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On December 10 2012 13:47 ItsPaul wrote:
The only thing I would like to say is in regards to the 'Leave League' button. As a casual I tend to have a few weeks where ill ladder, and then a couple of months where I won't play. After watching some ESPORTS I'll get in the mood again, but any muscle memory and awareness of how not to be completely clumsy has generally faded by then. I know I would rather have a fresh slate when I come back after being afk just so that the first few games I play aren't all roflstomps. I understand that in time any skill lost can come back, but in regards to the idea of trying to keep casuals engaged, it's really hard to get back into the game when you just feel like you have no chance of winning when you sit down.
An option to lower its own MMR could be used for smurfing. The MMR however automatically widens its interval when you didn't play for some time. That means you get both easier and harder opponents. So you have to face a few roflstomps, but the matchmaker will adapt quickly because you lose a lot of MMR because the interval is so wide. It gets narrower when you play on.
Hots also has a few options to get you back in shape. You can play unranked. While you still get roflstomped, you don't lose ladder points or bonus pool points. You also can try to play versus AI. Hots offers to tell the AI how to play (early rush, timing attack, eco opening, ...)
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The UI Inconsistence hurts my brain, well done.
so sad.
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On December 10 2012 00:17 paralleluniverse wrote:
8. Separate unranked and ranked matchmaking queues.
Players who queue using unranked can be matched with ranked players. This has been described as working as intended to reduce queue times. But queues should be separated to prevent abuse. Here are some possible abuses:
-Deliberately lowering your MMR to bronze level to beat up on low skill players, with no consequence to your ladder standing.
-Leave or backstab in team games, also with no consequence to your ladder standing.
-If you're losing, you can even ask the opponent very nicely to give you a free win by leaving, and if your opponent is playing unranked, there's no reason for the opponent to say no.
-If you want to practice TvZ with unranked, then you should leave every game which is not TvZ, thereby giving your opponents free wins.
While it’s possible to do these things now, it would stuff up your ladder standing. Pooling rank and unranked games in HotS will mean that there's no incentive to stop anyone from doing this. Everyone would be able to freely smurf with no consequence, which was a major problem with multiple accounts in WC3. This is an error that should not be repeated.
Before I start to comment on this point, I like to applaude you for the effort of your very good posting. I also noticed some of the inconsistencies, you however made a detailled posting with many example images. Guys like you make our world a better place.
You pointed out some issues with the mixed ranked/unranked pool. I think that the advantages however outweigh the issues with this. At least in the Hots beta, it seems to work quite okay.
There could be other measures taken by Blizzard to avoid abuse. For example to not lower the MMR below a certain value per day so even if you leave 50 games in a row, you only lower your MMR by X points. Also there could be a limit of games allowed per hour. This limit could be done in a way that occasional leaving, even for some games in a row, is possible without noticing any limit.
Team backstabbing was an issue in WC3 random team already.
If you want to practice TvZ and leave 2 out of 3 games to play versus zerg only, you cannot really practice because your MMR is too low and you roflstomp the zerg. But I agree that there is a potential issue here.
What about begging for a win? I guess this is mostly an issue in lower leagues where it doesn't matter that much. I also doubt that every non-ranked player will see no reason to say no. Since the unranked player gets no ladder points anyway, why grant the other one free points when he doesn't earned them?
In the end, I see the with to practice versus a particular race as the biggest issue, giving random freewins to other players. How could this be fixed? Either with a limit (just X very short games allowed per hour) or with an account standing which flags frequent leavers. The match maker then could attempt to match a frequent leaver versus another frequent leaver.
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On December 10 2012 06:16 Ero-Sennin wrote:Show nested quote +This option allows a player to leave their league. This is a very bad feature. There is no legitimate use of this feature. Players with MMR near the boundary of promotion could abuse this feature to make it easier to get promoted. If the goal is to make promotions easier, then do this by increasing the uncertainty threshold of MMR required for promotion.
If instead the goal is to make it easier to change divisions, there is no point in changing divisions. Divisions are already meaningless. Allowing division hopping would make the division rank even more meaningless for absolutely no reason at all, since players could “choose” newer and easier divisions.
Allowing people to leave their league also resets their points to 0 and refunds their entire bonus pool. So this hurts casuals who aren’t aware that using this option requires them to start from scratch.
