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On December 23 2012 03:16 emythrel wrote:
I certainly see how bonus pool helps you catch up. If you are active, playing 5 games a day you will have no bonus pool to draw from for most of the season as you use it regularly. That means that most of the time your wins and losses cost you the same amount of points, someone who is less active however will earn twice the amount of points for a win than they do for a loss (in hots, you don't lose any points for a loss if u have bonus pool, it is simply removed from the bonus pool instead) which inflates their points a lot faster.
I have successfully gained top8 in my division every season by using the bonus pool i get from being inactive most of the season. While everyone else is losing and gaining points at an almost equal rate (MM system making you go 50/50) I am gaining points all the time until I use up my bonus pool, which incidentally always works out to be the exact amount of points I need to get to rank 1 or 2 in my division. Using your bonus pool up every day actually means you get less use from it because most of the time you aren't actually getting any boost from it.
false. Everyone get the same benefit from the bonus pool if they use it up. If I play 100 games a day get a certain amount of points and you wait to the end of the season and use the minimum games to use up the bonus pool we each benefit the exact same amount which is the size of the bonus pool.
The only reason you were further back is because the bonus pool was added as I played each day and you got yours at the day you 'caught up'. This is just a fake catching up that is entirely created by the bonus pool.
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On December 23 2012 12:22 Unshapely wrote:
the skill level of WOL Beta Platinum is probably equal to today's EU Bronze or Silver League.
That's laughable at best.
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On December 23 2012 12:49 vesicular wrote:Show nested quote +On December 23 2012 12:22 Unshapely wrote:
the skill level of WOL Beta Platinum is probably equal to today's EU Bronze or Silver League. That's laughable at best.
Indeed. Perhaps I missed your point, but how does your remark pertain to this thread?
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I just really want the global percentile rating. That's really the only thing that matters. And yes it definitely needs to only include active players that play at least 10 games, maybe 15.
I'm not sure it would work without global servers, but it would be interesting. It should at least be implemented for server percentiles. I think it would be nice if they allowed cross server playing. This would allow for players on the American ladder to play on the Korean or European ladder and vice versa. This would be fun, helpful for serious gamers who want to learn meta game from areas around the world, and allow for an estimation of server comparisons and possibly a foundation for global percentile rankings. (ie MMR would eventually be established that 84 percentile players on the European server are comparable to 30 percentile players on Korea.
Can you imagine the awesomeness?
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On December 23 2012 07:53 Excalibur_Z wrote:
- You do a good job explaining the goals of the bonus pool. It also serves one other purpose not directly addressed in your counterproposal. It's functionally a decay mechanism however it's more flexible because there are no enforced deadlines. If I want to go on vacation for a couple of weeks or just take a break from SC2, I can do that in the current bonus pool system without falling behind whereas I would have suffered two weeks' worth of decay penalties if there were weekly deadlines. Also--and this could be considered either a good or a bad thing about the bonus pool--if I start the season late I get a ton of bonus pool that I have to spend in order to catch up to the active players, whereas in a decay system I wouldn't necessarily have to play as many games.
You say it can be a good or bad thing that someone who joins later has a mass of bonus pool. This is exactly the problem I outlined in the "Jan 6 vs Feb 20" example in 2.4. How can it possibly be a good thing? How is it fair that Bob has to play extra games because of the bonus pool when the system already knows his MMR and sigma to be the same as Alice's?
The bonus pool doesn't prevent you from falling behind when you vacation for a couple weeks. Your rank will fall because other people have used their bonus pool. It's not a bad thing that your rank falls in this case. What is bad is that it falls even if you take 24 hours off, and it distorts the ladder as explained in 2.2. I did acknowledge the decay mechanism goal in 2.4. And my proposal does include a better "decay mechanism":
-In 3.2, I said sigma should decrease after a week of inactivity.
-In 3.3, I said that points should converge to (as opposed to being set equal to) MMR-1.96*sigma, (so points won't fall if you go on vacation).
-In 3.3, I also suggest how bonus pool can be fixed, which has the side-effect of accounting for inactivity: "she was inactive for the week, so it could be justified that her rank should fall as a small penalty for the chance that her skill has decreased due to prolonged inactivity. However, such an argument cannot be applied to the current bonus pool system because Alice would not lose any skill due to not having played for one hour or one day."
Note that this doesn't "double-count" or "double penalize" inactivity. The change that sigma should decay if you go inactive is needed regardless, otherwise you can get a "garbage in, garbage out" problem due to sigma being used in the MMR update equations not being as accurate as it could be.
When you come back from vacation, my suggestion allows you to very quickly catch up, and consume 2 weeks worth of bonus pool in a few games, because now sigma is explicitly used to account for uncertainty, so there's no need to make you play heaps of games just because the bonus pool is bad at factoring in uncertainty about MMR.
- The point that Tiberius mentions about placement is interesting and the way a new ladder would address it varies based upon your vision for the new bonus pool. At first I thought you were in favor of scrapping bonus pool completely and enforcing a decay system like War3, but you also said that bonus pool points should be given in bulk at the beginning of a week. In any event, placement matches appear to give you a provisional rating just like the same concept in chess, where your rating is more volatile during those matches to place you as accurately as possible after only 5 games. If there were no bonus pool at all, then you couldn't have season wipes because your points are your MMR, meaning you just play one game in the new season and you're back where you were. If the bonus pool just gets wiped, you could use season wipes in much the same way they're used now.
