I wasn't trying to start a debate, thats the last thing i want to do, but that is what i noticed, going through c to s twice and generally seeing skill gaps within certain ranks.
Noticeably, had an easier time getting out of A vs getting out of B.
what do you think of the ranking system
- Thread starter Aquila Ezio
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Noticeably, had an easier time getting out of A vs getting out of B.
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Squid Savior From the Future
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That's precisely what I'm saying. That's my point. It needs a reset because it's a mess, and because resets are one method most games with ladders use to control the mess, typically a few times a year. It also needs massive fixes to how it applies/removes points to prevent the same mess from unfolding, but at a minimum a reset is an absolute minimum that should be done.
The terrible players get to S by getting carried and by scumming. Can't fix the scumming but resetting pushes back their carry at least temporarily. It's only a temporary fix if they don't fix the scoring though. The same problems will recur.
"B" was sort of randomly chosen out of a hat based on things I've seen and a prior conversation with Holidaze, but the point is, good players are often forced several ranks below where they should be based on losing streaks caused by poor players that should never have been in those ranks to being with (and possibly some less than honest matchmaking by the game designed to distribute the rank pools, or so I theorize.) Those good players will then end up demoting people in their new (low) rank to a rank below where they should be due to having to play a vastly superior opponent. Those good players (now in both ends, the B's force to the C's, the S's forced to B's) will then carry bad players with them up the ranks again. The result is further contamination of the player pool and the cycle repeats. Now the new C's carried to the B's by the B that was forced to C will now be carried to the A's by the S's that were forced to the B's....and then it gets worse again. A few here, a few there, now you have 300 players that shouldn't be in their rank and any 3 could end up on your team.
The goal we all want is where a rank represents an actual skill bracket where games played within that rank will be good, competitive, intense games among similarly skilled players where the side that plays best can win. That's what a rank should be. Because of the polluted pools, right now we have ranks that mean little with lopsided matches with complete shutouts that are impossible to win even if you do carry the team (and outperform the entire field) because your teammates are just so far below your opponent in ability their only value is as a decoy and meat shield. But to do that they actually need to be somewhere near the objective. Ranked won't be all to fun in any rank as long as the ranked battles are so unbalanced, so often.
Nobody has fun having to 1v4 to win, and no team has fun having to fight off "that one player" clearly several ranks overskilled for them and keeps them on the spawn non-stop, even if they can win by default.
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Nagastrike
Inkling
Well like I said, sometimes this situations is unavoidable, however leaving that lobby significantly increases your chances of not doing the same thing. From my personal exerience, I have found leaving lobby very useful. (you don't requeue right away, you have to wait a couple minutes)
Njok
Bouncer
I know what you meant, and I'm saying I think you're wrong. Have you considered that a player that is in B, but feels that he plays at S level, is overestimating himself?
And you're right, 1v4 is no fun. And you shouldn't be trying to play 1v4 (you can up until A-ish btw, but that's besides the point). You should be watching what your team and your opponent is doing, and adjust your play according to that. I've seen a lot of arguments like: "I play support and matchmaking f*cks me over because I get only other support players on my team", for example. Well in that scenario that player could have adjusted his play to carry his team (which does NOT equal 1v4), or he can keep doing the same thing and blame his team. My point: take the first option and stop blaming the matchmaking.
Again, this is by no means directed to anyone in particular. It's just a trend I've seen a lot lately in several threads and it's wrong.
This is also why points shouldn't be based on solo performance in a team. It's a team game. The point in carrying your team is finding ways to win with the team you are given. It's not 1v4-ING.
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Squid Savior From the Future
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That has not been my experience. When I'm getting the poor pairings, I can leave the lobby 5, 6 times and still get similarly bad pairings. Yet on a different day, or after the next map rotation, my pairings might changes significantly. There's something about the seeding process, possibly per map rotation, or just the online population at a given time of day that seems to seed into one type of matchmaking no matter the lobby.
I don't have a problem with the overall concept you state. Your premise is sound in a vacuum, but it ignores the genuine issues with matchmaking that are leading to specific problems with the player pools in each rank. In a few threads we've been analyzing and discussing the potential inner workings of the matchmaking system and hit on a few probable realities on it and the specific problems it would cause, in particular based on certain playstyles and metrics. It is very possible given those likely issues, that you have playstyles that are lower probability of getting the specific types of mismatched teams that some others are likely to get. It's all based on theory, of course, we don't exactly have the Splatoon engine to read through. But it's very possible.
Your answer to a player dominating the field having to 1v4 is to analyze the field and try to carry the team if needed. If I were to take your concept literally and apply it to my games, I would, instead, stop trying to carry the team, play purely defensive and supportive, and watch as the tower does not ever move to the opponent's goal. That's two types of mismatches. One is a team of support players and no one is willing to go offensive. That's a different situation. This is a situation with a team of 2-3 "support" players one player willing to go aggro, who does very well at it, and the remaining team either chooses to not assist, or defend, or is simply too unskilled to do so. So if the aggro player gets splatted at all (try that on TC!) things fall apart that moment.
It's not a question of playstyles, support vs offense. And no player should ever "carry" the team if it is indeed a team game. Carrying the team is not "finding ways to win with the team you are given" It's winning in SPITE of the team you are given. A.K.A. 1v4. Maybe 2v4 if you get lucky. It's a question of having one team of generally competent players that play on a similar skill level as defined by the rank, against another team of 1 player that plays above the opponents level, and 3 that play below. You can't help team mates that can't hit targets well, get splatted in most 1v1 encounters, are unwilling to advance the objective AND are unwilling or unable to defend the objective against an opponent that plays at a higher skill level than they do. That kind of mismatch would not be possible if the ranking/matchmaking system were not flawed.