Moreover, it makes points a worse measure of skill, because the player would have to use up their entire bonus pool again in order for points to correctly measure skill, even if the system already has an accurate MMR for players who were active enough to use up their previous bonus pool. This wouldn’t be an issue if joining a new league after leaving a league retained the player’s previous points and bonus pool, accounting for time elapsed. But then, players could abuse this as a way of hiding their stats and ladder standing by leaving their league after each game. I'd have to disagree. Now I haven't played HOTS yet so I may be wrong, but if you're right that leaving the league resets points to zero and gives back your bonus pool..... THIS IS GOOD! But I would say that it should only be able to be used once a week. Say you're in whatever league it doesn't matter, and you're concerned with your wins/losses or points, whatever, and you go on a massive losing streak. You know the kind, where sometimes people want to break their CDs and all that fun stuff. Well guess what. Rage reset, BOOM! Clean slate. Or if they have a different account they can hop on there, but instead of looking at an ugly 15 game losing streak and dropping from top 20 in their division to rank 70, they can /clearstats and start from scratch. This is a good feature to have. But how will we know who the good people are? Most pros already have a good idea through playing people and through tournament play. Judging skill based solely on ladder hasn't worked yet anywhere, so why try to force it to work now?
On December 10 2012 13:47 ItsPaul wrote:
The only thing I would like to say is in regards to the 'Leave League' button. As a casual I tend to have a few weeks where ill ladder, and then a couple of months where I won't play. After watching some ESPORTS I'll get in the mood again, but any muscle memory and awareness of how not to be completely clumsy has generally faded by then. I know I would rather have a fresh slate when I come back after being afk just so that the first few games I play aren't all roflstomps. I understand that in time any skill lost can come back, but in regards to the idea of trying to keep casuals engaged, it's really hard to get back into the game when you just feel like you have no chance of winning when you sit down.
This is a casualfag opinion though, and I completely agree with the criticisms of that option too so I can't really offer a solution. Excellent thread!
On December 10 2012 07:06 gCgCrypto wrote:
@ OP
You must have a lot of time in your hands =) Very nice work overall and i agree with everything but the part about the "leave League" option.
Its a thing that can help casuals to get over Ladder anxiety easily. Even myself, who plays over 10 Games each day, get really frustrated and demotivated when i´m deeply in the minus on my Win/Loss ratio and with this option i can simply reset everything.
So it does have a point and the negatives that it makes points useless to judge skill:
Isnt that the case now too?
I can think of no way to make points more meaningless then tey are now. I can easily (and did) achive 1800 points in master by simply only playing when i have bonus pool.
just my 2 cents ^^
It's not a good idea to reset your points simply because you're on a losing streak or have just returned to the game after a break.
Firstly, leaving the league doesn't affect your MMR, so it's not going to make you lose less, or be matched to worse opponents. It has no effect on matchmaking. It only effectively allows you to hide your points.
Secondly, if you want to practice and not have it affect your record or if you get mad and have anxiety about losing streaks, you can play unranked.
Thirdly, in most situations, it doesn't even help you overcome your losing streak. Suppose you've used up your bonus pool and your true skill level is 1600 MMR. You go on a losing streak of 10 games, because you're drunk and hence playing worse than normal. If this causes your MMR to drop by 300, should you leave your league? Well, you'll now be matched with players around 1300 MMR, and if your true skill level really is 1600 MMR, you should be able to more easily win and get back to your correct MMR, say in about 20 games. Just as MMR is self-correcting, so are points, because after accounting for bonus pool, points converge to MMR. If you left your league, then to get back to where you should be, you'll need enough games to use up you're entire bonus pool, and that could easily take over 20 games, depending on how far into the season it is. And throughout that time, your points will be incorrect.
But even worse, just as it is easier to be promoted after the start of a new season, for the same reason, it's far more likely that using leave league after a losing streak will demote you. So it doesn't help you, it just screws up points being a good measure of skill plus a certain level of activity. And the fact that players may not know this and still use the option regardless, is another reason to remove leave league.
You say that maybe this option should only be useable once a week. It's already usable, by force, once every 2 months, i.e. every season reset. And that's how it should stay.
The main points of your posts is to say that ladder anxiety is a problem. It is. But this is not the solution. There are some more effective remedies. For one, Blizzard should remove the obsessive focus on division ranks. While it's completely meaningless, casuals are less likely to know this. Together with the bonus pool system, division ranks makes the ladder feel like a treadmill, because the inflation of other player's bonus pool perpetually causes your rank to fall, and requires you to play to keep up the same division rank. That is of course assuming you didn't know that division ranks are meaningless and should be ignored. So the first pain-free step would be to display points more prominently and division ranks less prominently, since points always increase due to bonus pool.
There are also changes that can be made to the flawed bonus pool system to make points a better skill measure, while keeping recent activity relevant, but that discussion would require more time.
Another suggestion that should greatly help with ladder anxiety is an option to hide previous season history. Since MMR and points are self-correcting, and win ratios converge to 50% (unless you're very very skill or very very unskilled), it's not possible to stuff up your current ladder stats. However, the previous season history is unchangeable, and it's the only way you could permanently "stuff up" your account, so it may be a large factor in ladder anxiety. While hiding it would be a loss of information, at least it's not current information, it's old information.