I have been preaching the benefits of decay systems for a while. But I don't think that it would be acceptable to Blizzard. So when I was writing this post, I thought up of a way to prevent stagnation and account for decay, without using a decay system.
To be clear, if we want perfectly accurate ranks and don't care a bit for psychology, I still strongly believe decay systems are superior. However, the proposed overhaul of the bonus pool system in section 3.3 is a far superior way to design a ladder system that accounts for decay, explicitly accounts for uncertainty about MMR, prevents stagnation, with the least distortion to ranks as possible. I do think that this new suggestion is on balance better than a decay system.
The idea of bonus pool being given in bulk at the start of the week and only updating the ladder once weekly, is to capture the good properties of a decay system, while still letting points trend upwards. I actually surprised myself by being able to think of so many benefits that updating the ladder once weekly would bring: it takes a snapshot when bonus pool doesn't really have a distortionary effect (paragraph 4 in 3.3), so it displays ladder ranks at the only time that they're "correct", it reduces noise, it greatly reduces the treadmill effect, it might even reduce ladder anxiety.
You can still have season wipes. The proposal was that points should converge to MMR-1.96*sigma, so in a season wipe points can still be reset to 0, or reset to some average depending on the players league. But as I explained to TiberiusAk, the idea of a season wipe makes no sense in terms of accurately ranking players, but players do expect some sort of "clean slate" at the start of a new system, so it's mostly a matter of choosing a point along this tradeoff.
- I agree about the Favored thing vesicular mentioned. During beta and early Season 1 it was kind of neat, where I thought "oh cool the game knows who is favored to win" kind of as a novelty (which it doesn't even actually do because it's different for both teams, but I digress). After enough games that novelty wears off and you're right: if you're favored then you better win or else, and if the other team is favored then uh oh I'm screwed, it sucks both ways. I mean, this sort of thing will happen as long as there is any visible data, so it's not just the SC2 loading screen that's intimidating. In Street Fighter if I'm a 3000PP player and I face a 1000PP player I think "I'd better not lose" but if I face a 4000PP player I think "uh oh I'm screwed", so there's pressure either way. Dota 2 doesn't tell you anything.
Actually, Blizzard must know who's more likely to win, because this information is needed in the MMR update equation:
posterior distribution of player 1's skill = P(Player 1 wins | player 1's skill)*P(player 1 skill) / normalizing constant.
So P(Player 1 wins | player 1's skill) must be known in order for them to do the calculations. In fact, in TrueSkill, the formula is quite simple:
P(Player 1 wins | player 1's skill) = Phi((mu1-mu2)/sqrt(2*beta^2 + sigma1^2 + sigma^2)), where mu is mean skill, beta is a constant that depends on the type of game, and Phi is the normal cumulative distribution function
But, yes the favored system should be scrapped. It's unnecessary. They should just stop showing it.
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On December 23 2012 14:29 theinfamousone wrote:
I just really want the global percentile rating. That's really the only thing that matters. And yes it definitely needs to only include active players that play at least 10 games, maybe 15.
I'm not sure it would work without global servers, but it would be interesting. It should at least be implemented for server percentiles. I think it would be nice if they allowed cross server playing. This would allow for players on the American ladder to play on the Korean or European ladder and vice versa. This would be fun, helpful for serious gamers who want to learn meta game from areas around the world, and allow for an estimation of server comparisons and possibly a foundation for global percentile rankings. (ie MMR would eventually be established that 84 percentile players on the European server are comparable to 30 percentile players on Korea.
Can you imagine the awesomeness?
Yes, this is a very good idea, which Blizzard should aim for. However, when I say "global" ladder, I mean a ladder for everyone on the server, as opposed to everyone in the world.
There's actually a bunch of research debating (particularly for chess) whether it's valid to use ELO, TrueSkill, MMR, etc, to compare the skill of players from different eras. Comparing ranks across the world faces the same problem, due to accounts being separate for each server.
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On December 23 2012 12:22 Unshapely wrote:
i disagree with this thread in it's entirety. It is solely because an inactive player does become rusty which therein results in a drop of skill. Keep in mind that the skill level in ladder rises as time goes by. E.g., the skill level of WOL Beta Platinum is probably equal to today's EU Bronze or Silver League.
Therefore, your proposition of improvement is flawed.
What?
1. Inactive player loses skill.
2. ???
3. Therefore, everything paralleluniverse said is completely and utterly wrong.
Does not compute.
How does this change the validity of anything I've said?
