you are using the word ‘slaves’ wrong…
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Let’s examine the dictionary definition of “slave:”
- a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another and forced to provide unpaid labor.
- a person entirely under the domination of some influence or person.
According to that definition, my use of the word is hyperbolic but it isn’t wrong. Overwatch players do provide a kind of unpaid labor by populating and competing in Activision/Blizzard’s online games. They influence us by purporting to rank us based on our skill, while dominating us by algorithmically handicapping our matches in secret.
Is it as bad as chattel slavery, which I assume you are referring to? No, but there are many forms and degrees of slavery. I stand by my assertion that Overwatch players are slaves.
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I’ve seen some attempt recently to moderate your earlier stance and to redefine what you mean by “algorithmic handicapping.” You have, for instance, said that ‘forced 50% win rate’ is a misunderstanding of what you mean when you use the phrase “algorithmic handicapping.”
This post (quoted above in full), however, seems to fall back on that earlier meaning of the phrase. To be precise, it is when you say things like “purporting to rank us based on our skill, while dominating us by algorithmically handicapping our matches in secret,” that it becomes incredibly difficult to take anything you say seriously.
Do you not, in fact, understand that the current best practices of competitive ranking systems include things like making matches with a predicted win rate of 50% and including a seperate hidden skill rating apart from the publicly viewable ladder rating?
You are decrying best practices and doom saying good systems. At some point, do you not have to admit that you just are not well versed in how competitive ranking algorithms have been designed for decades and do not have any real basis upon which to make these judgements that you persist in making?
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people PLAY by CHOICE, massive difference.
can you honestly go one day without spamming this BS?
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Yes I completely understand that algorithmic handicapping practices have become standard in online games. My argument is is they are bad systems and they are not best practices.
Owing to my research and meditations on the subject, I think I understand it better than most people at this point. There is little to no historical precedent for the kind of fraudulent ranked competition and algorithmic handicapping that we see in Overwatch. It is a unique case and should be treated as such, because it will set precedent for other games to follow.
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It’s not that they are standard in online games. They are standard in other areas as well (including graduate school admissions exams, which are my area of expertise). They are also demonstrably better at solving the problem of ‘how do I most accurately rank the relative skill levels of any given group of competitors?’
That’s why they are standard across the board.
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Overwatch is very good at solving this problem on a per match basis. It does this with MMR. But on a long-term basis Overwatch fails to solve the problem, because algorithmically handicapped matches do not give players natural odds to win based on skill. The SR system does not rank players in order of skill, over time or at any point in time. Activision/Blizzard is solving for the wrong problem, and so are you.
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You are here (perhaps unknowingly) suggesting that all of the hundreds or thousands of people who have worked on solving this problem over the past six or so decades have been unable to spot this weakness that you have spotted (having never done serious work on the issue.)
That is some mighty hubris.
To expand on this a bit: There are no natural odds to win a match. One’s odds of winning are always based on the relative skills of the players involved (outside of things like power outages). Whether one makes matches randomly or in a more thoughtful way does not change this salient fact.
Skill is always the dominant factor. And if you are looking for confounding factors you should really look more at player behavior (though one could argue that not tilting and un-tilting teammates and similar are relevant aspects of the skill set required to master Overwatch).
So the question becomes, what match is most useful for evaluating the relevant skills of the players on the competitive ladder (and that is a generally solved question- it has been demonstrated many, many times in various academic journals and in various classes, etc)?
That’s where things like 50% matchmaking come in. I’ve actually expounded upon this at length in numerous posts hereabouts, because I saw widespread misunderstanding of how this works and why it is best practices, but in brief: stacking one side of the match (which could occur randomly) in such a way that the predicted win rate would be skewed away from 50% yields increasingly less information about the relative skill of the players in that match the further you skew the odds away from 50%.
So a match that has a predicted win rate for one team of 99% tells us basically nothing about the relative skill levels of the players involved. It has no value in re-ranking the ladder. It would be worst practices to allow such a match to be made.
The only way making those sorts of matches makes sense is if your goal is not to rank the ladder as accurately as possible, but to advantage some players over others- to give some players the good feeling of winning matches that are stacked in their favor.
But that is not the goal of competitive ranking algorithms. The goal of competitive ranking algorithms is to most accurately rank the ladder. For that, you need to intelligently make matches that will yield the most information about the relative skills of the players involved. And that requires something like 50/50 matches.
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The issue that we are talking about with algorithmic handicapping is not decades old. Online gaming as we know it is around two decades old at most. And the Matchmaker which Overwatch uses was only patented in 2015. It is not hubris to consider the design of systems, it is practical and it is important.
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The discipline of designing, testing and building competitive ranking algorithms is much older though. The modern foundations of the discipline are roughly 6 decades old. Improvements upon those foundations such as seperate MMR and SR are around 3-4 decades old.
