But thet patents :o?
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Ah, forgive me. I got to thinking about chaos and went in a completely tangential diatribe with absolutely no bearing on the conversation at hand.
Oh well, live and learn.
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Of course understandable, its not wrong to get into what your opposite is thinking or where its thoughts evolve from it just shows in my eyes a required sense of empathy while still stay objective and condeemed to the topic. I may be the only one still thinking or seeing this thread by Cuthbert as just what it initally is a theory or hypothesis we can discuss about and should stay as that and hoped it would not turn into conspiracy fallacies. :()
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I appreciate your attitude and your objectivity. Let me just delineate between my hypothesis, which is about the implications of algorithmic handicapping, and the fact that Competitive Overwatch is algorithmically handicapped, as stated by Activison/Blizzard representatives like Principal Overwatch Designer Scott Mercer.
I don’t expect everyone to believe everything that I believe, but it’s deplorable that so many people will deny such primary source information. Not saying that you are doing this, but many do and that is what I’m fighting.
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I haven’t read most of the posts in this thread because it is 2900 posts long, but I fully agree with the premise of the thread title (mostly all I read)…
What I mean is that I’ve heard people on both sides of the “matchmaker is broken/matchmaker is working well” argument agree that the game tries to force a 50/50 probability for each match with its “hidden MMR” system. I presume this means that it will put whoever it thinks is the best player in the match on the same team with who it thinks is the worst player in the match, etc to make the teams “balanced”.
This is bs and should not happen in a competitive mode. Just take “hidden MMR” and throw it in the trashcan. If you are playing basketball on a playground at school, they do this kind of thing of placing the best and worst player on the same team to make things seem “fair” to everyone and people are fine with it, because it is just casual.
But imagine if they did that in pro sports? Like in the NFL playoffs, when they match the #1 seed with the #8 seed. What if they said “hey, #1 seed, we think you are a lot better than the other team, so for your match, we’re going to take 3 of your best players and swap them with 3 of the other team’s worst players to try to make this match more even and fair” Would that make any sense?
There should be absolutely no component of that kind of nonsense in Overwatch competitive matchmaking (it’s fine if they put it in quickplay). There’s no reason for the matchmaker to even TRY to figure out “who are the higher performing players in this match” in terms of putting a team together. It should be “these 12 players have similiar SR, randomize them into teams” and let that be that.
It makes me very annoyed at the idea that if I stomp the enemy team and hard carry one match, the game is going to try to handicap me in my next match by giving me teammates that are underperforming to balance out me overperforming, to try to make a “fair match”. That’s not at all “fair” to the players that are overperforming
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If they made all your opponents tougher because you seemed to be playing well, better than you normally do, do you think that would be fair?
If someone who’s doing better than normal is on the other team, would you think it’s fair if they kept both teams at that person’s normal, skill level, as opposed to the skill level that they have been playing at today, so that they stomped all over?
Not that it works either way, just trying to figure out what people consider fair.
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If they made my opponents tougher because I was playing well AND they made my teammates better, then I would consider that fair.
I DON’T consider it fair when they make my opponents better but also make my teammates worse at the same time.
I have no idea wtf you are talking about with your second paragraph
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Yeah, it could be worded better. You touched on it with your answer, though.
If they made both teams, on average, slightly better as you stacked up wins, would you think that was fair, even if by “on average” it may be the case that someone on your team is going to be worse than you, but overall your team was better than the last round?
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Yes and I think that’s how a competitive matchmaker SHOULD be.
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So, if that’s “System A”, where the average of the teams is the same (and rising with your wins), but there is a spread of skill levels and you may be either top, bottom, or in between…
And we call “System B”, where, as you keep getting wins the opponents match your skill but…
thus keeping your average team at some level below the average of the other team.
Which do you really think is probably actually happening? Does System B make any sense at all to you? As in, aren’t the problems so glaringly obvious that it’s unlikely to be built this way?
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I don’t think you understand how averages work…
If you want a team to average 80 skill, you can make that happen by making every member 80 skill. Or you make half the team members with 100 skill and the other half with 60 skill.
On paper, you get an average of 80, either way. But one is the smart way to do it and the other is the nonsensical and lazy way to do it. Blizzard chose the nonsensical and lazy way
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Well, I’ll give you that.
Whether it’s non-sensical, well, remember that there are other factors involved. There aren’t an infinite number of people playing. You have to find people of in the region, playing right now, on the same platform.
Add to that the requirement that they are of the exact same skill? Or even really, really close? You can do it, sure, but you’re trading queue times for it.
So, you’re not wrong, but I don’t think “lazy” can really be applied to the technical system here. You may be willing to wait forever for such a match, but not everyone agrees.