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On December 23 2012 07:12 TiberiusAk wrote:Show nested quote +Do solution 2, but scrap the idea of leagues. As Apolo explains, Bronze league is just a big a "I suck" sticker which Blizzard forces 42% of players to wear on their heads. It doesn't help people suffering from ladder anxiety, it hurts them instead. They still might want to put a league icon next to a player's name, based on their global ladder percentile, but they should consider possibly ditching all fanfare associated with promotion and demotion and labeling people. I disagree with scrapping leagues. I think Apolo's post may overestimate the harm and ignoring the benefits of leagues (though he was talking about hiding, not removing them). What evidence is there that bronze players actually feel this way? How many of them do? I don't hear many people saying that ICCUP should have scrapped their D/C/B/A system because people felt stigmatized at being a "D" player. I think players are emotionally more robust than that--players accept that in a competition, there is going to be a bottom level. Also, if players felt stigma over being in bronze, then why have there been so many posts on the blizzard forums asking for demotions? (I've 2 friends that were independently terrified of being in silver when they started laddering.) I think players who feel like they aren't skilled want to be in a lower league because they perceive the matches would be more fair. They feel scared playing non-bronze players; they feel safer after demotion. On the flipside, players who post "where's my promotion" argue they are worthy of the next league. (The global ladder addition would make promotion/demotion more transparent, possibly solving this problem.) A couple of positive things:Improving to the point where one moves up to the next league is a big motivation to play competitively. I would bet cash money that going from Bronze to Silver with some fanfare is a lot more gratifying than going from say, 18% to 22% percentile. Players also like to wear their achievements; I think the HotS feature of displaying level and league on players icons in chat is a great idea. Leagues may also help the community by making it easier for the social players (the ones that hang out in chats, and might be concerned about stigma in the first place) to find new friends or practice partners near their skill level to invite to games at a glance. (Granted, you might be seeing someone's team league, but if an icon is bronze they are most certainly bronze! -- It'd be nice if blizzard let you choose to have chat display other player's highest league, team league, or 1v1 league.) You could argue that we could show percentile number and level number instead. But would players know what to do with that information? Should a 10% player bother playing at 15%? A 20%? You'd have to educate, or everyone might get unnecessarily afraid of playing people they'd actually have a decent chance against. Aside: If 20/20/20/20 isn't the best distribution for the lower four leagues for social (i.e. non-automated) matchmaking purposes, it could be adjusted. Proving what the "ideal" distribution might be an interesting problem. Conclusion: I don't think one can justify scrapping leagues entirely just because some (how many?) people might feel bad about being in bronze. The harm is probably overstated, and can be overcome through other incentive structures (e.g. leveling system) discussed in this thread.
A part of the problem with ladder anxiety is "where's the evidence for anything?". Why doesn't Blizzard do random surveys and research on ladder anxiety given that the whole ladder system design seems to have been driven by it? Here I'm assuming there's no research because I haven't heard of anyone ever getting surveyed by Blizzard, and there doesn't seem to be any other way to conduct large-sample ladder anxiety research (but maybe they have secret research which we don't know about).
So a lot of the arguments on this issue are just mostly based on reading what people are writing and just using "common sense" (which isn't always so reliable). Your comment about getting demoted to get easier queues and people demanding promotions highlights a major problem with the SC2 ladder system: most people have no idea how it works. I've also flagged this as a big problem, and Blizzard's attempts to explain it have been a very poor.
I agree with you that there are some benefits to having leagues and you've outline those. I didn't write that leagues should be removed in the OP because I thought it would be a very radical change and unlikely to happen. And I'm not sure whether the benefits are greater than the cost.
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On December 23 2012 07:53 Excalibur_Z wrote:
Blizzard has already shown that they are taking the ladder in a new direction with HotS.
I don't see it.
I see that Battle.net has very very significantly improved. But the ladder system is virtually identical to WoL.
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On December 23 2012 07:53 Excalibur_Z wrote:
- I agree about the Favored thing vesicular mentioned. During beta and early Season 1 it was kind of neat, where I thought "oh cool the game knows who is favored to win" kind of as a novelty (which it doesn't even actually do because it's different for both teams, but I digress). After enough games that novelty wears off and you're right: if you're favored then you better win or else, and if the other team is favored then uh oh I'm screwed, it sucks both ways.
I didn't have a problem with this in the early days when it happened very rarely, but now with the wider match search it is as you say.
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Allow me to make your comprehend.
The bonus pool perpetually inflates the points of more active players, which causes your rank to fall and continually requires you to play on a daily basis, even to maintain the same position. This creates a "treadmill effect”. If Alice and Bob are equally skilled and Alice becomes less active, then her points will diverge from Bob's.
I would like this system to remain unchanged - read my reasoning.
Keep in mind that the skill level in ladder rises as time goes by.
So, I have two points. Firstly, Alice loses her `groove.' Secondly, there is potential for the skill level of the entire ladder to rise. According to your article, the bonus pool doesn't serve it's purpose. I think it does, because if Bob has been playing in Alice's absence, then there is potential for him to improve and become better within this duration. He is learning new tactics while alice's quick hands are not so quick anymore. Nota bene: every company would like their player base to be as active as possible. I do not see any problem with active players being rewarded for keeping the game alive and thriving.
With the inclusion of the leveling system that rewards all types of players, the issue you're trying to address doesn't really bother casuals as much as you claim it does. Therefore the system is fine as it is.
Now, about global ladder. Blizzard has announced that they'll make it possible for people from Europe to be able to play on American and Korean servers (and vice versa). It is a bit unclear how this will be implemented, because I'm almost certain that there will be a variance in latency. I'm hoping for this to be implemented separately, with a separate set of statistics which will enable us to directly compare global statistics to that of our own continent. I must first witness the change before I can criticise it.
remove the GM league
I do not recommend that GM league be removed. It is the hallmark of the greatest achievement in your continent. It not only gives you bragging rights, but also gives you a sense of mental euphoria. I am not against the proposal you made for possible technical corrigendums in the algorithm used, but rather the idea of removing GM altogether.
if a player during the middle of the season becomes more skill than the players in the top 200, than he will be unable to enter the GM league
Then why have seasons at all? Shouldn't there be some significance of having different seasons, aside from a different map pool?
