The main problem with HotS as I see it is that you are more rewarded (or punished) for the teammates you’ve been dealt than for your performance during the game. This leads to the all too common feeling that there was nothing you could have done better to convert that loss into a win and the game was essentially lost at the loading screen. This is just how HotS was designed. You are extremely dependent on the entire 5 person squad and players ability to carry is very low.
The problem with that method is that wins and losses are a zero-sum game. Played great but still lost? You get the same reward as the player who played terrible and lost. Out of the 10 players in the game you played the best? Who cares, did you win or lose? We all kind of acknowledge that your SL level and your skill are only loosely correlated.
Not a great system.
What I propose is that only half of your points awarded at the end of the game come from whether you won or lost. The other half comes from your gameplay performance.
There a thousand ways to measure performance and I don’t want to propose any here as someone will lock in on a minute detail as a way to throw out the whole idea.
This would take the sting out of those defeats where you were simply placed on the weaker team. Maybe reduce toxicity knowing that the 1 bad player who caused the team to lose only has a small impact on your level placement. This could also reduce the disparity of solo queueing vs grouping up, and put less emphasis on a flawed MMR system.
Got the bad luck of being pared against a 5 man stack? Well a large chuck of your points is determined by how well you played. So there is a lot less incentive to ‘give up’ even if you are losing.
And to guard against level inflation…. If you played poorly in the game that was lost, you would lose a higher than normal amounts of points. The whole idea is whether you get a lot of points, or lose a lot of points (or somewhere in between)….you have no one to blame but yourself.
It’s a team game so you lose/win as a team.
The only thing that does not make a lot of sense is to give players an individual ranking while using a elo system that is mainly designed for 1v1 games.
The ranked mode is just a ladder that should make the game accessible for solo players.
The real competitive scene plays with real premade teams in tournament modes.
I think there are a ton of ways. I already get the occasional pop-up box after a game saying that my K/D ratio was higher than the avg with the same hero. So Blizz is already measuring some of this stuff.
But just to rattle off a few:
K/D ratio
Numbers compared to that hero’s avg.
Numbers compared to your opponent’s numbers.
Numbers compared to your own with the same hero in previous games.
etc.
And that is actually the main problem with this idea, and has been pointed out each time it is revived on this forum. Raw numbers usually do not tell the whole story, especially with supporting roles such as tanks. Taking a ton of damage as a tank does not mean you are playing well, and can often mean you are playing poorly. Doing a ton of damage as a tank and leaving your back line to die may look good on the stats screen, but is terrible for actually winning games.
As an assassin, having large damage numbers and no kills can mean you aren’t using your abilities wisely, but spamming them at meaningless times.
Having points being tied to numbers can actually make for a worse experience as your entire team goes after stat padding rather than the meaningful actions that wins games.
I think there’s simply too many variances in maps/objectives and team-comps for any of the current stats to be a decent reflection of how well you performed in a given match.
This isn’t even taking into account the option of stat padding, which could be a huge issue if not properly ironed out.
But how well does the current system tell the story? You lost so you must have played bad. Right? Well thats the current system.
If a player isn’t trying to win, they are throwing away half of the points they could have earned. So saying a player doesn’t want to win that just want to stat pad is a contradiction.
The thing is, the games that are lost due to team mates are balanced out by the games won due to team mates, or the enemy team getting the poor players. Is it perfect? Heck no, but far more fair than what you are proposing.
The main problem here is “trying to win” means different things to different people. Spending the entire match pushing a single lane may seem like a reasonable strategy to someone, while leaving their team to die at an objective. The fact that they will be then rewarded for having the highest siege damage, XP, and fewest deaths will simply reinforce that behavior.
It’s pretty much impossible to measure the performance correctly. It’s not like this idea is new…
It’s not necessary anyways because it’s a team game and there is no personal performance for any competitive team sport like football/basketball. The team loses or wins no matter who carried/threw the match.
The current system to me is the worst of both worlds. Luck of the MMR is everything. The only refuge is that the luck balances out over hundreds of games? Almost anything is better than the 1 dimensional win/loss criteria we currently have.
Right now we live and die by the luck of a flawed MMR system. Anything would be a step up.
And for the record I did not say anything about blindly using raw numbers. See above for a few suggestions I threw out.
This happens now… and again there is more to measuring performance than raw numbers. That is a bit of a strawman you are burning down there.
It is not a strawman, you are missing the point. The person who is doing this will be rewarded by your system and either climb in ranks, or at least drop down to an appropriate rank more slowly. In addition, how do you put a value on things like a tank peeling for someone? Anchoring? Scouting?
