What can Splatoon do to break Splatoon's problem with Splatfest in America?

[MrL1193]

Let's assume that it takes 100 points to reach max level. You get 1 point for losing, 10 for winning. And let's assume that there are bad players, and good players, evenly split on each team. Good players always win against bad players, and win half the time against good players. Bad players always lose to good players, and will win half the time against other bad players. If we take this to be true, it means that good players will win 75% of their matches, and bad players 25%. That means that good players will play, on average, about 13 matches before stopping, and bad players 31 matches.

Now let's take mirror matches into account. Let's assume that the more popular team will face a mirror match 25% of the time, and the less popular team only 10%. With these numbers, you can see that out of those 13 and 31 matches, on the more popular team, 4/13 matches will be mirrors for the good, and 8/31 for the bad. In turn, on the less popular team, you have 2/13, and 4/31.

Now you can see the issue. On the less popular team, good players will be playing about 11 matches against the enemy team, and bad players 27. But on the more popular team, you have 9 matches for the good players, and 23 for the bad. Even though the more popular team will still have less bad players playing against the other team due to mirrors, 71.875% of their matches versus the less popular team will be played by bad players, compared to the 71.053% of the less popular team. This difference is what explains the discrepancy due to team popularity. And keep in mind that these mirror match percentages of 10/25 are just an estimate.

Your model reaches an incorrect conclusion because there's an error in it, and it's really quite a silly error to make. Brace yourself for a math lesson, because here it comes.

Your fatal error was... Rounding.

Yes, really. Rounding.

You know all those percentages you pulled out at the end? You were basing them on rounded numbers. That's the only reason they came out different for each team. But see, the thing is, you weren't supposed to use rounded numbers for your calculations. Yeah, I know that no single player is actually going to play 3.25 mirror matches (mid-match DC's don't count), but that number isn't supposed to represent what any one player actually did. It's an average of the whole matches played by millions of players. That means that some played 3 or fewer mirror matches, while others played 4 or more mirror matches, and it averaged out to 3.25 per player.

So now, let's take another look at your model, this time with the correct numbers in place (marked in red).

Let's assume that it takes 100 points to reach max level. You get 1 point for losing, 10 for winning. And let's assume that there are bad players, and good players, evenly split on each team. Good players always win against bad players, and win half the time against good players. Bad players always lose to good players, and will win half the time against other bad players. If we take this to be true, it means that good players will win 75% of their matches, and bad players 25%. That means that good players will play, on average, about 13 matches before stopping, and bad players 31 matches.

Now let's take mirror matches into account. Let's assume that the more popular team will face a mirror match 25% of the time, and the less popular team only 10%. With these numbers, you can see that out of those 13 and 31 matches, on the more popular team, 3.25/13 matches will be mirrors for the good, and 7.75/31 for the bad. In turn, on the less popular team, you have 1.3/13, and 3.1/31.

Now you can see the issue. On the less popular team, good players will be playing about 11.7 matches against the enemy team, and bad players 27.9. But on the more popular team, you have 9.75 matches for the good players, and 23.25 for the bad. Even though the more popular team will still have less bad players playing against the other team due to mirrors, 70.4545% (23.25/33) of their matches versus the less popular team will be played by bad players, compared to the 70.4545% (27.9/39.6) of the less popular team.

Well, would you look at that. The percentages of matches played by bad players are identical for each team after all. (70.4545%) Who would have guessed?



You can try to make all the flawed mathematical models you want, but you can't change the facts. If the proportion of skilled players is the same for each team, then neither team has an inherent advantage, regardless of mirror matches, skilled players leaving early, or anything else. If one team wins more than the other, it's because they had a greater proportion of skilled players, better internet connections, or some other factor that created an inequality; the matchmaking has nothing to do with it (aside from perhaps a slight psychological effect created by differing wait times, but mirror matches actually help alleviate that, rather than making it worse).

