Ranked mode too punishing?

[BluEyes]

You need to get out of the mad houses. Mad houses are B+ and A- or A+ and S lobbies. Those are where players are getting ranked up/down and stakes are very high. I have always found them to be nerve wrecking. Sweet spots are B and A lobbies. Somehow players are less intense. I have always found A- harder than A and when I get to A+, all hell breaks loose again.

 

[BlackZero]

The only issue with that is the example that both I and jsilva cited the losing streak or "tilt" led us directly into winning streaks instead of prolonging the losing streak. Meaning it wasn't tilt at all.

It can also mean you dropped to a point where your tilt no longer caused you to lose. Again, in an Elo system, runaway winning streaks and losing streaks can have a disproportionate impact on your player value and place you in lobbies that are way above or below your actual level of performance. Also, 50/50 matchups mean you have as much chance of winning or losing, so luck may have simply favored you. Without looking at the actual numbers, it's impossible to tell what turned things around for you guys.

Either way, even if it's happening the way you say, a system that bounces between two extremes rather than ever settling on the intended goal of matching equals is a devastating failure from any angle you view it. It is unable to achieve its primary goal.

You're absolutely correct. I agree that a more sophisticated algorithm needs to be set up for the next Splatoon team shooter. I'm just trying to explain how Elo works, what it does, what it doesn't do, and how personal experience may give people the wrong impression of how Elo matches people up.

There's real money at the end of LoL and the heart of the games Riot makes in a way that is not true for most games.

Whether or not people bet on LoL games is not any indication of a racquet or someone pulling strings. People bet on a lot of things (including plot twists on TV shows). It doesn't mean someone manipulates every one of them to screw people. Even if we say that LoL matchmaking is being manipulated for someone to profit, it doesn't mean the same type of matchmaker used in Splatoon is engineered to be manipulative. There's no million-dollar bookie industry for Nintendo games or Splatoon, so I still don't see a compelling reason for engineering the matchmaker to deliberately set up imbalanced matches.

Not targeted sabotage, just "hmm, S now has 20% more population than A+ and A+ is experiencing an increase in wait times, lets balance the S matches to move about 8% of the population down so the A+ lobby doesn't get too barren.

This is called "rating inflation." To counter this, the people in control of ratings simply inject more points into the Elo system to prevent a tier from getting oversaturated or disproportionally large. I suspect this is what they did when they raised the rank cap to S+ and "improved matchmaking." Nintendo wouldn't need to implement slanted matchmaking to counter this. Simply injecting points into the system to keep the tiers balanced would do the same thing without Nintendo setting up a matchmaker that regularly puts people in bad matches on purpose. That doesn't mean you won't get bad matchups from time to time, but I'd be very surprised if Nintendo designed things for this to be the norm.

You need to get out of the mad houses. Mad houses are B+ and A- or A+ and S lobbies.

That's a pretty good point. This may be more common in the upper tiers. In theory, top-level competitive players would be better able to exploit any opportunities that come up. Even minor mistakes could be very costly and it may be harder for players to recover from set-backs in this type of match. In the lower tiers where people are either less skilled or more casual in their play, mistakes would be less costly and teams may not be as capable of keeping the initiative after gaining an advantage. This might make them less prone to the dramatic shifts in rank that top level players experience because the stakes are lower and its easier to bounce back from mistakes because both sides will be screwing up in ways that S+ players wouldn't. Basically, in S+, minor mistakes are much more costly than they are in C or B. Since little things can have a much bigger impact at that level, it's much easier for people to lose a match because of something minor. This could also give them the impression that they got cheated because they didn't feel like they played bad (and they may be right), but one little thing screwed them over.

 

[Award]

It can also mean you dropped to a point where your tilt no longer caused you to lose. Again, in an Elo system, runaway winning streaks and losing streaks can have a disproportionate impact on your player value and place you in lobbies that are way above or below your actual level of performance. Also, 50/50 matchups mean you have as much chance of winning or losing, so luck may have simply favored you. Without looking at the actual numbers, it's impossible to tell what turned things around for you guys.

Maybe, but results are results. "Tilt" would mean I was playing badly as a result of the losing streak. If my raw performance was the best or second best in each room during the streak, (I know elo wouldn't know that, but I would.) it's hard to say I was tilting or that I was placed in a rank above my actual skill.

In TW's invisible ranks I have no problem based on my own performance I have no problem believing it's placed me in a position well above my skill, but not yet in ranked. That's something different.

And we already established a "50/50" matchup based on elo's knowledge is not necessarily close to a 50/50 matchup in reality.

How exactly do winning streaks and losing streaks have such a disproportionate impact. Are you saying player value is based only on w/l? And in a system that's so bad, how do you avoid winning/losing streaks if you're going to be either overvalued or undervalued at all times? If the above is true, then would not the way to "beat" the elo system as @97Stephen asked be to intentionally throw matches in a controlled manner? Sit on spawn, ink 3 points, troll the poor fools on your team to lose a few here and there to keep the winning streak in control? By tricking the system by intentionally losing, would no you actually improve your player value for matchmaking by preventing it from being too improved by winning?

This is called "rating inflation." To counter this, the people in control of ratings simply inject more points into the Elo system to prevent a tier from getting oversaturated or disproportionally large. I suspect this is what they did when they raised the rank cap to S+ and "improved matchmaking." Nintendo wouldn't need to implement slanted matchmaking to counter this. Simply injecting points into the system to keep the tiers balanced would do the same thing without Nintendo setting up a matchmaker that regularly puts people in bad matches on purpose. That doesn't mean you won't get bad matchups from time to time, but I'd be very surprised if Nintendo designed things for this to be the norm.

