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On June 05 2012 07:03 skeldark wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2012 06:29 Excalibur_Z wrote:On June 05 2012 05:50 skeldark wrote:On June 05 2012 02:08 Excalibur_Z wrote:On June 05 2012 01:04 paralleluniverse wrote:On June 05 2012 00:57 Omegalisk wrote:On June 04 2012 22:27 paralleluniverse wrote:The custom game system and UI is a vast improvement over what is currently in game. I still have some minor problems with it, but I think we should focus on getting ladder improved now. Specifically, win/loss ratios, statistics, and a global ladder (or at the least a ladder where it is possible to compare any 2 players). Here's a post I wrote on the B.net forums: The new B.net interface is a vast improvement over the current version, and now that the custom game system is good, it's time to fix the ladder system and make this a competitive game again. The problem is the following:The whole division and ladder system does everything possible to hide your true rank and to make it impossible to compare the ranks of players in different divisions. There are no win loss ratios, no global ladder rank, no way to compare the skill of any 2 players, no statistics, and now with patch 1.5 you can't even view the division ladder of other players. Look at how empty the profile page is. There's just the number of games played, and a meaningless division rank that cannot be compared to anything. It literally has no meaning. If I tell you that you're 9th, what does that mean? 9th out of what? 9th compared to who? No one will ever know. To fix this Blizzard needs to:Bring back statistics. Bring back a global ladder or at the very least reveal division tiers so that player ranks are meaningful and comparable. Currently there's no way to tell how good you are, the 5 lowest leagues are meant to contain 20% of the players, but this band is too large and it's not true that it contains 20% of players. An alternative is a percentile, even if it's in multiples of 5. Make ladder competitive and promote competition. Put it on the home page or link to it in the home page. It's the core Starcraft game. Stop removing everything because of "ladder anxiety" and hurt feelings:The removal of win/loss ratios necessarily implies that useful statistics can never be revealed. Reverse this. Blizzard's resolve to appease players with ladder anxiety, to not hurt their feelings, is turning SC2 into a non-competitive game. This is the opposite of what an RTS game should be. The unranked matchmaking that's in HotS will fix ladder anxiety. It's time to stop killing the competitive nature of this game and removing all the systems needed to support competition because of ladder anxiety and hurt feelings. To appeal to casuals, they can even make a system where you always gain another type of point for playing, which can be spent to unlock cosmetic rewards to customize units and even the B.net UI, such as extra backgrounds. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/5589544562 I agree that those sort of features need to be implemented to make SC2 a more competitive game, but I also think that ladder anxiety is a real problem. I believe those features that you mentioned would be best implemented after the unranked ladder is, so you can have a truly competitive ladder and a "for fun" ladder (it still would have MMR, but still). I would wait until HotS for those type of features to be implemented (and, judging on these changes, Blizz is listening to the community, so they might just do that). Don't be so sure. They've never signaled that they will ever change the ladder except by taking away more details. For example, in the beta you can't view the division ladder of other players anymore. This should be a competitive game, to destroy systems that support this competition, just for some dubious and unproven relief to ladder anxiety, is contrary to the point of the game. Blizzard seriously thinks their division system is the greatest thing ever. They've been talking about how fun it is to climb the ranks in your little group of 100 arbitrary and insignificant players since before the game was released, and the facelessness of being rank 14,933. They've missed the point about ranking, they've missed the point that the removal of win/loss means there can never be statistics, and they've missed the point of competition on the ladder. They've said they won't reveal MMR. Absolutely everything they do, every single design decision related to the ladder, is about hiding true ranks. I think the idea is that there are so many casual ladder players out there who are fine with just earning points and climbing ranks in their division. It can't be overstated how important it is that lower-skilled players remain in the active player pool to keep the relative definitions of higher-skilled players accurate, because the more players the ladder has, the healthier the ladder is. Master and Grandmaster is where all of the obfuscating factors are removed: losses, division tiers, minimum MMR, everything. It's Master and Grandmaster that appeal to the more hardcore players who are truly looking to gauge their skill. Master and Grandmaster level players are far more active and more interested in improving than players of lower leagues, and that's where the skill gap becomes very pronounced. Thats the reason why master dont have bonus pool and divisions and they show the mmr and not points for master and also publish the server ranking of all master/gm players on their webserver. Oh wait... Blizzard thinks, showing the real skill will let the normal player stop playing. I think its the over way round. Lie to them and act like they are HIGH whatever and are close to get promoted all the time pressure them. Just play more and you raise, lets you think you are really good because everytime you try , you improve. However this clash with the reality where you dont improve at all. And this diffrence between reality and thought makes the ladder fear. If you see your mmr and realise that if you loose many games its easy to get back to your old mmr, you are way more relaxed. It works on any sport ever invented. Why is sc2 so different, that you have to hide the information? That's fairly disingenuous. The bonus pool is not an obfuscator. It's very relevant because it keeps rankings current. The bonus pool ensures that people can't rest at #1 without consequences. It could be that there's no harm in showing MMR to Master+ players, but that's neither here nor there as we're actively working to establish player MMRs anyway, especially for those skill levels. As for player psychology, I think that's something we're not experienced enough in the subject to properly comment on. 1) Yes. You get points for playing more if you are better or not. Its just a different system, that dont rate the skill its rate the play amount. I prefer a skill system not a indicator how much you play, I can see this in the gamecount. Every other game and sport dont mix this too. Why does sc2 have to? If you think, it takes the playamount and skil in ratio into account than its just a bad designed system. Because you can not know how much each a player dropes over idle time and this guess would be terrible random.