 

[Award]

@MrL1193 , @Vitezen , neat demo with the calculations in general, and on the correction with the unrounded numbers. Though I would consider that both of you are relying heavily on a MATHEMATICAL model as though there is a static state while ignoring the most important SOCIAL model that must go along with it. It's all fine and good to crunch numbers as though we're working with a static distributed player pool, but there needs to be variance for the changes involved in a dynamic social model in which behaviors will be modified as a consequence of any results that occur as the results take shape. Specifically people playing more, leaving sooner, having insufficient time to play more, playing more because they're winning, playing less because they're winning, inverse if they're losing, and of course @MrL1193 made the point itself, one team having more skilled players among other factors, and/or more players playing with intent to acquire snails and leave versus players that just want to play splatfest. In addition to players like me who are in the skilled group, but are going to win less matches after reaching royalty as a result of playing with various weapons I don't regularly play. The average results will be inconsistent from my start to my finish. Once one team starts winning more, even with the figures used above to start with, it's very unlikely that the dynamics of that social model won't change the statistics part-way through.

 

[Vitezen]

Alright, thanks for helping out @MrL1193 . My mistake.

@Award I think having an incentive for better players to continue playing would be nice. It is sort of uninspiring to know that your team's results will be mostly decided by the worst of your players.

However, @talkingbeatles idea of unique rewards will be a problem, as many players will feel punished for missing a Splatfest. In games like Hearthstone and World of Warcraft this attitude can be seen. Hearthstone rewarded players who played a certain small amount every month with a unique cosmetic item that could never be acquired once that month passed. If I took time off playing Hearthstone, instead of being welcomed back, instead I was upset to see there was something I would have liked, that now I can never have, because I chose not to dedicate all my time to playing the game.

A similar system existed in WoW, where playing for long periods of time made your character "unrested," and you would get less experience. Because players got so upset over this, they instead changed it so taking breaks from the game would make your character "rested," which meant you got more experience points than usual. The only thing is, the calculations for these two systems were exactly the same; the only difference was whether it framed it as a penalty for being unrested, or a reward for being rested. People loved the rested system even though mathematically it was identical.

A lot of people play Splatfests just for snails, so giving more snails would be a good reward. However, with that, it may be necessary to divide up the matches by ranked levels. I think one of the reasons Nintendo may have had for stopping rewards past a certain point was that so good players wouldn't stick around and prevent worse players from winning. With rank divisions in Splatfest, this wouldn't be a factor.

 

[Award]

Alright, thanks for helping out @MrL1193 . My mistake.

@Award I think having an incentive for better players to continue playing would be nice. It is sort of uninspiring to know that your team's results will be mostly decided by the worst of your players.

However, @talkingbeatles idea of unique rewards will be a problem, as many players will feel punished for missing a Splatfest. In games like Hearthstone and World of Warcraft this attitude can be seen. Hearthstone rewarded players who played a certain small amount every month with a unique cosmetic item that could never be acquired once that month passed. If I took time off playing Hearthstone, instead of being welcomed back, instead I was upset to see there was something I would have liked, that now I can never have, because I chose not to dedicate all my time to playing the game.

A similar system existed in WoW, where playing for long periods of time made your character "unrested," and you would get less experience. Because players got so upset over this, they instead changed it so taking breaks from the game would make your character "rested," which meant you got more experience points than usual. The only thing is, the calculations for these two systems were exactly the same; the only difference was whether it framed it as a penalty for being unrested, or a reward for being rested. People loved the rested system even though mathematically it was identical.

A lot of people play Splatfests just for snails, so giving more snails would be a good reward. However, with that, it may be necessary to divide up the matches by ranked levels. I think one of the reasons Nintendo may have had for stopping rewards past a certain point was that so good players wouldn't stick around and prevent worse players from winning. With rank divisions in Splatfest, this wouldn't be a factor.

I agree, unique rewards are neat, but it's a punishing system when real life can get in the way. Hearthstone follows the mobile model where the company is interested in their playership ratings and frequent play metrics etc, as their investors will fund them largely based on those metrics. As such, using gambling like traps to lure you into playing a certain way is monetization for them. Puzzle & Dragons is NOTORIOUS for that kind of manipulation. Only it leads to direct monitization there.

For me, the example is Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I was quite addicted to that game, much like Splatoon. I needed to go get my beetles at night to pay that ****ing tanuki back. But it's a game that you have to play on ITS schedule, not yours, and if you miss things when it wants you to see them and with the regularity it expects, you feel punished. After I'd put it down for a while I opened it up again and found my village in disarray, my character hair messed up, and had to do all sorts of work to set it right. I figured "why bother?" and never touched it again.

Even having Splatfest as the only real way to get snails is a little limiting and punitive for anyone with a conflicting schedule.