If you read the literature on skill based matchmaking, people do tend to hate it. The reasons are that the better you are, in random matchmaking you have proportionally more easy games. For an above average player, but not great player, that leads to a win-ratio of greater than 50%.
But great players need to go outside the matchmaker. Bad players (me!) just quit after a few crappy games. In other words, there is no little league and there is no in-built pro league.
This severely limits the life of the game. It ends up not being fun for many.
But then you tell me…is it bad game design to have team averages being equal, or is it bad human nature that can’t handle losing half their games by said design?
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Not in all cases, but certainly in most cases.
Absolutely, 100%. Welcome to the party!
All there is to do with it, really.
Exactly! Every few months a logical-thinking and practical person like yourself joins the discussion and makes the same analogy. Such a real-world analogy is perfectly fair and highly illustrative; don’t let the blind fools of this forum dissuade you from perceiving simple truth (they will try).
I agree, Quick Play is a different story. But even there, I think it is wrong that MMR is hidden because even in WP players do get competitive. It is absurd that a player can be effectively handicapped by their MMR, and have no visible representation of the fact.
From a player’s perspective, there certainly is no reason for it. But from a corporate product management perspective, there are billions ($) of reasons.
Another sane person wanders into the asylum that I inhabit with Activision/Blizzard’s insane fanboys. And to you I say “Don’t go! Take me with you!”
In all seriousness, I’m not leaving. Thank you for your reasonable take on the subject. It is gratifying to see another person take the same steps of logic that I and others have taken, reaching the same conclusions. It is like a ray of sunshine in a storm, or an oasis in a desert. Please spread the word if you can. I am trying to find exposure and take action outside the forum, because clearly Activison/Blizzard does not mean to ever respond.
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Any logical-thinking person realizes that this analogy makes no sense and this has been addressed many times.
For someone who claims to be grounded in logical reasoning, Cuthbert, you sure dismiss everything that has clearly disproven each of your arguments and simply recycle your non-sensical points to every new person coming here.
It’s beyond me how anyone still believes that you are debating in good faith.
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It really does make perfect sense, and nobody has made a convincing augment otherwise. All I’ve heard to the contrary is a lot mental gymnastics, plain ignorance, contortion of fact, and general verbal diarrhea.
Oh man.
Okay. I’m going to go through this again. But it would be really nice if I take the time to do this if people would actually read and consider this. I know Cuthbert will not. He has proven that time and again. He is not trying to understand what is happening. I know Rigged will not. Rigged is not trying to understand what is happening.
To the best of my knowledge they are the only ones suggesting a law suit against ActiBlizzard alleging the matchmaker has harmed the players is actually being pursued. (I may have more to say about that later.) So either or both of them may, in fact, be attempting to scam various members of the playerbase for their own financial gain. It may be, instead, that they are in the process of being scammed by some outside party. The only other alternative is that one or both of them have been lying repeatedly for years about this alleged lawsuit because they somehow believed that those lies would shore up their absurd claims about the matchmaker.
In any case, I shall now (once again) give a fairly lengthy explanation of how competitive ranking systems function (not just OW and not just online gaming, this applies to computer adaptive admissions testing as well, which is my particular field of professional expertise.)
I’m going to begin with the basketball/pro sports analogy that Waffle posted. I’ve used this analogy when explaining these systems in other threads on this forum.
This is a useful analogy for us to consider. The problem is that the above analysis has it backwards. The NFL has a different motive than that of a well designed competitive ranking system. The NFL simply wants to make money. It does not want to actually rank every team in terms of their skill. It is not set up to do this. Further, even if it did want to rank each and every team according to their skill, it does not want to rank every player according to their skill.
The NFL’s goal is to entertain its fans. It’s more analogous to quickplay than comp. Fans debate which player is better or which team is better. But even when any given team wins the Superbowl there is often still debate about which team was the best. (Or, indeed, debate about what metric should be used to determine the best team.)
So when Waffle suggests that swapping the three best players from the better team to the worse team would not make sense, Waffle is right. At least from the perspective of the NFL, its teams, and its fans. The team just wants to have the best team possible. They don’t want true competition. They want to win, and they’ll do whatever they can get away with (including cheating when feasible) to ensure that. Similarly, the fans want their team to win. They want their team to have all the best players in the league and they want them to stomp all over the competition. It makes no sense, given that context, to balance the teams.
What does a competitive ranking system want?
It wants to rank each and every player on the ladder according to their skill as efficiently as possible. Given that context, then, does it make more sense to make balanced or unbalanced matches?
Consider the sports analogy again. If I put all the best players on the same team and have them play all the worst players, how does that impact my player rankings? Well, going into the match, I thought all the players on Team A were the best and all the players on Team B were the worst. After the match, I think the same thing. But which of the players on Team A are better than the others? And which of the players on Team B are better than the other players on Team B? And how do I know?