What on earth are you talking about? The system is SUPPOSED to encourage players to be active, not climb to a particular position and sit on it. Every good ranking system will penalize your rank for inactivity.
Also, your English is very hard to read even if it isn't your first language, so I have no idea what you're arguing other than "the system takes play amount and skill into account therefore it is badly designed." And that's flat out false.
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On June 05 2012 07:34 FieryBalrog wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2012 07:03 skeldark wrote:On June 05 2012 06:29 Excalibur_Z wrote:On June 05 2012 05:50 skeldark wrote:On June 05 2012 02:08 Excalibur_Z wrote:On June 05 2012 01:04 paralleluniverse wrote:On June 05 2012 00:57 Omegalisk wrote:On June 04 2012 22:27 paralleluniverse wrote:The custom game system and UI is a vast improvement over what is currently in game. I still have some minor problems with it, but I think we should focus on getting ladder improved now. Specifically, win/loss ratios, statistics, and a global ladder (or at the least a ladder where it is possible to compare any 2 players). Here's a post I wrote on the B.net forums: The new B.net interface is a vast improvement over the current version, and now that the custom game system is good, it's time to fix the ladder system and make this a competitive game again. The problem is the following:The whole division and ladder system does everything possible to hide your true rank and to make it impossible to compare the ranks of players in different divisions. There are no win loss ratios, no global ladder rank, no way to compare the skill of any 2 players, no statistics, and now with patch 1.5 you can't even view the division ladder of other players. Look at how empty the profile page is. There's just the number of games played, and a meaningless division rank that cannot be compared to anything. It literally has no meaning. If I tell you that you're 9th, what does that mean? 9th out of what? 9th compared to who? No one will ever know. To fix this Blizzard needs to:Bring back statistics. Bring back a global ladder or at the very least reveal division tiers so that player ranks are meaningful and comparable. Currently there's no way to tell how good you are, the 5 lowest leagues are meant to contain 20% of the players, but this band is too large and it's not true that it contains 20% of players. An alternative is a percentile, even if it's in multiples of 5. Make ladder competitive and promote competition. Put it on the home page or link to it in the home page. It's the core Starcraft game. Stop removing everything because of "ladder anxiety" and hurt feelings:The removal of win/loss ratios necessarily implies that useful statistics can never be revealed. Reverse this. Blizzard's resolve to appease players with ladder anxiety, to not hurt their feelings, is turning SC2 into a non-competitive game. This is the opposite of what an RTS game should be. The unranked matchmaking that's in HotS will fix ladder anxiety. It's time to stop killing the competitive nature of this game and removing all the systems needed to support competition because of ladder anxiety and hurt feelings. To appeal to casuals, they can even make a system where you always gain another type of point for playing, which can be spent to unlock cosmetic rewards to customize units and even the B.net UI, such as extra backgrounds. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/5589544562 I agree that those sort of features need to be implemented to make SC2 a more competitive game, but I also think that ladder anxiety is a real problem. I believe those features that you mentioned would be best implemented after the unranked ladder is, so you can have a truly competitive ladder and a "for fun" ladder (it still would have MMR, but still). I would wait until HotS for those type of features to be implemented (and, judging on these changes, Blizz is listening to the community, so they might just do that). Don't be so sure. They've never signaled that they will ever change the ladder except by taking away more details. For example, in the beta you can't view the division ladder of other players anymore. This should be a competitive game, to destroy systems that support this competition, just for some dubious and unproven relief to ladder anxiety, is contrary to the point of the game. Blizzard seriously thinks their division system is the greatest thing ever. They've been talking about how fun it is to climb the ranks in your little group of 100 arbitrary and insignificant players since before the game was released, and the facelessness of being rank 14,933. They've missed the point about ranking, they've missed the point that the removal of win/loss means there can never be statistics, and they've missed the point of competition on the ladder. They've said they won't reveal MMR. Absolutely everything they do, every single design decision related to the ladder, is about