How Do You Deal With Losing Streaks?

[jsilva]

I'm going to double down on my comments from the other day. The A's are a fetid cesspool of misery.

There seem to be a lot of players in the A's that are quite seriously bad. I mean so bad they make C+'s look semi pro. I suspect it is for this reason that the losing streaks happen the way they do when descending from S for @jsilva and others. The fall from S is the normal kind of losing streak. Some bad matches some bad players, whatever. Then once you get to the A's you're kind of sunk and the spiral will continue.

So on my way up today, again, after descending to B 6 at one point in RM, I was playing SZ and TC in B. Mostly B-, B, B+ lobbies. Matches weren't as frantic as with higher ranks, but the pacing was fine, the objective contested, matches were more or less tight...everythin was fine. People played Splatoon. In SZ I had CHyddra...on Mackerel its like taking candy from a baby. Just park over the one zone, hold it alone, the rest of the team can press the other zone....and the second zone is the only point of contention. Our zone is locked by me and the enemy can't take control, only we can.

Then rank up to B+. All lobbies are now A-, A, A+. No B+'s....I'll never understand this. Suddenly my teammates feel like playing Turf War. They're behind me. They're painting the base....a few try to rush the other zone...they die. Now I have the ENTIRE enemy team coming at me exclusively, in waves....I can't hold them all off forever. Wave after wave they keep trying to take the zone....3 of them at once. Finally I get backed into a tiny corner by a wail only to have an inkstrike land on me while the wail was boxing me in. Where's my backup? No team....they probably didn't look at the map. They weren't pushing the other zone.... So I have to get of my perch, STOP defending the on zone we have...and try to push myself into the other zone.... Similar scenarios in multiple lobbies. Why is it the B's knew to push the other zone while the Hydra defends the close one and the A's do not?

Then there's the round where 2 of them decide to squid party.

I lucked out when I got back to A- actual rank. I started getting some B+'s on my team finally....and then we started winning some...the B+'s were tough against the A ranks on the other team.... And I probably lucked out since it was late at night. Read: Mid-Sunday in Japan....so the serious players were all playing :D

Bottom line is, I'm convinced the A's are quite possibly the worst set of ranks in the game.... I've consistently seen A's get destroyed by B's. In TW as well.

It's not that there aren't good rounds, and good plays by A players....it's just that those A players are probably the S players that got deranked in a losing streak. It's just that there's this HUGE concentration of truly awful players in the A's that are definitely worse than the majority of B & B+. :)

I'm not sure how to take that ... You're saying the bad A players are people like me? :) I can assure you I was playing fine when I went down to A! That's part of my point with the losses, that I wasn't playing badly.

 

[Award]

I'm not sure how to take that ... You're saying the bad A players are people like me? :) I can assure you I was playing fine when I went down to A! That's part of my point with the losses, that I wasn't playing badly.

LOL, no, no, I'm saying that the A pool contains so many players that are worse than the B's, fairly consistently, so that when S players fall to the A's a losing streak is inevitable because the odds of getting paired on horrid, horrid teams, and worst, getting paired on horrid teams against some very good S quality players that got sent to A, like you, seem higher in A than anywhere else. The imbalance is the most extreme there....REALLY bad players, and some very good players :)

Edit Back up to A 64 ..... then the obligatory losing streak....then back to A 42. The losing streaks, sometimes they're obvious. One lobby (A) had 4 S players, 2 A- players and an A+ ALL FOUR S players were assigned to the other team. We were spawncamped.

Others, it's a fairly mixed lobby across all A's. The other team is very aggressive. Mahi TC their very first move, no matter which of dozens of lobbies I was in was to invade our base....every single time, every single lobby the enemy invaded our base straight off, and I had nowhere to snipe from. The time it takes a charger to clear off their ink was enough time for them to return and do it all over again. My team meanwhile was fairly passive, not even touching the tower most of the time. Not shooting the enemy off the tower...I'd get to my perch and see the tower go by me....with no one on my team shooting at it. I'd manage to shut it down ,but we'd end up with scores of 99 v 14 most of the time unless i pushed the tower myself....then we'd get more like 54 v 8. Every now and again I'd push it to the lead...or inspire a team mate to to it. If you're relying on the sniper as the aggro tower pusher, you're doing it wrong. Every lobby, and I'd change every match, same thing, aggressive opponents, passive teammates that don't push the tower.

It's just too much of a joke to take too seriously.

 

[maxie]

if i lose three games in a row, i change weapons and then try again, but if i continue to do badly i make myself have a break to force myself to calm down because by that point im probably at the 'almost breaking my controller' stage.

 

[Award]

I let myself get frustrated today, even though I don't care about rank (or am making a point not to), just because it was making it impossible to break A....I got up to A 75 fairly easy...but then once the "scheduled losing streak" set in, there was just no way out....I went all the way up and all the way down several times....now I'm at A 10. I'm almost guaranteed to lose it back to A- tomorrow. Grr!