But the best way to fix ladder anxiety is to have unranked games, and Blizzard has already done this. So there are better ways to address ladder anxiety which I won't strongly disagree with. But ultimately, the point of a ladder system is to correctly and truthfully rank players, not to hide your current ladder standing because of hurt feelings.
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On December 10 2012 11:37 Warpath wrote:
Some good points, but a chunk of this is really un-needed points. for example, of course searching "blizzard maps" will make every map in the list be under the author "Blizzard", but removing it would make it so searching say "Ladder" wouldn't say if its a "blizzard" map, a "GSL" map, or some random community members map. Removing it from the "Blizzard Maps" filter would only reduce the consistency,
a few more things, but overall some pretty good stuff
The "author" column doesn't show up if you use another filter. If it did, then I would agree with you. Currently, it only shows up for Blizzard maps, and this adds zero information, while at the same time being inconsistent with the other filters.
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On December 10 2012 04:35 Defacer wrote:
Jesus fucking crap, parallel, how long did this take you?
By the way, clients are supposed to pay for this level of design feedback. The one thing that always bothered me about Blizzard (and TL) is that their community's are a litte too generous.
A few days.
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On December 10 2012 12:54 earti wrote:
Seeing this at an Engineering point of view, the majority of the suggestions are aesthetic. When they release a beta patch, they're more concerned about the functionality of the product than looks. Eventually they will be fixed in the future, but that's the point of Beta: They want to test out functionality rather than looks.
Yes I can see the many inconsistencies in the UI, but I really not gonna be concerned at this phase because it's not one that is being released into the masses. Think of it as writing the first draft of a report and all you care about at the time is the content of the report and not moreso the grammar, layout, and alignment because it's all going to be finished upon release. That sums up 99% of all the reports that I write up for all my classes.
I do appreciate your problems about the current beta patch, but that's the idea of a beta--there's BOUND to be problems.
On December 10 2012 16:45 ClanRH.TV wrote:
Sounds like a bunch of little stupid things for the most part.
Most of the UI inconsistencies are currently in WoL, a live finished product.
Yes, there are a lot of little things about UI design and inconsistencies, because there's a lot of real UI issues with B.net. But if that's not your interest, there's some serious stuff about ladder and how easy (or not) it is to use the UI too.
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Is the monobattles category really a case of "nothing much there at all"? As far as I know monobattles is pretty popular and its probably the my most played category - a category for that would be suitable for map variants in that mode. Its an easily definable group of maps that doesn't need to be lumped together with other Arcade maps
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On December 10 2012 20:40 mellitus wrote:
Is the monobattles category really a case of "nothing much there at all"? As far as I know monobattles is pretty popular and its probably the my most played category - a category for that would be suitable for map variants in that mode. Its an easily definable group of maps that doesn't need to be lumped together with other Arcade maps
Really? According to my search on WoL, there's only1 monobattle map.
I'm not saying to remove it. I'm just saying to make Monobattles a category in Arcade, instead of a category in Custom Games, since it's not the standard melee Starcraft game.
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Great write-up I disagree about the new decals making the game look like a joke, I enjoy them and like that blizzard has added a exp mechanic to attain them, it's small things like that that make me want to play a bit more
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While I think most people appreciate your work I am sure all of these things you have pointed out will be fixed for release, at the end of the day its a BETA and you are NOT expected to experience a FINALIZED product. I think there are more important things than font consistency.
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On December 10 2012 21:11 Swwww wrote:
While I think most people appreciate your work I am sure all of these things you have pointed out will be fixed for release, at the end of the day its a BETA and you are NOT expected to experience a FINALIZED product. I think there are more important things than font consistency.
Most of the UI inconsistencies are also in the live game.
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I wounder how the programming code looks if it allows for this inconsistency. It must be a maze.
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On December 10 2012 22:03 GrassEater wrote:
I wounder how the programming code looks if it allows for this inconsistency. It must be a maze.
Not necessarily. The programming code probably processes a UI description file. I would be very surprised if the buttons and other UI elements are rendered within the actual program source.
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Thank god for anal graphic designers.
Seriously, no sarcasm implied, good work
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Yeah just wanna pop in here to echo the statement most people are giving, thanks a bunch for all this hard work  People like you make this community.
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Can we get someone (possibly a pro) to go through this and put some on the restricted pro sc2 forum on battle.net?
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This is an impressive job, really well put . I just can hope someone on blizzard reads this.
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On December 11 2012 00:01 `phobiA wrote:
Can we get someone (possibly a pro) to go through this and put some on the restricted pro sc2 forum on battle.net?
Not neccecary, if you look at Dustin's Twitter you can see he's already aware of this thread.
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EPT