hiding true ranks. I think the idea is that there are so many casual ladder players out there who are fine with just earning points and climbing ranks in their division. It can't be overstated how important it is that lower-skilled players remain in the active player pool to keep the relative definitions of higher-skilled players accurate, because the more players the ladder has, the healthier the ladder is. Master and Grandmaster is where all of the obfuscating factors are removed: losses, division tiers, minimum MMR, everything. It's Master and Grandmaster that appeal to the more hardcore players who are truly looking to gauge their skill. Master and Grandmaster level players are far more active and more interested in improving than players of lower leagues, and that's where the skill gap becomes very pronounced. Thats the reason why master dont have bonus pool and divisions and they show the mmr and not points for master and also publish the server ranking of all master/gm players on their webserver. Oh wait... Blizzard thinks, showing the real skill will let the normal player stop playing. I think its the over way round. Lie to them and act like they are HIGH whatever and are close to get promoted all the time pressure them. Just play more and you raise, lets you think you are really good because everytime you try , you improve. However this clash with the reality where you dont improve at all. And this diffrence between reality and thought makes the ladder fear. If you see your mmr and realise that if you loose many games its easy to get back to your old mmr, you are way more relaxed. It works on any sport ever invented. Why is sc2 so different, that you have to hide the information? That's fairly disingenuous. The bonus pool is not an obfuscator. It's very relevant because it keeps rankings current. The bonus pool ensures that people can't rest at #1 without consequences. It could be that there's no harm in showing MMR to Master+ players, but that's neither here nor there as we're actively working to establish player MMRs anyway, especially for those skill levels. As for player psychology, I think that's something we're not experienced enough in the subject to properly comment on. 1) Yes. You get points for playing more if you are better or not. Its just a different system, that dont rate the skill its rate the play amount. I prefer a skill system not a indicator how much you play, I can see this in the gamecount. Every other game and sport dont mix this too. Why does sc2 have to? If you think, it takes the playamount and skil in ratio into account than its just a bad designed system. Because you can not know how much each a player dropes over idle time and this guess would be terrible random. What on earth are you talking about? The system is SUPPOSED to encourage players to be active, not climb to a particular position and sit on it. Every good ranking system will penalize your rank for inactivity.Also, your English is very hard to read even if it isn't your first language, so I have no idea what you're arguing other than "the system takes play amount and skill into account therefore it is badly designed." And that's flat out false.
1) Im sorry for my English.
"the system takes play amount and skill into account therefore it is badly designed."
The good thing on the quote function is: when you use it you dont change what people wrote.
2) In this case every sport have a bad ranking system. I never heard about a ranking system that takes inactivity every 2h into account to rate your skill value new. If they are all bad perhaps you should write letters to all sport and chess unions and 99% of the game publisher that they have bad ranking systems and should learn from sc2.
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I don't know if any of you guys have checked this out, but I seem to be getting 9% better performance for frame rate in 1.5.
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On June 05 2012 08:13 Limniscate wrote:
I don't know if any of you guys have checked this out, but I seem to be getting 9% better performance for frame rate in 1.5.
Yup there is better performance. But instead of 9% for me, I get around 100 fps on maxed settings without anti aliasing. Before the beta, I got around 70 fps.
100 fps in the beginning of course, then it drops to around constant 50 fps.
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On June 05 2012 08:18 OneBaseKing wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2012 08:13 Limniscate wrote:
I don't know if any of you guys have checked this out, but I seem to be getting 9% better performance for frame rate in 1.5. Yup there is better performance. But instead of 9% for me, I get around 100 fps on maxed settings without anti aliasing. Before the beta, I got around 70 fps. 100 fps in the beginning of course, then it drops to around constant 50 fps.
Yeah I get 59-60-ish on the beta at 2560x1440 no AA ultra settings on a GTX 460 and i5 750 overclocked to 3.8Ghz as opposed to 55 on the normal game.