I seriously have no idea how some of these people are in the A's. I took out the whole enemy team with a single splat bomb in Saltspray Zones....and my team STILL could not reclaim the zone until I got there to do it for them. In Warehouse zones with hydra I could cover the entire zone all by myself....keep retaking it....but no, they couldn't flush out the same darn camper under me every 20 seconds. RM...I suck at RM....finally just took some shooters... DS I'm good with. Started going 3/12 - because I kept carrying the RM....but the team was rarely there so I'd have to try to carry it alone (splat!) I kept trading to take out the RM carrier kamikaze style, and just making death defying leaps right into 3 enemies with a DS to try to stop their push (it worked, but we still lost, and I got splatted a lot.) Switched to SSP, still carried the RM a lot, but ended positive K/D. Still lost. Where was the team in Moray RM when I tried to carry or had to kamikazy to (try to) keep the carrier from the wall? Painting the ramps! Including the ones above the RM goal.

Each of these rounds was the same: The enemy team was twice as aggressive, twice as good in combat, twice as focused on the objective than our team. "Randomly" the teams ended up that way in like 30 lobbies.

Mostly I just scream at the screen...works well enough :p

 

[jsilva]

I let myself get frustrated today, even though I don't care about rank (or am making a point not to), just because it was making it impossible to break A....I got up to A 75 fairly easy...but then once the "scheduled losing streak" set in, there was just no way out....I went all the way up and all the way down several times....now I'm at A 10. I'm almost guaranteed to lose it back to A- tomorrow. Grr!

I seriously have no idea how some of these people are in the A's. I took out the whole enemy team with a single splat bomb in Saltspray Zones....and my team STILL could not reclaim the zone until I got there to do it for them. In Warehouse zones with hydra I could cover the entire zone all by myself....keep retaking it....but no, they couldn't flush out the same darn camper under me every 20 seconds. RM...I suck at RM....finally just took some shooters... DS I'm good with. Started going 3/12 - because I kept carrying the RM....but the team was rarely there so I'd have to try to carry it alone (splat!) I kept trading to take out the RM carrier kamikaze style, and just making death defying leaps right into 3 enemies with a DS to try to stop their push (it worked, but we still lost, and I got splatted a lot.) Switched to SSP, still carried the RM a lot, but ended positive K/D. Still lost. Where was the team in Moray RM when I tried to carry or had to kamikazy to (try to) keep the carrier from the wall? Painting the ramps! Including the ones above the RM goal.

Each of these rounds was the same: The enemy team was twice as aggressive, twice as good in combat, twice as focused on the objective than our team. "Randomly" the teams ended up that way in like 30 lobbies.

Mostly I just scream at the screen...works well enough :p

I don't know what to say about your experience in A since I haven't observed the same thing (exclusive to A at least), but glad you're going up quickly in your rank!

It does feel like there's no way out of losing streaks when you're constantly matched on the weaker team. I have had teammates doing weird things but usually it is just that the other team is so clearly better. Frustrating!

 

[Award]

I don't know what to say about your experience in A since I haven't observed the same thing (exclusive to A at least), but glad you're going up quickly in your rank!

It does feel like there's no way out of losing streaks when you're constantly matched on the weaker team. I have had teammates doing weird things but usually it is just that the other team is so clearly better. Frustrating!

It seems slower than it should, just because of the sheer number of defeats and the random fact that when I lose I have the higher ranked team, and it's a knockout so I lose a lot more points than when I win where it's all similarly matched, and is just a lead not a knockout. I'd bounce between 10 and 58 for hours. Easy losses, easy wins on occasion, and mostly fighting to prevent knockouts more than fighting to win. (RM will throw it away though...that's the only one I can't get salty about, though since I know I suck...though I'm still questioning that given some of the "plays" I've seen.)

But yeah, it's mostly just getting matched on a clearly weaker team. I get most salty in Zones since that's the one I know I've got in the bag. Rapidly coming to terms with TC again, Rm I still suck, but Zones is my thing. Give me a hydra or a carbon roller and I've got the zone covered. Which makes it ever more inexplicable how we can lose. Saltspray yesterday, so many times we got the early lead, fortified the throne entry, life was good. Then the enemy took everyone out, finally took me out, and my team was going out to get killed single file and never reclaimed it. Meanwhile I'd often see the other team rally together, split in twos and attack from both sides, very coordinated. It mirrors TW - the only thing holding the team together was my defensive position. Once I go down, the match is over.

I was switching lobbies every round for a while, and it was the same no matter the lobby. It would give me one winning round, too easy a win, and then it would be awful again.

I wondered: Could it punish us for switching lobbies too much? Does it want us to stick with one? When do you switch lobbies? After wins, after losses, after every round?