Well, I did say that it could be either broken or rigged, but if it's rigged, it's to balance out the lobbies. Injecting points, where would those points be injected? Across the board to everyone? Only to the top, to the bottom? Adding new rank tiers hurts more than helps since it creates more lobbies to have to fill. if the point of rigging it would be to distribute players to all lobbies, adding more lobbies isn't going to be a good idea. Though I personally wish they would add more ranks as it might help distribute the skill levels a little better.

It's also possible that the lowest valued players just get run through a *1.5 multiplier that was really meant for awarding rank points or something and it's just THAT broken.

You need to get out of the mad houses. Mad houses are B+ and A- or A+ and S lobbies. Those are where players are getting ranked up/down and stakes are very high. I have always found them to be nerve wrecking. Sweet spots are B and A lobbies. Somehow players are less intense. I have always found A- harder than A and when I get to A+, all hell breaks loose again.

While I don't doubt that, everyone's pretty much guaranteed to get to at least C+ due to how the points work, so out of 9 brackets, 5 are mad houses. That's not a good ratio at all

B didn't seem like a sweet spot, though. The swings were volatile from what I saw. I don't know about seeing great players there, but seeing horrible ones, definitely. ANd that makes it a madhouse too. So, A or bust? :)

 

[jsilva]

I'll stop posting because we seem to have reached a peak :) But I did want to clarify.

You aren't going to experience tilt on a winning streak. Tilt is exclusive to losing streaks due to how our minds perceive losing. More info here and here, if you are still uncertain as to what tilt and amygdala hijack are. As I've explained before, a winning streak propels you higher in the ranking than your actual skill should place you. A subsequent losing streak is the system "rebalancing," i.e. pushing you to a position that's closer to where you actually need to be.

That was my point. Perhaps I wasn't clear? My example was simply that I had a long losing streak at a rank much lower than I 'should' be followed by a long winning streak. This reduces the probability that tilt was a deciding factor and also that my own skill was a deciding factor. Rather, my example was to support the notion that the matching system was the primary factor in both the losing and winning streaks.

First, unless a player has ESP or can look at the objective game data of the players they faced, there's no way a player can determine whether they were at an identical disadvantage in any two matches. It may feel that way, and one may believe that to be the case, but what a person thinks and what is objectively going on are two very different things. This is why I take any anecdotal experience with a grain of salt: people are biased and operate with limited information. Unless you can prove that you had the same disadvantage in all three matches without simply saying it happened that way, I have to base this on a few things. First, rank =/= skill. They may be higher or lower rank than you, but they may also be experiencing a losing streak or winning streak that placed them above or below their actual ability. So, higher or lower ranked teammates is not a guarantee of anything with regards to how players actually perform.

Again, perhaps I wasn't clear...

My point was that the the loss of 7 points (at S rank) reflected the system believed there was an imbalance, yet it matched pretty much the exact same rank imbalance from different player pools three games in a row and believed there was an imbalance in all three games. Further, I observed that in all three games my teams were dominated—yes I know that happens and by itself it doesn't mean anything—and I was asking what the likeliness is that three games in a row from three different player pools where the system supposedly believes one team has a strong advantage but yet that advantaged team is dominated. And again, that by itself doesn't mean anything, but when taken in context of a bunch of other things that make it nearly impossible to win (or lose, in other cases), your explanations don't satisfy the necessary details to know what is going on because probability would go against that.

Second, the game calculates a 50/50 win ratio. There's nothing impossible about losing three games in a row with 50/50 odds, especially if a win streak put you higher in the ranks than you actually need to be. There's nothing impossible about losing three times in a row with 50/50 odds period. If your son's account was C rank or B rank, I'd give this more weight. It sounds like his account is also on the upper level of ranks (A-S). It's entirely possible for someone S ranked to get put in an A rank lobby after a losing streak.

I only lose 7 points as an S when there's a rank imbalance, presumably because the system doesn't see it as 50/50...

And also, as I had said, my losing streak on my son's account took me from lower A- down to B+ 40-something. It'd be a hard sell for you to say I easily got two accounts up to S but I really belong in a B+ or even A- lobby!

Same thing with Splatoon: there's no gain for engineering a biased system. It's actually against their interests to create a game that screws people because people won't spend money on it. Unless you are suggesting that you guys are on Nintendo's hit list for some reason and they are willing to throw money away on a game just so they can screw you over with biased matcmaking

I can think of several reasons why Nintendo would do this which aren't nefarious and it's easily possible even without the entire Splatoon community secretly rallying against someone, and obviously it's not resulting in a lost player base and there are reasons it wouldn't.

But, whatever the case, I'm quite content with the other notion that the matchmaking inadvertently results in severe bias that is nearly inescapable in losing streaks (unless you're immensely better than the rank you're in) and difficult to lose in winning streaks.

 

[Ξ◆Zᴇпsʜi◆Ξ]

LITERALLY ME RIGHT NOW AFTER PLAYING RANKED

Re: to "Git Gud"

 

[NBSink]

You need to get out of the mad houses. Mad houses are B+ and A- or A+ and S lobbies. Those are where players are getting ranked up/down and stakes are very high. I have always found them to be nerve wrecking. Sweet spots are B and A lobbies. Somehow players are less intense. I have always found A- harder than A and when I get to A+, all hell breaks loose again.

I have easier times winning in A+ then in A...

However: I wanted to get my experience into that: I almost never have a normal match... I might be rushing up from (A) A+ to S60 and after hitting S60 I start falling back to A+ 30... Its an up/down the hole time and I really don't know how thats possible. Also don't ask me why that line at S60 (My record is S61). Even if I learned to catch myself in A+ its kinda frustrating when I have that losing streak. And I feel like not being important while the winning streak (I already won with a 1/9 KD).

In Splatoon2 its somehow better and I lost my first rank from S+1 to S+0.