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On June 05 2012 07:34 FieryBalrog wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2012 07:03 skeldark wrote:On June 05 2012 06:29 Excalibur_Z wrote:On June 05 2012 05:50 skeldark wrote:On June 05 2012 02:08 Excalibur_Z wrote:On June 05 2012 01:04 paralleluniverse wrote:On June 05 2012 00:57 Omegalisk wrote:On June 04 2012 22:27 paralleluniverse wrote:The custom game system and UI is a vast improvement over what is currently in game. I still have some minor problems with it, but I think we should focus on getting ladder improved now. Specifically, win/loss ratios, statistics, and a global ladder (or at the least a ladder where it is possible to compare any 2 players). Here's a post I wrote on the B.net forums: The new B.net interface is a vast improvement over the current version, and now that the custom game system is good, it's time to fix the ladder system and make this a competitive game again. The problem is the following:The whole division and ladder system does everything possible to hide your true rank and to make it impossible to compare the ranks of players in different divisions. There are no win loss ratios, no global ladder rank, no way to compare the skill of any 2 players, no statistics, and now with patch 1.5 you can't even view the division ladder of other players. Look at how empty the profile page is. There's just the number of games played, and a meaningless division rank that cannot be compared to anything. It literally has no meaning. If I tell you that you're 9th, what does that mean? 9th out of what? 9th compared to who? No one will ever know. To fix this Blizzard needs to:Bring back statistics. Bring back a global ladder or at the very least reveal division tiers so that player ranks are meaningful and comparable. Currently there's no way to tell how good you are, the 5 lowest leagues are meant to contain 20% of the players, but this band is too large and it's not true that it contains 20% of players. An alternative is a percentile, even if it's in multiples of 5. Make ladder competitive and promote competition. Put it on the home page or link to it in the home page. It's the core Starcraft game. Stop removing everything because of "ladder anxiety" and hurt feelings:The removal of win/loss ratios necessarily implies that useful statistics can never be revealed. Reverse this. Blizzard's resolve to appease players with ladder anxiety, to not hurt their feelings, is turning SC2 into a non-competitive game. This is the opposite of what an RTS game should be. The unranked matchmaking that's in HotS will fix ladder anxiety. It's time to stop killing the competitive nature of this game and removing all the systems needed to support competition because of ladder anxiety and hurt feelings. To appeal to casuals, they can even make a system where you always gain another type of point for playing, which can be spent to unlock cosmetic rewards to customize units and even the B.net UI, such as extra backgrounds. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/5589544562 I agree that those sort of features need to be implemented to make SC2 a more competitive game, but I also think that ladder anxiety is a real problem. I believe those features that you mentioned would be best implemented after the unranked ladder is, so you can have a truly competitive ladder and a "for fun" ladder (it still would have MMR, but still). I would wait until HotS for those type of features to be implemented (and, judging on these changes, Blizz is listening to the community, so they might just do that). Don't be so sure. They've never signaled that they will ever change the ladder except by taking away more details. For example, in the beta you can't view the division ladder of other players anymore. This should be a competitive game, to destroy systems that support this competition, just for some dubious and unproven relief to ladder anxiety, is contrary to the point of the game. Blizzard seriously thinks their division system is the greatest thing ever. They've been talking about how fun it is to climb the ranks in your little group of 100 arbitrary and insignificant players since before the game was released, and the facelessness of being rank 14,933. They've missed the point about ranking, they've missed the point that the removal of win/loss means there can never be statistics, and they've missed the point of competition on the ladder. They've said they won't reveal MMR. Absolutely everything they do, every single design decision related to the ladder, is about hiding true ranks. I think the idea is that there are so many casual ladder players out there who are fine with just earning points and climbing ranks in their division. It can't be overstated how important it is that lower-skilled players remain in the active player pool to keep the relative definitions of higher-skilled players accurate, because the more players the ladder has, the healthier the ladder is. Master and Grandmaster is where all of the obfuscating factors are removed: losses, division tiers, minimum MMR, everything. It's Master and Grandmaster that appeal to the more hardcore players who are truly looking to gauge their skill. Master and Grandmaster level players are far more active and more interested in improving than players of lower leagues, and that's where the skill gap becomes very pronounced. Thats the reason why master dont have bonus pool and divisions and they show the mmr and not points for master and also publish the server ranking of all master/gm players on their webserver. Oh wait... Blizzard thinks, showing the real skill will let the normal player stop playing. I think its the over way round. Lie to them and act like they are HIGH whatever and are close to get promoted all the time pressure them. Just play more and you raise, lets you think you are really good because everytime you try , you improve. However this clash with the reality where you dont improve at all. And this diffrence between reality and thought makes the ladder fear. If you see your mmr and realise that if you loose many games its easy to get back to your old mmr, you are way more relaxed. It works on any sport ever invented. Why is sc2 so different, that you have to hide the information? That's fairly disingenuous. The bonus pool is not an obfuscator. It's very relevant because it keeps rankings current. The bonus pool ensures that people can't rest at #1 without consequences. It could be that there's no harm in showing MMR to Master+ players, but that's neither here nor there as we're actively working to establish player MMRs anyway, especially for those skill levels. As for player psychology, I think that's something we're not experienced enough in the subject to properly comment on. 1) Yes. You get points for playing more if you are better or not. Its just a different system, that dont rate the skill its rate the play amount. I prefer a skill system not a indicator how much you play, I can see this in the gamecount. Every other game and sport dont mix this too. Why does sc2 have to? If you think, it takes the playamount and skil in ratio into account than its just a bad designed system. Because you can not know how much each a player dropes over idle time and this guess would be terrible random. What on earth are you talking about? The system is SUPPOSED to encourage players to be active, not climb to a particular position and sit on it. Every good ranking system will penalize your rank for inactivity.Also, your English is very hard to read even if it isn't your first language, so I have no idea what you're arguing other than "the system takes play amount and skill into account therefore it is badly designed." And that's flat out false.
If you can only speak one language then your brain gets too used to the same "correct" stuff and gets lazy. I can understand him just fine. I'd say the problem is mainly the English speakers thinking they don't need to learn any other language, ignoring the benefits for their cognition system. You can't have everyone speaking/writing perfect English, it's way easier for the natives in English to expand their cognition just a little bit in order to understand all the variations that non-natives create.