Ladder Anxiety
This is the point where, perhaps, most people would disagree with me. Be it as it may, I find it absurd that certain people feel anxiety from playing a video game. Perhaps it is because I never felt the same way when playing Starcraft.
Blizzard should remove the division ranks,
I like the current system better because it indirectly relates to the ranks in real-world. Just like we have a Soldier, Major, General, etc. People are not ranked upon numbers. You're basically trying to bring the ICCup/Fish like points from Brood War right? I fail to see how this would make a difference, because people would inevitably classify a set of points into a rank.
Exempli gratia,
1-100 (Bronze)
100-200 (Silver)
200-300 (Mid Silver)
...
1000-1500 (Mid Masters or whatever)
So on and so forth. It wouldn't bring about the change you're hoping it otherwise would. Because the rank mentality will remain.
Some of your points are quite general, as people have been wanting to know the correct system used to determine ranks for a long time. You seem to view the bonus pool as a big problem, whereas I don't. This is where we differ. Your proposal for improving the algorithm is better served at Battle.net forums because the likelihood of a developer coming across it would be greater.
I admit, I did not read the rest of your article. I see no problem with the last two points you made. Let me know if I missed anything worthwhile.
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On December 23 2012 17:42 Unshapely wrote:Allow me to make your comprehend. Show nested quote +The bonus pool perpetually inflates the points of more active players, which causes your rank to fall and continually requires you to play on a daily basis, even to maintain the same position. This creates a "treadmill effect”. If Alice and Bob are equally skilled and Alice becomes less active, then her points will diverge from Bob's. I would like this system to remain unchanged - read my reasoning. So, I have two points. Firstly, Alice loses her `groove.' Secondly, there is potential for the skill level of the entire ladder to rise. According to your article, the bonus pool doesn't serve it's purpose. I think it does, because if Bob has been playing in Alice's absence, then there is potential for him to improve and become better within this duration. He is learning new tactics while alice's quick hands are not so quick anymore.
As I've already explained in the OP:
"In that example, Alice is more skilled than Bob. She doesn't play for a day and falls below Bob's rank as a result of Bob's bonus pool. So the ladder ranks have become wrong. Now if the ladder were to update only once weekly and bonus pool were changed as I've suggested, then Alice would be able to get back ahead of Bob, before the next ladder snapshot. If she didn't, it would be because she was inactive for the week, so it could be justified that her rank should fall as a small penalty for the chance that her skill has decreased due to prolonged inactivity. However, such an argument cannot be applied to the current bonus pool system because Alice would not lose any skill due to not having played for one hour or one day. The skill lost for 2 weeks of inactivity is far more than 14 times the skill lost in 1 day of inactivity."
While players may lose skill for not having played for a week, they don't lose skill for not having played for a day. In fact, the sleep and rest should make them play better. Yet the bonus pool still penalizes them for inactivity on an hourly basis, causing ranks to be distorted. It creates a treadmill effect where your rank continually falls each day you log in.
Nota bene: every company would like their player base to be as active as possible. I do not see any problem with active players being rewarded for keeping the game alive and thriving.
Ask yourself why activity should be rewarded instead of just taking it as an article of faith.
There are 2 possible reasons:
1. As a proxy to uncertainty about MMR. In the above example Alice may have lost some skill, we're not sure so we would like to take that possibility into account.
2. To encourage players to play the game.
On 1, Blizzard should directly use the uncertainty about MMR, sigma, instead of using the bonus pool as a way to indirectly estimate uncertainty about MMR. And it isn't even an accurate proxy as shown by my "Jan 6 vs Feb 20" example in 2.4. How can you explain this example using an "inactivity causes loss of skill argument"? You can't. What Blizzard's bonus pool does is like estimating the temperature of the room indirectly by using air inflows and outflows and the rate at which a bowl of hot water cools down. Whereas what I'm proposing (making points converge to MMR-1.96*sigma) is like measuring the temperature of the room directly by looking at the thermometer.
On 2, encouraging people to play should be achieved using a leveling system that gives cosmetic rewards. Doing it through the bonus pool distorts ranks in ways that cannot be explained by loss of skill, delays points from self-correcting when the player has legitimately loss skill (as shown by the examples in 2.2) and fails to correctly account for uncertainty about MMR (as shown in the "Jan 6 vs Feb 20" example in 2.4).
With the inclusion of the leveling system that rewards all types of players, the issue you're trying to address doesn't really bother casuals as much as you claim it does. Therefore the system is fine as it is.
What are you talking about? What issue? The leveling system is for rewarding activity. My point is that the bonus pool is not needed for this goal since the leveling system already does it.
Now, about global ladder. Blizzard has announced that they'll make it possible for people from Europe to be able to play on American and Korean servers (and vice versa). It is a bit unclear how this will be implemented, because I'm almost certain that there will be a variance in latency. I'm hoping for this to be implemented separately, with a separate set of statistics which will enable us to directly compare global statistics to that of our own continent. I must first witness the change before I can criticise it.
It is crystal clear how this will be implemented. Blizzard has continually said that you'll get a completely and absolutely new account for each region. Nothing is shared between regions.
But that's not what I mean by a global ladder. I'm talking about a ladder that ranks all active players on the server, i.e. all North American players on 1 ladder, instead of hundreds of meaningless division ladders.