One thing that might be useful to note is that an algorithm does not require a computer. Algorithms can be (and often are) carried out by hand. It just becomes impractical to do so across a player base of thousands with many matches being played simultaneously. But that does not mean that the algorithms being employed in a game like Overwatch are not building upon a foundation whose underpinnings are 6 decades old.
To expand on this a bit- none of this originated with online gaming. This all came about because people wanted to rank competitive chess players as accurately as possible. The two biggest issues that people found with the traditional Elo system were that results would be skewed if matches were made too randomly or if players took matches that heavily favored one player over the other and that tracking only a single ladder ranking (as opposed to having both SR and MMR) skewed results.
So it’s useful to recognize that the issues you have with OW matchmaker are not particular to it, but best practices that have been honed across decades by people seeking to find the best methods to rank people on competitive ladders.
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He’s been told this enough that he must realize it by now.
I’ve never understood what his problem with the system really is, what’s “bad” about creating fair matches. Or what his alternative would look like.
Most that “agree” with him aren’t making the same points other than “system bad, blizzard bad”. And since many aspects of the system and blizzard really are (or were, it’s been 4 years) bad, it’s impossible to refute a nebulous argument.
Cuth notably never corrects those who agree for the wrong reasons. This indicates that he’s not after a technical goal.
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Unlikely, given that no laws have been broken.
Also, if it was posted on a forum, it can be found. You can’t “scrub” things from existence. As proven here, old Jeff being toxic 20 years ago on a forum that has been deleted.
h ttp://web.archive.org/web/20090608034937/h ttp://www.legacyofsteel.net/oldsite/arc27.html
If it exists, and you want to find it, you will. Incriminating or not. (even though this claim would get laughed out of court).
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Problem is, I don’t think it matters to him anymore. I think it is about attention.
But then he is accusing ActiBlizz of crimes. So, he needs to show some courage, stop talking about it, and get to court.
Master Rigged is adamant some of us players will be caught up in the legal proceedings too. I am happy to give him all my details to make that happen.
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I know that if I had an idea that people said they agreed with but clearly did not understand, I would correct them even more vehemently than those who disagree. It’s best to fight on one front. Being accused of contradictory ideas is a nightmare.
Cuth basks in the attention of everyone dissatisfied with the system no matter how far from his own position.
It’ll never stop. There are people like him in all spheres. People who feed on the ignorance of others, promising salvation but delivering only false hope.
Why this venue when he could have a cult harem like Koresh, I can’t possibly fathom.
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A lot of surgeries are, in fact, either unnecessary or useless according to the data. The majority of orthopedic surgeries do not have outcomes that are superior to non-surgical treatments.
On the other hand, some surgeries are completely necessary and largely successful.
It’s up to us to manage our doctors up and tell them what to do to us, not vice-versa.
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Thats actually an interesting point, indeed a confident one.
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So, the point of the surgery analogy is not to imply that all surgeries are perfect. It’s to point out that if one is arguing that surgery is nefarious, one needs to do more than point to doctors defining surgery.
That’s all the ‘evidence’ ever amounts to in these threads- look! it’s a description of a competitive ranking system. Aren’t they scary! What are they hiding?!
That’s not anything remotely close to a compelling argument. It just sounds more like the person making the argument simply has little familiarity with competitive ranking systems.
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Let’s set surgery aside, since it’s too broad a topic to be relevant. Instead, let’s continue the medical analog with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It’s medically documented, but no one wants to diagnose it because there’s no definitive cause or cure. For years, researchers have hypothesized that certain infections could trigger some kind of bizarre long-term immune reaction within certain people, leading to symptoms that match CFS. Not everyone – just some people. Most doctors didn’t believe in CFS, though, they thought it was just some kind of mental illness.
Initially researchers thought this was Lyme Disease (a bacterial infection), then they added the Epstein-Barr virus (mononucleosis) to it. Now the condition known as “long Covid” is suspected to be identical to CFS, and since there are so many patients who have it, suddenly it’s being taken seriously. Yet CFS has been around for a long time while doctors shrugged and prescribed palliative treatments while thinking “This patient is crazy.”
And now that we’re looking at CFS more closely, we see that there may be other horrible mysterious incurable syndromes caused by certain infections that are typically mild or benign, such as Multiple Sclerosis.
When there’s a horrible mystery, you can’t solve it by turning away from it.
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But there’s no mystery here. And anyone’s attempt to suggest that there is relies on nothing more than descriptions of competitive ranking systems functioning as one would expect them to.
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I’m curious if you ever found my post about this from 2018.
To be fair to people, I can see how this is difficult to understand. Unfortunately, the people who are down this rabbit hole will do and say anything to think it’s the system’s fault.
I’m curious what you think, because you’re the first I’ve seen to address what SEEMS to be Cuth’s true misunderstanding. Most people misread “handicap”, thinking disability rather than golf. Of course, as I’ve mentioned, this discrepancy is accepted rather than corrected.
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