Also, it would be interesting for team liquid to open a new forum: "English Class". We do have enough non-native English speakers here to make it a very interesting forum and we would all have this bounding with gaming/SC2, so I think it could lead to an interesting environment for learning English =D
Anyway, there is no point in telling someone that his English isn't good enough. Instead you should bring whatever is problematic for you and ask for clarification. I am 100% sure I must have made mistakes or abnormal/weird English in this text I just wrote, but I really have no idea where are these mistakes, so there's no point telling me they exist, bring me to them, then I can start learning ok.
Native English speakers should be more pro-active while interacting with non-natives, you already have it easier.
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BTW, I don't mind the bonus pool, I do mind not knowing my division tier and offset. I should be able to do the math to reach to my MMR if I wanted to, in a similar way that I can use sc2gears to have my win/loss ratio and the people that don't care enough to use sc2gears or other method don't get the numbers, that's fine! It's stupid for Blizzard to say that only the top 4% best players are harcore enough to take the "reality". I am hardcore in my own way and I want to have information, otherwise I might just give up completely this game, it's not fun to just be a random platinum for 2 years, then if I play enough I get a star <3 (top8...)
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hey i believe this happened for the PTRs as well, but there is a tab when you log in, it says
SCII-1 and SCII-2
I tried it and I can create a 2nd character for SCII-2.
Why is this? Did Blizz say anything about this? Are they looking at possibly allowing more than 1 character per account? Or is it only if you bought 2 SC2s or something? Why do they have this function in the beta?
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On June 05 2012 09:35 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:
hey i believe this happened for the PTRs as well, but there is a tab when you log in, it says
SCII-1 and SCII-2
I tried it and I can create a 2nd character for SCII-2.
Why is this? Did Blizz say anything about this? Are they looking at possibly allowing more than 1 character per account? Or is it only if you bought 2 SC2s or something? Why do they have this function in the beta?
As you mentioned it's happened on every single PTR, I think it's just a weird artifact of how they do the licenses I wouldn't look too deep into it.
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On June 05 2012 02:13 Adeeler wrote:
So can we find ladder map custom games with titles in it yet i.e. zvp mapname? So that we can practice a certain race matchup?
can anyone answer this.
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On June 05 2012 11:02 trips wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2012 02:13 Adeeler wrote:
So can we find ladder map custom games with titles in it yet i.e. zvp mapname? So that we can practice a certain race matchup? can anyone answer this.
Nope, sorry, but im sure you can use chat channels for that instead...
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So you can ladder using a different name and it doesn't affect your mmr and theres an unranked ladder.Gonna download and check it out.
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Wow defiantly looks better on low graphics and seems to run better.
The custom melee games are listed the same as before which is annoying.
The open games are just nexus wars,marine arena etc no melee games at the moment and there's like 5 of them lol.
Worth downloading just for the graphics and getting to play on a different name.
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Is there a full installer that you can download (the whole 10GB I mean)?
I think the Arcade installer doesn't work for me because my Internet is not fast enough (I downloaded it twice, yet still "please check internet connection"). I tried rebooting my PC, modem and router twice now and still the same error.
+ Show Spoiler +
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On June 05 2012 13:50 trips wrote:
So you can ladder using a different name and it doesn't affect your mmr and theres an unranked ladder.Gonna download and check it out.
There isn't an unranked ladder, it's just the same as now only you get a fresh account because it's a beta, so it doesn't affect your live account.
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On June 05 2012 15:40 trips wrote:
Wow defiantly looks better on low graphics and seems to run better.
The custom melee games are listed the same as before which is annoying.
The open games are just nexus wars,marine arena etc no melee games at the moment and there's like 5 of them lol.
Worth downloading just for the graphics and getting to play on a different name.
If this is true... then hurray!
Actually now that you mention it, I don't recall the game randomly freezing anymore! Yay! Cus that didn't happen to me until i forget what patch, maybe 1.3 or 1.4. After that, suddenly SC2 was running slower. Whenever a new building/unit was about to finish, or just finished (especially if it was the first one in the game), I would suddenly lag for a second. Very annoying. Place my first Barracks? Game lags. Barracks at 95% and I'm about to make a Marine and OC? Game lags. Marine pops out? Game lags. Grrr.
I just noticed that this hasn't happened yet though! I wonder about if it actually runs better though, with the graphics on low, despite them being improved... if it does, then huge thanks and applause from me! Though I wonder why they don't allow you to make the graphics lower like they are in non-beta. Low graphics in the 1.4.3 version looks fine to me.