I also have no idea where you quote-mined the statement: "Blizzard should remove the division ranks,". That phrase doesn't appear in my OP. The closest thing I said is that ranks should be taken from the matchmaking page and score summary page and put into the ladder page within the profile, in order to reduce the treadmill effect and to maximize the positive psychology associated with points that trend upwards.
I do not recommend that GM league be removed. It is the hallmark of the greatest achievement in your continent. It not only gives you bragging rights, but also gives you a sense of mental euphoria. I am not against the proposal you made for possible technical corrigendums in the algorithm used, but rather the idea of removing GM altogether. Show nested quote +if a player during the middle of the season becomes more skill than the players in the top 200, than he will be unable to enter the GM league Then why have seasons at all? Shouldn't there be some significance of having different seasons, aside from a different map pool?
I said that the GM league should be removed, if there is a global ladder. If all active players are on a single ladder, from 1 to 40,238, then what's the point of GM league? What additional information does it provide? None, because everyone, not just the top 200, are ranked together.
You call the GM league the greatest achievement. But you fail to understand that the design of GM is flawed. Once you get in the GM league you don't leave unless you're inactive. You can't get into the GM league unless someone leaves. So why have a GM league at all when it doesn't even give the top 200 players at the current moment. It gives the top 200 players at the start of the season who have remained active. The GM league does not reflect current information about the top 200, hence there are people in GM who shouldn't be, and there are people who should be in GM but aren't.
Information on how GM league works: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/2452060
This is the point where, perhaps, most people would disagree with me. Be it as it may, I find it absurd that certain people feel anxiety from playing a video game. Perhaps it is because I never felt the same way when playing Starcraft.
You can find it absurd all you want. To deny that it exists is to ignore reality. Why do you think Blizzard hid losses in WoL? Because of ladder anxiety.
I like the current system better because it indirectly relates to the ranks in real-world. Just like we have a Soldier, Major, General, etc. People are not ranked upon numbers. You're basically trying to bring the ICCup/Fish like points from Brood War right? I fail to see how this would make a difference, because people would inevitably classify a set of points into a rank. Exempli gratia, Show nested quote +
1-100 (Bronze)
100-200 (Silver)
200-300 (Mid Silver)
...
1000-1500 (Mid Masters or whatever)
So on and so forth. It wouldn't bring about the change you're hoping it otherwise would. Because the rank mentality will remain.
I wasn't aware that there's a real world rank called #47 or #18. You're confusing "league" with "division ranks". I suggest you read up on the current ladder system: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Battle.net_Leagues
I said that division ranks are meaningless, not leagues. You haven't addressed any of the substance of my reasoning on why division ranks are meaningless in 4.1. Moreover, I didn't say that division ranks should be removed, in fact, I argued that they should stay: "This does not necessarily mean that the division ladders should be removed, just that division ranks are meaningless. Both global and division ladders can coexist."
Where are you getting this idea that I'm trying to bring back Iccup? I said there should be a global rank as a percentile, i.e. if you're in the top 4% of all active players on the server, you get a percentile of 96, i.e. you're better than 96% of all active players on the server.
If you don't believe in ladder anxiety, then what is your problem with my suggestion of adding a global ladder.
Some of your points are quite general, as people have been wanting to know the correct system used to determine ranks for a long time. You seem to view the bonus pool as a big problem, whereas I don't. This is where we differ. Your proposal for improving the algorithm is better served at Battle.net forums because the likelihood of a developer coming across it would be greater.
I admit, I did not read the rest of your article. I see no problem with the last two points you made. Let me know if I missed anything worthwhile.
It appears that you didn't read much of my post as you've misinterpreted most of what I said, while having ignored sections showing that your arguments are wrong and that bonus pool is a major problem. Moreover, you haven't adequately addressed why my reasons against the bonus pool are wrong and how my changes to the bonus pool system would make it worse. No one else who has replied to this thread has so misunderstood what I've written.
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Loss aversion: decay system vs bonus pool
An interesting point to consider is that humans are psychologically loss adverse, i.e. the hurt caused by losing $1 is greater than the happiness caused by getting $1. This very recent article (not political) makes some points about this fact: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-24/people-hate-losses-and-that-affects-u-s-budget-talks.html
Although the discussion in the article looks at motivation, rather than "fun", it would seem to imply that a decay system is a greater motivator than a bonus pool system. I still think my revamped bonus pool system is probably overall better than a decay system, which in turn is light years better than the current bonus pool system, but this is interesting food for thought.
Division system in a global ladder
If a global ladder were implemented, the division system could have great potential:
1. Divisions could be a mini-ladder with players in your skill range (i.e. division tiers without the point modifiers).
2. Divisions can be completely divorced from leagues (if you change league, you don't change division).
3. Divisions could even be a "create-your-own ladder" with friends and others.
Under the current system:
1 and 2 are not possible since it would imply that getting to the top of division ladder would no longer be a (crude) approximation to being promoted.
3 is not possible because there would be no real ranking system at all.
So if there's a global ladder to handle "serious" ranking, the division system could be freed up to be more fun and welcoming. It could be a system that allows you to make your own division to compete with friends. This could even be tied into the group and clan feature. And it could also be a system where you can compete with 100 players of near equal skill. If a tournament system were added, good players would always win. But if divisions had tournaments, it would allow the average player to win, despite the fact that such a tournament win can't really be taken seriously. But that would be OK, because the global ladder is for the more serious business.