Maybe I could use some sort of performance indicators from the game, but the rigged matchmaker proponents say we shouldn’t do that. They say we should only use wins and losses. But we already knew they were going to win. It was a stacked game from the beginning. So we could award them SR gain, but without some sort of performance based metrics we would have to give every player on Team A the same SR and every player on Team B would lose the same SR.
And (and this is the crucial bit) we would be doing that having learned nothing new about these players. This is the bit that people who decry 50% matchmaking simply do not understand: if ladder ranking is actually reflective of player skill, it should only change when we learn more about the relative skills of the people in the match and the change in ladder ranking should be proportional to what we learn.
So there should be little or no change when we do not learn anything about the relative skills of the players from any given match. Lopsided matches should not result in significant SR gain/loss.
And the implication of that is that we should not make lopsided matches if we can avoid it- because lopsided matches do not teach us anything about the relative skills of the players involved. They may be what sports fans want- my team should be much better than other fans’ teams, therefore I want my team to have all the best players. But they are not what well designed competitive ranking systems want.
I can further demonstrate using actual numbers if necessary, but the short version is this: If Team A has 5 GM players and 1 newbie of relatively unknown skill and they are matched against 5 bronze players- I learn nothing about that newbie without using performance based metrics, and even with performance based metrics I would learn more from a less lopsided match. Team A would win regardless, whether that newbie were top 500 or bottom 500 or anywhere in between.
Solely tracking wins/losses of unbalanced matches is a terrible way to try to rank players according to skill.
Alternatively, if I make a match of 5 gold players and that same newbie vs 6 gold players on the other team, I have maximized the newbies potential to impact the match and I will learn way more about their relative skill.
Now consider the fact that every player on the ladder may have improved or lost skill since they last played- every player in every match has some degree of uncertainty about their skill and the match itself is how we learn more- they are all the newbie on Team A, and we need balanced matches to learn their current skill level.
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I never suggested a lawsuit against Blizzard, although I think a class-action suit is warranted in this case. However I am not a lawyer or a rich person myself, so I will not be bringing it.
What a vile a baseless lie. I have never tried to deceive or extract money from Overwatch players, unlike Activision/Blizzard.
When I first came to this forum, I was warned of not wasting my time explaining this to these guys. I didn’t listen and tried anyway until I finally arrived at this conclusion myself.
When you came here, I, in turn, warned you and you tried anyway. Now, here we are.
It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and if you ever took the time to understand what was said to you, maybe you would get there as well.
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Are you saying that Activision/Blizzard’s motivations are any better by contrast?
Both the NFL and Activision/Blizzard are corporate enterprises. Both of them are solely motivated by profit. Your assumption that Activison/Blizzard is somehow better than other entertainment corporations is laughably naïve. Either that or you are being contemptuously dishonest.
Read what I wrote Cuthbert. I said either or both of you may be attempting this scam. Or that either or both of you are being scammed by an outside party. Or that one or both of you are lying about the lawsuit.
Rigged said that the lawsuit was proceeding. That it was a slam dunk case. That there was a firm handling it. And that it was time for the lawsuit to move forward. You backpedaled a bit in your reply and asked if the lawsuit really was a time sensitive thing that needed to move forward now.
That looks an awful lot like a scam happening. The reason the time sensitive element gets added to these scams is to start extracting money from people. The time is now and we only need $X to proceed.
I’m not saying you are necessarily involved in a scam. I’m saying that everyone should be on the lookout if anyone starts suggesting that money change hands. But the fact of the matter is that a scam would make way more sense given the bizarre extent to which you guys keep making these claims and not even stopping to think about plausible alternatives.
The way you want to periodically keep pushing these absurd claims to the top of the discourse would make way more sense if someone were profiting from it. Whether anyone actually is or not, the following is absolutely true:
The lawsuit talk does not shore up your claims, it makes them way less tenable- because lawsuits are specific things that must be filed. Further, class action lawsuits are never secret the way Rigged keeps suggesting- they want as many people to sign onto them as possible, and the first step in that whole process is actually filing in court and having the class established- that’s a legal proceeding that can be verified, by the way- because if that step fails, the lawyers make no money and drop the case.
Any lawyer filing this suit on Rigged’s behalf would want as many of us as possible to sign onto it. They would communicate with everyone who has ever played an OW comp match over the past 6 years. It’s in their financial interests to do so. So the lawsuit claim is a non-starter and undermines every other argument you guys make, because we know you are lying.
The second point is that there are real implications to lying about this sort of thing. One of those is that people do this in order to extract money from vulnerable people. And part of what you do with your whole rigged matchmaker crusade is increase the number of people who would be vulnerable to such a scam.
I’m not saying that is what you are intentionally doing. You may be an unwitting ally here. I’m just pointing out that there may be implications to what you are doing that you have not fully thought through.
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