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On June 05 2012 02:08 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2012 01:04 paralleluniverse wrote:On June 05 2012 00:57 Omegalisk wrote:On June 04 2012 22:27 paralleluniverse wrote:The custom game system and UI is a vast improvement over what is currently in game. I still have some minor problems with it, but I think we should focus on getting ladder improved now. Specifically, win/loss ratios, statistics, and a global ladder (or at the least a ladder where it is possible to compare any 2 players). Here's a post I wrote on the B.net forums: The new B.net interface is a vast improvement over the current version, and now that the custom game system is good, it's time to fix the ladder system and make this a competitive game again. The problem is the following:The whole division and ladder system does everything possible to hide your true rank and to make it impossible to compare the ranks of players in different divisions. There are no win loss ratios, no global ladder rank, no way to compare the skill of any 2 players, no statistics, and now with patch 1.5 you can't even view the division ladder of other players. Look at how empty the profile page is. There's just the number of games played, and a meaningless division rank that cannot be compared to anything. It literally has no meaning. If I tell you that you're 9th, what does that mean? 9th out of what? 9th compared to who? No one will ever know. To fix this Blizzard needs to:Bring back statistics. Bring back a global ladder or at the very least reveal division tiers so that player ranks are meaningful and comparable. Currently there's no way to tell how good you are, the 5 lowest leagues are meant to contain 20% of the players, but this band is too large and it's not true that it contains 20% of players. An alternative is a percentile, even if it's in multiples of 5. Make ladder competitive and promote competition. Put it on the home page or link to it in the home page. It's the core Starcraft game. Stop removing everything because of "ladder anxiety" and hurt feelings:The removal of win/loss ratios necessarily implies that useful statistics can never be revealed. Reverse this. Blizzard's resolve to appease players with ladder anxiety, to not hurt their feelings, is turning SC2 into a non-competitive game. This is the opposite of what an RTS game should be. The unranked matchmaking that's in HotS will fix ladder anxiety. It's time to stop killing the competitive nature of this game and removing all the systems needed to support competition because of ladder anxiety and hurt feelings. To appeal to casuals, they can even make a system where you always gain another type of point for playing, which can be spent to unlock cosmetic rewards to customize units and even the B.net UI, such as extra backgrounds. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/5589544562 I agree that those sort of features need to be implemented to make SC2 a more competitive game, but I also think that ladder anxiety is a real problem. I believe those features that you mentioned would be best implemented after the unranked ladder is, so you can have a truly competitive ladder and a "for fun" ladder (it still would have MMR, but still). I would wait until HotS for those type of features to be implemented (and, judging on these changes, Blizz is listening to the community, so they might just do that). Don't be so sure. They've never signaled that they will ever change the ladder except by taking away more details. For example, in the beta you can't view the division ladder of other players anymore. This should be a competitive game, to destroy systems that support this competition, just for some dubious and unproven relief to ladder anxiety, is contrary to the point of the game. Blizzard seriously thinks their division system is the greatest thing ever. They've been talking about how fun it is to climb the ranks in your little group of 100 arbitrary and insignificant players since before the game was released, and the facelessness of being rank 14,933. They've missed the point about ranking, they've missed the point that the removal of win/loss means there can never be statistics, and they've missed the point of competition on the ladder. They've said they won't reveal MMR. Absolutely everything they do, every single design decision related to the ladder, is about hiding true ranks. I think the idea is that there are so many casual ladder players out there who are fine with just earning points and climbing ranks in their division. It can't be overstated how important it is that lower-skilled players remain in the active player pool to keep the relative definitions of higher-skilled players accurate, because the more players the ladder has, the healthier the ladder is. Master and Grandmaster is where all of the obfuscating factors are removed: losses, division tiers, minimum MMR, everything. It's Master and Grandmaster that appeal to the more hardcore players who are truly looking to gauge their skill. Master and Grandmaster level players are far more active and more interested in improving than players of lower leagues, and that's where the skill gap becomes very pronounced.
You're wrong for 2 reasons:
1. What the ladder ranks is players who play it. If casual players stop playing, the scope of the ladder changes to... ranking players who play it. In other words, it's still ranking the same thing. Cutting out casual players has no effect on the scope of the ladder in relative terms, and the ladder is necessarily relative. Nor does it have any effect on the accuracy of the ladder, because all MMR is relative to the player pool.
2. So only the top 2% of players deserve to be on a ladder that is comparable. 98% of players are uncompetitive and do not want statistics, and don't want a global ladder, and are happy with a meaningless rank that is impossible to compare?