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I just want to add that, imo, the biggest factor that makes people stop laddering is fear of demotion.
When your MMR is in-between 2 leagues and you manage to get a promotion to the higher league, you have all reasons to stop playing right there.
The fact that many people don't realize that the threshold for demotion is lower than the threshold for promotion doesn't help.
Just picture this example for a second:
- you've been recently promoted to plat, a long term goal! It took you so much effort to get there, but people now finally respect you a little! And, of course, you told all your friends about it.
- Problem is now you're on a losing streak, so you start worrying about demotion to gold again.
- You have no idea how close it could be... how do demotions work anyway? You have no idea... but you have a feeling it could be next loss or 2.
- So what do you do? You stop laddering to keep your precious plat icon.
(Note: I don't mean everyone is like this)
Also, the whole ladder system is obscure and not knowing / being in control of things make people uncomfortable and anxious.
This is why I actually think a very good measure would be to make MMR visible.
What would this achieve?
The social importance of being in a certain league would decrease a lot, as people would be focusing more on each other's MMR, so players wouldn't worry so much about demotion.
In terms of MMR, any loss is just another 10-20 points you loose. Not a big deal. The loss aversion remains a lot more constant, instead of reaching huge proportions near demotion.
Also, everyone would understand how ladder works a lot better, which is good.
I feel that Blizzard doesn't want people asking questions like: 'why does this guy with -100 MMR is in a higher league than me?' But making things clear is always better. In chess, GMs having lower ELO than masters happens all the time and no one complains about that, because people understand the system.
Also, I believe MMR is a constant motivation to play. Instead of just having very distant league promotions, you can set a number of intermediate goals for yourself: reach 1500, then reach 1600, etc...
I've had a chess ELO since I was a kid and chess players love their ELOs and are constantly working to improve them for the next 50 or 100 points.
This little number is best motivation one can have to play.
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On December 22 2012 21:06 paralleluniverse wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2012 06:50 Treehead wrote:
On Ladder Anxiety:
I'm sorry to say that you've missed the point a bit on ladder anxiety in 5.1-5.3 (though I like the inclusion of team games, though, that would do a ton). People aren't afraid to queue because they see and understand the potential volatility in their ladder ranking, or their points, or whatever. People are afraid to queue for a much more basic reason - they're afraid they'll do something which makes them look silly.
It's like this - you can explain to someone that by asking a girl to a dance, they can't actually possibly lose anything except the indifference of a girl who's probabilistically unlikely to date you anyway, unless you count the fact that you could get married to said girl and she could rule your life with an iron fist, leaving you a crushed and hopeless shell of a man who has to ask permission to use the bathr... oh look, it appears I've wandered - but anyway, the point of going with said girl in the first place is to initiate such a relationship, so I wouldn't think one should count that. And you can explain that if for some reason said girl does decide to go to the dance with you, it could be a great boon to the rest of your life.
But explaining the logic of the matter doesn't deal with the anxiety. If it promotes an action one anyone's part, psychologically speaking it isn't generally because you've dealt with the anxiety, but rather because you've created a social situation in which people feel silly for being afraid of feeling silly - you can see the possible issues this might present people. But really, any "tutorial" about how someone is supposed to feel is most likely to be ignored or misunderstood anyway.
The only ways I know of to deal with anxiety is through practice and discipline, through medication, or through evasion (hence my like of team games, where everything wrong can always be someone else's fault). The impression that I usually get from reading threads on this forum is that it's more about promotions and demotions and having bad losing streaks than it is about what's happening in the actual game. If the cause of ladder anxiety is that people are afraid of getting hellion harassed or getting killed by a cannon rush or annihilated by a protoss deathball after spending 20 minutes in game, getting outmatched by zerg etc, then there really isn't too much that game designers can do other than dumbing down the game, which should definitely not happen. I don't think there is any one cause of ladder anxiety or any one solution. It's probably impossible to completely fix, which is why I've made several suggestions to help reduce it. As for the tutorial, I think it's a good idea not because it tells people how to feel, but rather because it would explain to them that MMR is self-correcting. It's something everyone should be told. How they feel is up to them. It obviously won't be a silver bullet. Throughout WoL, the awful design of the ladder system seemed to have been completely driven by ladder anxiety, hiding losses, making points incomparable, refusing to implement a global ladder etc. Yet Blizzard doesn't seem to realize that the league system and the bonus pool system, while not the direct cause of ladder anxiety, still makes the problem worse. What do you suggest?
The fact that you're reading threads on ladder anxiety and taking what is written there at face value exemplifies the problem. Take said example with asking a girl to the dance - assume guy asks girl to dance and gets rejected. Is he likely to respond to the anxiety itself? Is he likely to think with a cool and logical mindset about it (and just say "oh well, it happens - I'll find someone else" without feeling bad)? Or is he more likely to find random negative things about himself or his potential date and attribute the blame for his rejection entirely on a small set of likely irrelevant factors?
If you said the third option, you've probably been rejected by a girl before. If you ask this person what the problems were which led to this rejection, he'll likely complain about her, himself, or the environment in which this occurred. That is what these people are doing. They're taking something arbitrary (the inner workings of the promotion and demotion system, which they usually do not understand, or balance which they understand even less, or maybe even the nature of the game, or people, etc.), and attributing the entirety of the cause for their anxiety on these things.
