I just noticed there's "wood" tier on HeroesProfile now

General Discussion
21

It would open up the joke of wood league being rotten.

But for blizzard i think bronze 5 should be changed in the system it works entirely. In such way that it also allows infinitely scaling.

A reverse ELO could do a lot here. Each lost match is handled in ELO style as if its a win, and each win reduces that rating the same way. Lets call it RELO (reversed ELO).

If your normaly reach bronze 4. It instantly would start tracking your RELO rating (which starts at 1000). Upon reaching the bronze 5 condition, your RELO starts to matter (its very likely you ‘dropped’ to somewhere near 1400 RELO at that point). You then have to win and take that RELO below 1000 again, and as soon as that happens, you get out of bronze 5.

If someone repeatedly keeps losing, because of ELO not having a cap on its highest end, RELO also wouldnt, someone can reach 5000 RELO without any problems.

For displaying a rise towards the player, you just display that RELO rating as a negative number placed on top of their ELO (which at that point would be close to 0 anyway). It would mimic a system that can go infinitely down.

There is no point bashing players in bronze 5 or lower anymore, they are already placed in the ‘dumpster’ tier. And any additional tier would still be the same. Instead players should be motivated to win more and see that it helps.

And especialy when that RELO rating is not directly displayed and instead converted towards MMR. You can get a quite clear indication and show that wins are a lot more rewarding. A -4000 might be harsh, but if each match is still giving a quite stable 200 adjustment. You at least get the idea that you can make progress.
Its much better than witnessing you need to get to 2000, being at 400, and only getting +20 per match. Since that would still require 80 wins if people calculate. While its actualy less since at 1000 MMR, its more likely a 50 adjustment instead of 20.

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22

Wood means fake. I wrote this first, on this forum, unless someone proves me wrong. Wood league meant, in my mind, that you don’t deserve your rank : it can be easily burnt.

23

Hahahah, Heroes profile is a website after my heart

24

Rust might be a good name for a Rank like that.

25

I have heard Wood League a very long time ago. 2010s or so.

26

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27

I was thinking that, in view of how I think the MMR is working, the only 2 ways that can change this perception issue are:

  1. Reduce the range of MMR to the 1000 pts of rank points (create other leagues, change the shape of the curve or maybe something else);
  2. Change the system all together for Bronze 5.

But I am not sure to understand how your reverse ELO would be different from the standard ELO.

28

Standard ELO has a limit since it relies on numbers never being able to reach 0. It can surely work with decimal accuracy. But even there you will run towards limits.
The idea of reversing is to make it easier to get a clear number out of it. A number that can be displayed to the player (when at ELO 3.4523 it isnt clear how this converts, while at RELO 2345 it might be quite clear). It also allows easier resets as it isnt going to affect the actual ELO value (to make an artificial to bronze 4 more likely, and give players the idea of progress, and chance to preserve that progress).
It surely isnt the perfect idea, but it can give insights on new ways to look at the issue.

Its very demotivating to see you only get a little progress, and this idea is trying to make it appear as if the progress remains the same, instead of relying on going to 0. Getting a 200 adjustment per match, while needing 5000 still looks better than getting 5 and needing 500, even if by the time you are at 75, you are already getting 10 again. It just makes the steps look larger when you are far behind.

This reversed method then can be used to even create an artificial bronze 6 etc (lets say each 1000 RELO points is a rank below bronze 5, bronze 5 being 1000-2000 as we do not accept lower than 1000 in this system - ill explain why later). But since ELO does have restrictions especialy when you have a high MMR, in the RELO solution it makes dropping when at bronze 7 happen extremely slow, while wins can rapidly boost.

The reason to also not allow it to go below 1000, is so we can enforce certain RELO values for bronze 4 and 3 (and by that make these get handled artificialy low like 500 and 250). This is a way that can circumvent some of the personal adjustments by simply making wins in bronze 5 vs bronze 4 significantly higher, in order to get out of this rank (for the bronze 4, it uses the normal ELO value anyway).

Its still going to be a lot of progress to perform, but it gives more feedback and still filters out the worst players (they will drop to bronze 6 level, or worse). Making bronze 5 itself become better.

And although in theory the cap is infinite, its going to take a huge effort to reach bronze 8 (which is effectively equal to a 1% winrate at that point), since even though they are bronze 8, they still get matched with bronze 6, because the matchmaker uses the ELO rating and not the RELO one for this.

Maybe a mathematician can come up with a better system, but this is why it was just a concept. A concept that might have flaws, but also a few benefits. In the end, on the very low end ELO isnt reliable (unless you use decimal values, as then 10.00 is effectively just 2 powers lower than 1000, and gets equal calculations against another 10.00 player). Just like it already isnt because its a team game. But ideas for improvement are generaly welcome, because it takes 1 good idea to potentialy make a much better system.
This was just 1 of those ideas.

29

The legend comes true !!!

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31

I was wondering why wood league stat had a better win rate than bronze league.
The smurfs below lvl 50 explain it.

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32

Thanks for the explanation.

I understand well the perception issue for Bronze 5, especially at the bottom of it. Like winning 10 rank points when one needs around 1000 of them to go out of Bronze 5. It leaves with the impression one needs to win 100 more games than one looses. It can be demotivating, especially when combined with the impression that winning or loosing all depends on one’s luck with the match making.

And I am all OK with discussing ideas as long as it is an actual discussion! Now I see your idea in the following way.

If one wants for Bronze 5 players to still be able to play with Bronze 4 players using a match making, the scoring system (currently, the MMR) needs to be the same for both leagues or the match making needs to be able to translate somehow two different scoring systems between each other. If you change the scoring system only for Bronze 5, you will need to change the match making system. Now, if you are using this reverse ELO for display and feedback purposes only, I don’t really see the difference with directly displaying the current MMR.