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On June 05 2012 06:29 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2012 05:50 skeldark wrote:On June 05 2012 02:08 Excalibur_Z wrote:On June 05 2012 01:04 paralleluniverse wrote:On June 05 2012 00:57 Omegalisk wrote:On June 04 2012 22:27 paralleluniverse wrote:The custom game system and UI is a vast improvement over what is currently in game. I still have some minor problems with it, but I think we should focus on getting ladder improved now. Specifically, win/loss ratios, statistics, and a global ladder (or at the least a ladder where it is possible to compare any 2 players). Here's a post I wrote on the B.net forums: The new B.net interface is a vast improvement over the current version, and now that the custom game system is good, it's time to fix the ladder system and make this a competitive game again. The problem is the following:The whole division and ladder system does everything possible to hide your true rank and to make it impossible to compare the ranks of players in different divisions. There are no win loss ratios, no global ladder rank, no way to compare the skill of any 2 players, no statistics, and now with patch 1.5 you can't even view the division ladder of other players. Look at how empty the profile page is. There's just the number of games played, and a meaningless division rank that cannot be compared to anything. It literally has no meaning. If I tell you that you're 9th, what does that mean? 9th out of what? 9th compared to who? No one will ever know. To fix this Blizzard needs to:Bring back statistics. Bring back a global ladder or at the very least reveal division tiers so that player ranks are meaningful and comparable. Currently there's no way to tell how good you are, the 5 lowest leagues are meant to contain 20% of the players, but this band is too large and it's not true that it contains 20% of players. An alternative is a percentile, even if it's in multiples of 5. Make ladder competitive and promote competition. Put it on the home page or link to it in the home page. It's the core Starcraft game. Stop removing everything because of "ladder anxiety" and hurt feelings:The removal of win/loss ratios necessarily implies that useful statistics can never be revealed. Reverse this. Blizzard's resolve to appease players with ladder anxiety, to not hurt their feelings, is turning SC2 into a non-competitive game. This is the opposite of what an RTS game should be. The unranked matchmaking that's in HotS will fix ladder anxiety. It's time to stop killing the competitive nature of this game and removing all the systems needed to support competition because of ladder anxiety and hurt feelings. To appeal to casuals, they can even make a system where you always gain another type of point for playing, which can be spent to unlock cosmetic rewards to customize units and even the B.net UI, such as extra backgrounds. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/5589544562 I agree that those sort of features need to be implemented to make SC2 a more competitive game, but I also think that ladder anxiety is a real problem. I believe those features that you mentioned would be best implemented after the unranked ladder is, so you can have a truly competitive ladder and a "for fun" ladder (it still would have MMR, but still). I would wait until HotS for those type of features to be implemented (and, judging on these changes, Blizz is listening to the community, so they might just do that). Don't be so sure. They've never signaled that they will ever change the ladder except by taking away more details. For example, in the beta you can't view the division ladder of other players anymore. This should be a competitive game, to destroy systems that support this competition, just for some dubious and unproven relief to ladder anxiety, is contrary to the point of the game. Blizzard seriously thinks their division system is the greatest thing ever. They've been talking about how fun it is to climb the ranks in your little group of 100 arbitrary and insignificant players since before the game was released, and the facelessness of being rank 14,933. They've missed the point about ranking, they've missed the point that the removal of win/loss means there can never be statistics, and they've missed the point of competition on the ladder. They've said they won't reveal MMR. Absolutely everything they do, every single design decision related to the ladder, is about hiding true ranks. I think the idea is that there are so many casual ladder players out there who are fine with just earning points and climbing ranks in their division. It can't be overstated how important it is that lower-skilled players remain in the active player pool to keep the relative definitions of higher-skilled players accurate, because the more players the ladder has, the healthier the ladder is. Master and Grandmaster is where all of the obfuscating factors are removed: losses, division tiers, minimum MMR, everything. It's Master and Grandmaster that appeal to the more hardcore players who are truly looking to gauge their skill. Master and Grandmaster level players are far more active and more interested in improving than players of lower leagues, and that's where the skill gap becomes very pronounced. Thats the reason why master dont have bonus pool and divisions and they show the mmr and not points for master and also publish the server ranking of all master/gm players on their webserver. Oh wait... Blizzard thinks, showing the real skill will let the normal player stop playing. I think its the over way round. Lie to them and act like they are HIGH whatever and are close to get promoted all the time pressure them. Just play more and you raise, lets you think you are really good because everytime you try , you improve. However this clash with the reality where you dont improve at all. And this diffrence between reality and thought makes the ladder fear. If you see your mmr and realise that if you loose many games its easy to get back to your old mmr, you are way more relaxed. It works on any sport ever invented. Why is sc2 so different, that you have to hide the information? That's fairly disingenuous. The bonus pool is not an obfuscator. It's very relevant because it keeps rankings current. The bonus pool ensures that people can't rest at #1 without consequences. It could be that there's no harm in showing MMR to Master+ players, but that's neither here nor there as we're actively working to establish player MMRs anyway, especially for those skill levels. As for player psychology, I think that's something we're not experienced enough in the subject to properly comment on.
The bonus pool is disingenuous. Or at least Blizzard's reason is.