 

[jsilva]

I wondered: Could it punish us for switching lobbies too much? Does it want us to stick with one? When do you switch lobbies? After wins, after losses, after every round?

I don't know if it would matter much to the system if players stayed in a lobby. I would think it wouldn't matter because it seems silly for them to design a system which expects players to remain given that we can leave at any time or even just delay replaying for any number of reasons. Who knows though!

 

[Award]

I don't know if it would matter much to the system if players stayed in a lobby. I would think it wouldn't matter because it seems silly for them to design a system which expects players to remain given that we can leave at any time or even just delay replaying for any number of reasons. Who knows though!

A lot of things about the matchmaker seems silly ;)

I mean, there has to be SOMETHING that cause a player to consistently get assigned a team weaker than the opposing team. Even if they intentionally do it to load balance the lobbies as I suspect, there has to be a "trigger" that makes it choose who to do it to.

I try to leave a lobby any time I see one player, on either team dominate, even if I win, if it's an overwhelming win where one player dominated in a minute, particularly if it's because the other team didn't fight back. Because certainly the next round, I'll be on that team that doesn't fight back. :) So I DO get put on the strong team sometimes....but infrequently.

 

[jsilva]

A lot of things about the matchmaker seems silly ;)

I mean, there has to be SOMETHING that cause a player to consistently get assigned a team weaker than the opposing team. Even if they intentionally do it to load balance the lobbies as I suspect, there has to be a "trigger" that makes it choose who to do it to.

I try to leave a lobby any time I see one player, on either team dominate, even if I win, if it's an overwhelming win where one player dominated in a minute, particularly if it's because the other team didn't fight back. Because certainly the next round, I'll be on that team that doesn't fight back. :) So I DO get put on the strong team sometimes....but infrequently.

Definite something is up...

In addition to your idea, it could also be some sort of mathematical error in the matchmaking algorithm that results in a player being matched repeatedly on the weaker team.

There are other ideas, but it doesn't really matter what it is. Nintendo just needs to put an end to it. They get away with it because most people assume the ranked system is overall fair, or don't care if it is (possibly because it hasn't affected them significantly or they don't realise their repeated losses aren't entirely their own fault), and so improving the system isn't a matter of selling the game or not for Nintendo. Hopefully they care enough to better the system in any case.

 

[Award]

Definite something is up...

In addition to your idea, it could also be some sort of mathematical error in the matchmaking algorithm that results in a player being matched repeatedly on the weaker team.

There are other ideas, but it doesn't really matter what it is. Nintendo just needs to put an end to it. They get away with it because most people assume the ranked system is overall fair, or don't care if it is (possibly because it hasn't affected them significantly or they don't realise their repeated losses aren't entirely their own fault), and so improving the system isn't a matter of selling the game or not for Nintendo. Hopefully they care enough to better the system in any case.

Possible. But since it doesn't affect all players, or so it seems, or affects some of us more, there's still got to be something to our metrics or patterns that are more likely to trigger that error. We assume it has to be "winning too much" or being the carrier on our team. Maybe it's just time spent playing, or lobby switches. It's not # of splats because it doesn't seem to affect it whether I'm the 18/12 aggro, or the 5/12 kamikaze, of the 7/3 careful sniper. But you're right at how many people assume it's fair, or it balances out or "you can get to the rank you deserve"usually the latter comes from an S+ that's so good they dominate most matches alone, even in S+. And the arguments about "oh, it's tilt" and "take a break after 3 losses" definitely don't apply (I'll often do worse after breaks actually, I get out of the groove.) But it just became so evident in RM for me since I know I suck, and I was STILL pushing the objective more than the rest. "I came into this expecting to lose....why am I the one closest to bringing victory...how bad ARE you people?" :p

IMO the non-resetting ladder and not scoring individuals is an unsolvable problem to begin with. The rigged losing streaks are just the icing on the cake. They just make the problems visible by bringing them to the front.

 

[Isan]

Yeah after doing Squad mode with Nivie and Sora, I don't think I'll ever go back to singles. It's just not as fun, and I get too rage prone. Speaking of,

Award
Sora Blue
jsilva

We need to figure out a group message solution.

 

[Award]

Yeah after doing Squad mode with Nivie and Sora, I don't think I'll ever go back to singles. It's just not as fun, and I get too rage prone. Speaking of,

Award
Sora Blue
jsilva

We need to figure out a group message solution.

Yeah, it's a lot more fun, even when you lose, when you know you have good players with you that didn't just sit around and do nothing and mistakes are mistakes and not sheer incompetence.

Posted in another thread how I was (losing consecutively again) with my old main (carbon) in zones. One round I got a full team wipe just outside the zone, traded on #4, and my team did NOT reclaim the zone while I respawned. They just sat there. That doesn't happen in squads. :D

You mean other than the chat thread and discord?