all, but I think the fact that many here have never played warcraft 3 competitively is the reason why they are not much, much more upset about the huge, epic fail which is the current ladder. SC2-ladder is ages behind wc3 VANILLA, not even talking about frozen throne-add-on....and many people accept it, since SC2-ladder is better than BW (hurr, durr).
Should probably remind people that BW-era bnet had more functionality then Bnet2.0 does. Although it's nice to know that they included things like chat channels and LAN in the past, everyone used Iccup anyway. Third-party ladders would be the greatest thing SC2 could get, because there are problems with the current ladder that won't be going away anytime soon.
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Whether it be flawed or not, this is an excellent write up
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On April 08 2011 02:28 Zaqwert wrote:
Trying to rig a ladder to trick everyone into thinking they are actively competing for something just wrong. Lying to people, no matter how well intentioned, is something I'm just against.
The idea that a bronze player really cares whether or not they are 1st in their division or 90th is laughable. The first thing anybody says to him is "HAHA, bronze noob"
Try being in bronze for a while.
Seriously, there's no lying going on in the system. How it works is pretty much laid out there for everyone to see at this point. It's simply presented in a way that gives people realistic, achievable, and somewhat satisfying goals to work toward: Play more actively to climb to the level in the division that's set by using up all one's bonus points. Beyond that, improve a little bit to get a higher ranking. Beyond that, get promoted to the next league.
Nothing is stopping the bronze player from setting a goal of hitting the top 200 someday, but a system where the only realistic NEAR TERM goal is to get from position 191,000 to 190,000 on the ladder would mean the same thing as what we have now but make the experience of getting there a lot less rewarding.
Edit: These are not arguments for omitting loss information, but instead for why the division system has value, particularly for lower-level players.
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On April 08 2011 03:43 Lumpybd wrote:
tl:dr: While it may fluctuate slightly, MMR will keep your win ratio at roughly 50%. You want to know how many games you have lost... just take the number of games you have won and you won’t be very far off.
Actually, your win/loss ratio will permanently deviate from 50% if you have in the past had any periods where your MMR has been shifting rapidly up or down. So, for example, take a break and lose some games in a row and you'll be below 50% until you have a winning streak, which the system will do its best not to give you.
The matchmaking system makes its best effort to match you with an equal opponent for each individual game, but it does not try to bring your season-wide ratio to 50%.
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Win ratio means nothing when your match-ups are dependent upon a volatile, changing rating, unless you are tip top masters. People who are concerned with win ratios in such an environment are most likely pretentious snobs. The only measure of skill is your league, as it gives you a window in which your MMR falls. Unless you use low skill cheese strategies in every game, but then you know that you're not actually good at the game anyway.
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On April 09 2011 04:40 funkybovinator wrote:
The only measure of skill is your league, as it gives you a window in which your MMR falls.
Even that shifts over time, as the population changes, either because people drop out or because they improve.
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I'd have to disagree that it's not fair to let smurfs crush new players. Hell, you'd have a lot more to learn from a replay of you getting your face mashed in by Jaedong than by someone just as bad as you. Being smashed to pieces in a game isn't a bad thing, you can see what better players are doing.
The best thing Blizzard could do to the ladder for me is completely drop any form of visual ranking, and just let you mash the button to find a game blindly. Many a time I've anxiously looked at the multiplayer screen as it glares out at me with "HEY BY THE WAY THIS IS YOUR RANKING, THIS IS HOW YOU COMPARE TO OTHER PLAYERS, WOULDN'T IT BE AWFUL IF SUDDENLY YOU LOST AND IT WENT DOWN", hesitant to actually play.
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EPT