Here's what they say about the bonus pool:
Q. What is the Bonus Pool and how are bonus points acquired? A. The Bonus Pool is an accumulation of points that every player receives whether they're online and playing or not. They're essentially used as a means to help give a player a catch-up boost if they haven't played in a while. The pool does have a cap, but it increases slowly until the end of a season. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/110519
This is so wrong that it can almost be classed as a lie. The bonus pool doesn't help you catch-up with other players. The reason you even need to catch-up in the first place is because of the bonus pool. The bonus pool doesn't help close the divergence between points of 2 equally skilled players, it is the CAUSE of the divergence.
If there were no bonus pool, after playing ~30 games you'll hit your MMR and you'll only fluctuate around this point as you continue to play games. This is what happens when you've used up your bonus pool anyway. There would be no need to catch-up, other than to play enough games to avoid point decay (which is the correct way to implement bonus pool).
The bonus pool system causes endless inflation of points until the seasonal ladder reset. This also causes the ladder to never stabilize. E.g. Player 1 and 2 are ranked 10 and 15 respectively, and have used their bonus pool. Player 1 is better than player 2. The next day, player 1 doesn’t play, so he falls to rank 15 because others have used their bonus pool. Player 2 uses his bonus pool moving him to rank 12. Player 2 is now erroneously ranked higher than player 1, until player 1 and all the other players use their bonus pool, to increase their points, bumping player 2 down. Since the ladder never stabilizes, this again delegitimizes ladder ranks. In fact, ladder ranks are only correct when everyone has used up their bonus pool.
The intention of bonus pool is obviously the same idea as XP decay in the WC3 AMM, but disguised as a reward. Thus, the bonus pool is a psychological gimmick. But it’s not a reward, because every time you log in, your rank falls, since others have used their bonus pool. Hence, it is a failed psychological gimmick. Bonus pool should be redesigned so it is the extra points you get for playing in the WoW arena system that is used to move your displayed rating (points) to quickly converge to your MMR. Point decay should be implemented.
Another alternative is to freeze inactive players from the ladder. So if you haven't played a game for, say, 2 weeks and you're ranked 25. It will still be recorded on your profile that your last known rank was 25, until the ladder reset or until you become active again. But you won't be on the official ladder, until you've played a minimum of, say, 3 games. After these 3 games, you're put right back where you left off plus those 3 games played. This will make ladder ranks more accurate because the scope of the ladder is changed to ranking all active players. Currently, an active player can be ranked higher than inactive player, because of their activity. The ladder doesn't measure skill, it measures activity+skill. If we kick the inactive players off the ladder, we can make a ladder that measures skill only, while solving the problem of inactive players camping at high or untouchable ratings.
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It's designed to make scores increase even if your MMR plateaus.
The ladder is designed to reward activity. The bonus pool lets them reward activity without rewarding mass gaming.
I don't think it qualifies as a lie at all. They could have had scores increase in a different way, such as giving 50 extra points for your first win every day. Just displaying MMR like WoW Arena would be a terrible idea for player retention, since the majority of players will sit in the middle of the bell curve with hardly any divergence. Ladder ranking is not a psychological trick, it's part of the ruleset of the game.
I don't think anyone ever thought that the bonus pool magically inflates their MMR and makes them better players.
It does have the added benefit of cushioning the relearning after a break bit, but again, only as far as ladder points go.
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On June 05 2012 21:56 yeint wrote:
It's designed to make scores increase even if your MMR plateaus.
And that's as much a punishment as it is a reward.
Everyday you're punished by seeing that your rank has fallen and that you must play games and face the stress of potentially losing just to keep up.
The ladder is designed to reward activity. The bonus pool lets them reward activity without rewarding mass gaming.
Point decay and kicking inactive players off the ladder (in the particular way I described) would be a better way to achieve this, as I've explained.
I don't think it qualifies as a lie at all. They could have had scores increase in a different way, such as giving 50 extra points for your first win every day.
If they did that and said that the 50 extra points are to help player's catch-up it would be the exact same lie. That 50 extra points caused the divergence in the first place. It does not help you catch-up. No catch-up would even be necessary if there was no bonus pool and no 50 extra points.
Just displaying MMR like WoW Arena would be a terrible idea for player retention, since the majority of players will sit in the middle of the bell curve with hardly any divergence. Ladder ranking is not a psychological trick, it's part of the ruleset of the game.
Again, you're assuming that the way WoW does it is a psychological punishment and the way SC2 does it is a psychological reward. But this is not true. The reward of increasing points is symmetric with the punishment of falling ranks.
There is no free lunch.
And I didn't call the ladder a psychological gimmick, I called the bonus pool a psychological gimmick, which it is. It's meant to be the "feel good" version of XP decay. But as I've shown, there's a punishment that mirrors the reward.
I don't think anyone ever thought that the bonus pool magically inflates their MMR and makes them better players.
It does have the added benefit of cushioning the relearning after a break bit, but again, only as far as ladder points go.
What?
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nice beta, but
PLZ ADD A FRIEND LIST SEARCH FEATURE
pleaase! beggin you blizz!
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/d62Up.jpg?1)