You ask what I suggest doing for anxiety? I have a few ideas, but on the whole overcoming anxiety is more about a person's awareness than it is about those around them.
1. Training - people on the ladder hate losing because they're not used to it and they're not sure what to make of it. They expect to win because "they're awesome", and much like inertia, they'll remain in this state of mind unless you break them of it. The simplest and most straightforward way to do this - make something that'll beat them a lot of the time. You have to make it beatable, but you have to make it hard. Then you have to give them incentives to go back over and over again. Then you have to somehow make it fun.
Concretely, make an AI trainer that actually is capable of playing like a normal player would and makes decisions (if only randomly) like another player. Make this AI notably better than each player, but not so much better that it leaves them no chance to win. Reward them with wins against these bots by giving them points, but don't change their MMR. The points awarded should roughly be the same as point inflation (which may or may not fade away).
This gives people a way of playing and improving and most importantly getting used to losing in an environment free of judgment, but is probably not the best option because such an AI would likely be impossible to code correctly.
2. Give them external factors to blame - these can be chance factors (as in card games), or it can be other players (you already mentioned doing this a la WC3-like multiplayer).
As an alternative to the standard multiplayer, I'd propose a new kind of multiplayer where you can simply have multiple players controlling the same base. This accomplishes a couple of key things. First, it provides an environment where 3 or 4 people can team up and work together to beat their opponent(s). Second of all, it gives us an environment that we are already trying to balance so that no additional balance work needs to be done to make multiplayer "balanced". Third, and perhaps most importantly of all, it makes the multiplayer that people stick around for still related to the pro scene - so that players who are into 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 are still able to look to 1v1 pros to discover build orders, micro techniques and compositions.
This is infinitely more achievable that 1 above - but I still doubt they'll do this.
3. Give the people reasons they lost at the end of the game. These do not need to be terribly overt, but some form of measuring a players macro, micro, strategic thinking and multitasking would give each player something to work on after each loss. When you lose to a cloaked banshee early on before you have an observer, the lesson is obvious, and people alter their build orders to make an earlier observer. But often times, the reason people lose are less obvious. Maybe they missed a bit of micro or got supply blocked for a long period of time, while their opponent did not. By rating things like micro, multitasking and macro, we can get an idea of why our opponent was better than we were and it gives us something to improve on in our next game. When we don't know what went wrong, it can be a frustrating experience.
Let's look at another analogy. When a child is about 2 or 3 years of age, they begin to purposefully get into trouble in a period known by most parents as the "terrible twos". In general, they do this to determine precisely what it is that parents expect of them. By giving them repeated punishments or reprieval of privileges when they do certain activities, a child learns that these activities are things they are *not* expected to do. Through repeated rewards or removal of negative consequences, a child learns that these activities are things they are expected to do (and praised for doing). It is when these punishments and rewards get mixed that we see anxiety. A child may be momentarily happy that he is rewarded despite performing a behavior which previously earned punishment, but the overall effect is uncertainty and anxiety as to whether the action he is performing is appropriate or not.
Now, I'm not saying we're all 2-year-olds, but at some level human beings learn behaviors similarly throughout life. If you win some games and lose others while appearing internally to be doing the same thing, the result is that you feel uncertain about if the way you are playing is good or bad - creating anxiety. Especially amongst people with poor game sense where the reason they lost feels unknown, giving a person ratings compared to their opponent on different things gives them concrete things they need to be doing better instead of the generic "win or loss" mentality, we can reward their macro while punishing their micro, or reward their use of strategy while punishing them for their multitasking.
The biggest hurdle here is actually measuring these things in a way that is both meaningful and will very seldomly produce a result where the winning player actually played worse in all categories than their opponent.
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United Kingdom36161 Posts
I don't have much deep to add, I just read it because it was interesting and made good points. I'm a fairly casual low masters player, I just play a few games a week. The one suggestion I didn't like was only updating the ladder weekly. Even though I appreciate it's pointless, I like seeing my points go up and down as I play (even knowing that with my bonus pool and the bonus people of other people in my division, the ranks are mostly meaningless). Basically what I'm saying is that I like immediate feedback when I play games, and it would irritate me not to have it, however meaningless it is ^^
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I honestly wish we hada true global ladder. I mean i really dont even care about sliver/gold/plat. I jsut want to know where i'm at without having to go to sc2 ranks. idc if its ever 400,000/4 million or whatever.
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@OP:
This is an interesting post, and you obviously put a lot of thought into it. I would like to respond to certain points about it, but have a question for you, first, since you seem to understand TrueSkill better than most I've been able to talk to.
Halo Wars, an RTS created by Microsoft Game Studios for Xbox 360, used the TrueSkill rating system for online ladder. The developers linked to the same Microsoft research article that you linked to in your OP and claimed that it was this implementation. I would assume that if TrueSkill was to be implemented correctly anywhere, it would probably be in a Microsoft Game Studios game for Xbox 360.
This rating system had serious problems for 1v1 gameplay, and was widely regarded as 'completely unusably horrible' for team play. To give you an example of some of the 1v1 problems, I'll just share my experience:
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At release, the best player in the game (a game balance tester who started with a bit of an advantage) reached a TrueSkill (TS) rating of 48, and then quit. He was #1 on the ladder until the ladder reset months later, unable to be surpassed by anyone. Since the system was not well-understood, people just continued to play games, and were not sure why he couldn't be surpassed. The best players reached TS 47 but could not increase. I was one of those players.