Of course it is frustrating to lose points because you lost a match when you played well, but someone rotated badly and got jumped, killed, and the numbers disadvantage led to a team wipe. We have all been there, but to make a bad system worse isn’t a solution.
Edit: And all of the suggestions you provided were raw numbers.
You have shot down blindly using raw numbers as a basis for judging performance. I have never suggested doing that. I purposely tried to avoid throwing out an algorithm for this exact reason.
Step 1: Would incorporating the player’s performance into points award be a good idea? Yes or no?
If yes, awesome. Lets move to step 2 which is how best to do it.
If no, then step 2 doesn’t matter.
On this forum when there is a choice between getting something kind of right, or not right at all… The ‘not right at all’ usually wins out. Right now, we have ‘not right at all’.
Those are not raw numbers. Those are ratios and percentages. And there are probably a hundred other ways to do it.
If there is no good way to do it then it will turn the answer back to a no.
We have been at this point before where even blizzard said they want to implement personal performance bonuses for ranking and they did not found a way to do it so they went back to “no”.
To use your analogy, it would be like Lebron James being on the worst team in the league so he gets paid league minimum salary. Would that make sense?
How are placement games determining your initial level every season? Its not just wins and losses. Blizz measures a lot of stuff including the number of clicks you do throughout the game.
You could do a weighted-average consisting of 40 different variables. If we had access to the data Blizz has I am confident we could come up with a workable method.
He will not win the NBA with that team even tho he would be the best performing player in the universe? How much teams pay to get him in their team is a completely different business.
They did implement it, and it was an unmitigated disaster. They rolled it back within weeks of releasing it. It was called PBMMR, and it actually made ranked play worse.
Comparative numbers tend to still come from raw numbers, so the ability to get better ratios would stem from getting better raws.
Part of the issue of comparative values is that bad plays tend to reward better numbers than good play.
In HGC and similar type matches, a top dps might only get 20k. In pug play, that might be 200k. Since more average players outnumber top players, that pushes the ave comparative much higher to wanting to bloat figures and statpad.
Similarly, just because a hero has better numbers doesn’t mean they played better; it means they may have chosen to avoid getting kills, fighting objectives, ending the game, etc etc. Or, if a team is behind, there can be better opportunity to get stats because they’re not winning.
eg. if 3 lanes have catapults, it takes more siege damage to offset those waves than it would to have a punisher or garden terror take structures and clear forts.
Rather than having systems that appeal to bad aspects of HotS play, it’d probably be better to incentive something in a different direction.
One option could be game length: the winning side gets more mmr if they win quickly while the losing side decreases their loss the longer the game lasts. A strong player/team outside their mmr could push for faster games and climb sooner while players that hold out (instead of giving up) may mitigate their losses and not feel so ‘punished’ for games out of their control.
However, in said case that does curb a bit of ‘close’ games where one team may feel they weren’t as rewarded as they should have been for a hard-fought game. On the other hand, because perception of play tends to fixate on the wrong things, games may not be as close as they could/should be because players aren’t doing the right stuff to make it close, so having the time/comparison could be a way to try to better focus on finishing games, rather than farming stats, or rather, bragging about stats to teammates.
I welcome the feedback and think what you propose has merit. Like I said, there are probably a hundred ways to do it and I threw out 4 off the top of my head.
I think the solution lies in a weighted average of 40 variables (or something like that). So if you tried to exploit 1 metric it would only influence 1/40th of the input parameters.
The only thing I don’t accept is:
A: It can’t be done.
or
B: It will incentivize tactics that will increase the likelihood of losing the game.
Thats like saying an investment plan will increase the likelihood of people throwing their money in the fireplace. It would achieve the exact opposite outcome of what they wanted… so why would they do it?
No thank you. The way to measure MMR in this system is inefficient, slow, and sometimes seemingly unfair. Yet, it is also way more fair than what you’re proposing.
Instead of painting yourself as a victim to how you performed comparatively to your allies and demanding the system recognize that, just do better to win more games which on average will set you apart from people who are worse than you. It’s perhaps crude, but ultimately more representative when taken into the context of many games.
A game like this is way too complex to try to measure out the thousands of variables that take into winning. All of which completely change depending on different contexts and the meta, all of which become useless every time there’s a new patch. No.
Care elaborate how it would be worse? I am unfamiliar with the principle of ‘the less data you have, the more accurate your predictions become.’
Victim? I am simply suggesting that good play be rewarded, which will incentivize… more good play. And yes, over 300 games the luck of the MMR will balance out and my 52% win rate will eventually win the day, but we can do better than just being at the mercy of the MMR.
So right now we should just measure 1 variable… whether you win or lose? Really? Nothing is better than that?