Moreover, the MMR tracks, in some sense, the wins and the losses. Reverse ELO would also tracks the same wins and losses, but in reverse somehow. Basically, ELO and reverse ELO tracks the same thing.

But the idea of an “artificial” that can be reset / modified without changing the idea can be a good idea.

By the way, I am sure that was already discussed somewhere but I don’t know. Why wouldn’t they display directly the MMR? I mean, currently, the division and the rank points is already the same as MMR in terms of who has “more skill”. If the reason of not displaying MMR is about e-peen, bashing or something similar, this is already possible. I wouldn’t buy such an exaplanation :stuck_out_tongue:.

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33

MMR isnt a linear spreading process. So a lot of people will fall within 750 and 1500. Which is most likely the entire spread from silver to diamond.

MMR is also dynamic, between years your MMR can differ quite a bit. (depends on the playerbase, in this example you must assume that the player skill didnt change at all). This is purely because the other players can also become better/worse.

For rewarding certain ranks, you must get quite some strange numbering method that would be hard enough to explain. Otherwise certain ranks will be larger.

Their own system now just tries to get a certain number of players within their rank, and doesnt entirely depend on the MMR value. This is much easier to explain, and works because in the end it still relies on the spread of the MMR, but it doesnt require strict treshold. Its just a ‘this rank should contain x players in them’

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34

What about directly displaying (an estimate of) the number of wins needed to go to Bronze 4?

35

Doesnt work, when playing against bronze 4 players, you are normaly considered significantly weaker, which makes your match more valuable (a match can count worth 1.5x when winning, and only 0.5x when losing). This makes it impossible to get an accurate number of matches. Its as reliable as stating that 1000MMR is normaly 5 matches away (200 p/m), it might easily be 6 matches. Or even more (if each match only gives 150 per win).

But thats why having such points being linear is important, it gives a rough idea of progress.

36

Yep not perfect at all.

I was thinking that it is a little better than the current display of the rank points (for Bronze 5):

  1. It tells the player that he doesn’t need as much wins as he might think. Here, it will depends on the average number of wins needed to go to Bronze 4. Because, if this average number is 50 wins, I am not sure that it pleases people. But if it is more like 15, it might help with the perception issue;
  2. the “scale” is a little bit more linear than rank points. But yeah, it is an estimate. So it can happen that the number does not change at all because the player would have win an “easy” game. But I think that this does not happen that often because we are talking about players who are in the bottom of Bronze 5 already.

However, displaying (an estimation of) the needed number of wins might also bring some other issues. Like this number not changing after a win… I think that this will bring a lot of complaints. Actually, it all depends on the fact that the players understand that this an ESTIMATION.

But, I agree with you: not perfect at all.

37

That would be an elegant solution that I haven’t thought of. Since Bronze 5 is a very unique division with a point structure that differs from every other division and league in the game, it should have an in-game popup explaining to players why the lower point gain is happening.

I mean, they even bothered to write a full technical article on how Bronze 5 works.

Would it be too much effort to give those players an in-game message box that explains this with a few lines of text to give them hope and make them understand it’s not a bug or ‘issue’?

As far as the average player is concerned, this information is as cryptic as nuclear science, because it’s only explained in a single page buried on the battle.net site. It’s not obvious instantly why they are gaining 15 points per win, when their friends gain 200. The lack of in-game information for them is a design flaw.

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38

Even if you explain it, people would still be confused. A lot of people in bronze have bad logic in their system, so these things can be difficult to them (note, this isnt the case for all of them, plenty of people simply know the logic but lack mechanical skill or map awareness. not all people are gamers).

This is why i think a linear system would be better. As it simply shows linear progress.

I think blizzard is simply just afraid of showing negative stats to players (they avoid anything that tells a player he did bad, except for the cases in which they simply cant avoid it anymore like deaths and losses). They seem to want to avoid the ‘you are bad’ title at all costs. A positive number for rank is therefor better than a negative number.

But i think its often mandatory to tell someone he is bad, just like a teacher at school would. Its harsh for some as they are rarely going to show up well. But in the end, it will make them a better person, since if they care, they will ask for help (there are plenty im stuck in bronze threads where people try to give constructive feedback, as long as the person asks nicely - if they dont, its better to rub in that bad title to them).

I know i rather would see -2000/2000 needed to rank up. rather than seeing 30/2000 and having no idea where i am exactly unless i have to put up some algoritm to calculate it for me. In the -2000 case it can be quite easily said that i would need about 20 more wins than losses with a +/- 200 per match. And that is a statistic that motivates, as it says ‘its just 20 games’ and feels quite reliable on that.

Which way they use to get to such number i wouldnt care much about, since even if those 20 games end up being 22, by the time you are at 5 remaining, it doesnt matter if it actualy took you 16 or 17 to get there, it shows progress. But then it should be clear that its an estimated value.

39

Darn, if you call wood league to describe players under bronze league, how to name the ones totally over ranked / PL ?

40

That sentence makes it sound like only people who are very dumb get stuck in B5. There might be legacy players who were silver or gold in 2015 who came back and find themselves in this league.

Or just kids who have a hard time grasping some mechanics of the game and will learn them as they grow older.

I just thought it’d be better for the game to explain them why their point gain differs from their friends. Or at least give a small notification saying “Caution: Point gain in this division is different from other divisions. Click here for additional information [link to battle.net article]”.

Currently, you’re just there and the game doesn’t tell these players why your point gain is so low. It leads to many false bug reports too.