Then a ladder reset came. Everyone started playing games, and after around a week, people couldn't get above TS 46. Nobody understood why. About a month later, I created a new account out of boredom, and hit up the 1v1 ladder. I rocketed to TS 48 in 17 games. Other top players saw the same and created new accounts as well, and met me at TS 48.
We started noticing interesting (read: bad) characteristics of the TrueSkill system. One such characteristic was that if you played a player with significantly lower TS than you (let's say 48 against 37), and you won the game, you would actually lose TrueSkill. Sometimes you would drop from 48 to 47. Someone found a bug that allowed you to view your exact TrueSkill rating (out to many decimal points, so for example, 47.271642), after which we could confirm that playing a player below your skill level definitely made you lose TrueSkill 100% of the time, win or lose (if you lost, your TrueSkill would tank).
Another characteristic was that it had a very, very strong weighting component. If you were TS 48, and you played 150 games, then you aren't getting to 49 TS, ever. Beating an equally-ranked opponent at 48 will net you around 0.002 TS points. If you've played 14 games, it will net you about 0.1, a 50-fold difference.
Everyone began to race for TS 50, the end-accomplishment on the solo ladder. Many people didn't think it was even possible to do. I made this my goal. The game became "get a new Xbox account, play 10-16 games, if you lose any games or if you play anyone bad and win after ~16 games, you quit and restart". Losing more than a few games was an insurmountable challenge because your TS became nearly impossible to move. Beating a bad opponent was the same thing as losing.
My second account was un-tainted by losses or games with bad players, so I stayed on it, playing judiciously. I would add all the top players to my friends list, see when they were searching for games, and snipe them. This kept me from playing anyone bad and weighting my account, and somewhat hilariously, made it impossible for them to ever improve, forcing them to create another account. After about two months or so, I was the first to hit TS50, and quit (playing anyone else at that point, even if I won, would drop me back down to 49. This is the silliest thing ever).
Following this, people figured out that you can just boost to 50+ by getting two accounts to ~45 TS, which is easy to do because of the weighting factor. Then you attempt to get matched up with eachother by searching at the same time and forfeit. Months later, there were 5-6 TS 50s from this (even though it's essentially cheating).
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As you can see, the rating system became the focal point of the game, and you had to game it in order to progress on the ladder.
I'm a bit tired of typing to write a full experience with the team TrueSkill system, but just trust me when I say that it's unplayable. My team had a 118-0 record (yes, seriously) on the in-game leaderboard. We were ranked 956th or something with 42 TS. The #1 team was like 30-10 with 49 TS, because they learned that the TrueSkill system gives insane gains when you pair a highly-ranked player with lowly-ranked players and intentionally exploited that fact. The teams in the between unintentionally exploited that fact.
Your endorsement of the TrueSkill system, and inclination to move Starcraft's system closer towards it, makes me question how good of an idea these suggestions would be. If Halo Wars' implementation of the TrueSkill system is any indication, implementing TrueSkill would literally ruin the Starcraft II ladder. I've laddered competitively on Starcraft II as well as an RTS with TrueSkill and I can say with confidence that Starcraft's ladder system is superior.
Do you have personal experience with a system where TrueSkill works well?
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I would have to say that bonus pool is fine where it is. This is because matchmaking is made to place people with you who are equal in skill, resulting in a ~50% winrate. If bonus pool didnt exist, everyone would have 0 points, except for smurfs, and people who are on the verge of promotion. While you are right in that it does not help inactive players, creating a treadmill effect, it, instead of helping them, makes them play more. It is more of an incentive than an actual tool in helping inactive players.
And yet, this treadmill effect is still a problem. I have to play to keep my rank, because someone else played. I definately think the best way to rank someone is to reveal MMR and rank accordingly. Eg. a higher mmr player is higher in his division. Of course, there is an uncertainty value. The MMR should subtract the average of the upper and lower bounds of a player's uncertainty. So that way, if a player will occasionally play higher than his mmr more often than he plays lower than his mmr, his mmr rises slightly. And if a player's uncertainty shifts to a tendancy to play less than their mmr, he loses some mmr. If blizz wants to hide ppls mmr to hide their patented algorythms, they simply dont reveal the uncertainty, and the mmr algorythm is impossible to decode.
Another idea i have is just to make active players have no bonus pool. Bonus pool only accrues after 2 days of ladder incativity. If a person is active, he instead loses less points for losing a match, equal to the number of points the game is worth + or - the number of consecutive active days. and wins more points for winning a match. This means that inactive players can catch up, and that the ability to gain points along with mmr gets rid of the need for a treadmill effect.
This way:
- a person cant log In once a day to farm his bonus pool and then get off.
- Active players are rewarded.
- Inactive players can catch up, but the playing field is leveled once they are caught up.
(edited to avoid double post with second idea)
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I am extremely impressed by how well written the OP is and how extensively paralleluniverse answers all questions and objections. I just read through everything very thoroughly, looking up hard words like "converge" and working hard to understand all the math and statistics.
All the posts have been impressing too, except for one which was so unclear it caused a laugh attack-welcome in all the seriousness.
I do not actually have anything to contribute with but felt that I had to share my appreciation for all this. The work put into making ladder a better experience for all and the thread with the best written OP and highest overall quality of posts I have ever seen on TL.
Thank you.
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EPT