You're probably right, they may have wanted to get the strong players out of the way to let the weaker players have their time, BUT, I do think there's already something of a ranking system in place for Splatfest as there is for TW normally. Better players (who play a lot of TW) definitely get mostly matched with better players. Weak players with weak players. Even with red/blue, I was matched on some tough games with strong players where we lost. Someone else that's not a great player was always matched with scrubs. This is consistent with TW matchmaking in general, where the developers have commented as of 2.4 improved TW matchmaking in which you're more likely to be matched with players of similar skill.

I think a lot of ranked players tend not to play too much TW, so they haven't built up their separate, invisible TW ranking and keep it seeded. So any time they jump to TW they get these really easy games. When I took a month off from ranked and played mostly TW, I was matched almost exclusively with A+, S, and S+ players if I checked their rank in my Plaza. Now that I've been playing mostly ranked and less TW recently I notice more low level players (but it rapidly ratchets me back up, including Splatfests.) It's behind the scenes, but it works. Not QUITE as distributed as ranked, but well enough. And honestly ranked isn't always that well distributed either.

I think the problem in recent splatfests is just HOW disproportionate the amount of good players were on one team versus another, there weren't enough good players to match blue/past/naughty/burger against on the other side so we ended up playing a lot of weak players. I definitely saw some good players from team red mid-afteroon last time though.

 

[BlackZero]

A lot of people play Splatfests just for snails, so giving more snails would be a good reward. However, with that, it may be necessary to divide up the matches by ranked levels. I think one of the reasons Nintendo may have had for stopping rewards past a certain point was that so good players wouldn't stick around and prevent worse players from winning. With rank divisions in Splatfest, this wouldn't be a factor.

A really lazy solution is for both sides to receive the same number of snails and for the winning side to get a special gear reward. Something like a shirt that says "I busted my *** to get to '____ King' and all I got was a lousy T-shirt" sounds perfect. That way, people still get a reward and snail farming doesn't enter into the equation.

 

[Award]

A really lazy solution is for both sides to receive the same number of snails and for the winning side to get a special gear reward. Something like a shirt that says "I busted my *** to get to '____ King' and all I got was a lousy T-shirt" sounds perfect. That way, people still get a reward and snail farming doesn't enter into the equation.

I much prefer getting additional snails past royalty. Makes the Spyke junkies happy, makes the teams have more skilled players. Everybody wins.

 

[talkingbeatles]

A really lazy solution is for both sides to receive the same number of snails and for the winning side to get a special gear reward. Something like a shirt that says "I busted my *** to get to '____ King' and all I got was a lousy T-shirt" sounds perfect. That way, people still get a reward and snail farming doesn't enter into the equation.

Hah, yeah. I like this. Or, what if you just got to keep your Splatfest shirt?

Like then, the only shirts existing after a Splatfest would be for the winning team, kinda cool.

And @Vitezen, I'm kinda okay with people being a LITTLE bit upset about missing Splatfest. It provides incentive to play the fest in the first place, and, arguably, helps maintain interest in the game overall.

 

[BlackZero]

Like then, the only shirts existing after a Splatfest would be for the winning team, kinda cool.

It could also have a special skill exclusive to that Splatfest shirt. Nothing too broken, but enough that people want it.

And @Vitezen, I'm kinda okay with people being a LITTLE bit upset about missing Splatfest. It provides incentive to play the fest in the first place, and, arguably, helps maintain interest in the game overall.

I wish they went on longer. I used to work a job that had you come in on weekends and get two weekdays off. That pretty much screws anyone's chance of getting a high rank in Splatfest if they have to work 8 hours Sat/Sun. If they did Fri-Mon or something like that, it might be a little more forgiving to people who have regular weekend commitments. Either that, or have the Splatfest take place twice a month: one weekend, one mid-week.

 

[talkingbeatles]

I wish they went on longer. I used to work a job that had you come in on weekends and get two weekdays off. That pretty much screws anyone's chance of getting a high rank in Splatfest if they have to work 8 hours Sat/Sun. If they did Fri-Mon or something like that, it might be a little more forgiving to people who have regular weekend commitments. Either that, or have the Splatfest take place twice a month: one weekend, one mid-week.

Yep, yep, yep.

Also, even if I'm not necessarily swamped with work... I uh, have a life. And like, sometimes that involves the weekend.
I don't know what they could really do to extend it, and I'm not sure that doing so would be the best thing; all I'm saying is, I feel your pain.