I think what your proposing isn't wrong, but would be accurate in a properly working ladder without significant problems associated with it. If this were COD, Halo, Battlefield, where the ladders are tried & true and don't have glaring problems, your advice would be very sound. I'm not trying to say that your way of thinking about it doesn't have merit. But ignoring real problems in a system by faulting the participants for not making lemonade of the lemons doesn't change the fact that the problems in the system are real and damage the experience.
Nobody puts an all-star MLB pitcher on a Little League team, pits them against even an AA minor league team and says "oh, come on, learn how to win with the team you have!" The problem would be the system that let the Little Leaguers in a match against the AA's to begin with.
You are correct that it's a team game, and largely correct that the scoring should reflect that. But that makes it all the more critical that matchmaking and bracket creation work as intended. If it does not, it breaks down fast. One player carrying the remainder of a team that less skilled than the opponents in a game that requires 4v4 teamwork is as clear a definition of 1v4 as I can imagine. In a well matched game, everything you say is true. In a skill bracket that is actually groomed into a skill bracket, everything you see is true. If you are such an exceptional player that you can personally make up for any problem team composition against any well composed opponent, that's amazing! But that would make you not just top bracket, but the top of the top bracket, and I'm not sure your experiences would translate well to most other brackets, including the rest of your own.
Absolutely, in fact in my case, In fact I've personally stated from the beginning that I believe my real rank is probably around A-, based largely on my experience with players at A-, A, A+, S, and S+ ranks in TW and some in ranked. Given my experiences recently, it's possible I'm even an A. I don't know if I'd go as far to say I'd make A+. Maybe, but I'd consider it icing on the cake. I'm no S, and that I'd put in writing!
However, using my most frustrating B rank match (or two of them) as the example, I was clearly the best performing player in the lobby. I was clearly very overskilled for the competition given the k/d and tower coverage I scored over them alone (and defended the tower alone.) My team however was clearly very underskilled against them, as indicated by their k/d and lack of tower defense (and coverage.)
When round after round, lobby after lobby, the same player is the best performer (or occasionally the second best) but loses more than wins due to team mates with negative, often deeply negative k/d's (and zero to little time on the tower) there aren't many ways to look at that situation. I couldn't protect them from the clearly dangerous enemy much more than I did. How else could I help them beyond finding a way to eject the entire enemy team from the lobby while keeping us connected. I suspect some of them still would have had high bad k/d ratios since that Mahi water is such a dangerous opponent...
Or the round (same day different lobby), where the whole team would get repeatedly spawncamped in TC at Depot. I'd get splatted off the tower, respawn, clear the enemy out of our base. Repaint it myself with a Luna blaster, before shooting the enemy off the tower as it came by our base near the goal, hop back on the tower, and by the time I'd get shot off and respwan, I'd find the enemy camping in our base again, having fully painted it. It's not their fault they're not great players. But it's the system's fault that they're playing against an opponent that clearly outskills them by a margin more than should be normal in the same rank. The fact that I know I'm NOT an S player is kind of the point. I shouldn't be able to do as well against the enemy, solo, as I am doing, which means the enemy is not exceptional. Which means my team is exceptional in the wrong direction.
Yet on another day, I joined ranked, got a team, for the first time since the C's where everyone had a positive k/d, I did not have the highest kill count (but did have the lowest death count) and lo and behold we won every game but one, and I ranked up in an hour.
The problem is the system. Whether you want to view it as me playing with poor team mates that shouldn't be in my rank, or if you want to view it as me being in a rank above where I should be is fine by me. Regardless, the wrong players in the wrong ranks is a problem with the system. I just want to play competitive lobbies where a rank means games include players of similar ability rather than matches as random as pre-2.4 TW.
DeeSqweeDee
Inkling
I get it more now...more like a status update on your performance but without the backlash of other poorer performance of anonymous players.
To improve matchmaking it should be like SFVI performance personal chart. But since the algorythms for win and defeat, K/D, if not any point gathering and the way Rank works, it is left irrelevant to any other standard games. It needed a simpler system for obvious reason because no other game works like that.
And as the WiiU as a system is very weak for data gathering. His speed upload is slow for 2015 standards. (I won't even talk about the other part about the PVP netcoding, I heard it's poorly done.)
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Squid Savior From the Future
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The power of the Wii U is very underrated. It's not really a low powered system. That was a myth propagated by a few US publishers, namely EA, both as an excuse for not investing much in a platform they didn't see a business reason to support, an attempt damage a competitor (people tend to forget that Nintendo's power as a publisher is very high, and other major publishers are directly helping a major, often superior competitor when they put games on Nintendo hardware, and that's a source of much bad blood in the industry and the whole "Nintendo gets no 3rd party games" situation.) The press lapped up and regurgitated that information because that's what uniformed press seeking controversey (and ad money that won't come from Nintendo) do.
The "Real" performance problem with the Wii U isn't performance but architecture. It's PPC and the industry was moving fully to X86. That DOES make ports of their games difficult and bound to performance problems, but not because the Wii U can't handle it but because the design of their software isn't wholly compatible with WiiU's architecture. This combined with a weak *CPU* because it was moving to a GPU assisted architecture. That's not new, PC developers have been processing audio on the GPU for 15 years because the generic PC CPU is so ill suited for those tasks.
PS4 is "more powerful" absolutely but not by nearly as large a margin as myth makes it seem. Some of that spare GPU power is taken up by software shaders that Nintendo likes to build into hardware so they're "free" from a performance standpoint. Neither is as powerful as even a midrange PC. Both are far more powerful than even a flagship smartphone or tablet in terms of OVERALL computational ability. Phones wouldn't even get warm churning the kind of data that's needed here.