If players want a challenge, then they won’t intentionally create imbalanced teams in the first place. I do think there is an extent in advantage that can be given to prevent an all out spawn camp, but that’s about as far as I would go. The problem with giving too much compensation to an outclassed side is that it completely intrudes on the concept of skill (ex. CoD lowering the skill ceiling to promote fun). Not to mention that there are plenty of reasons why a loss is well deserved. Losing is not always fun nor are all wins challenging, but that in no way justifies auto-boosting incompetent players as a means of promoting “fun”. Losing is the long journey to self-improvement and eventually everyone will win more often than not and have close games. I would never want anything like that implemented in the pub for the same reason I would never want to see it in the competitive environment.
Community Question: Measuring Player Skill
Forfeit + rebalance vote option for a locked out team? I felt that was lacking in etqw.
Thats an interesting idea.
Forfeit on current map + rebalance on next.
The only negative; players deliberately F2ing the forfeit, to avoid the rebalance.
Still an improvement on the current vote system though.
etqw is lacking the ultimate anti-stackers machine
THE STACKOMETER
auto-rebalance when it gets overload (and people not allowed to change team for 5 min after it happens).
Or option C: Neither, we go back to the actual topic and keep discussing how skill should be defined and measured. Everyone is beating around the bush right now with lots of great points that can be saved for future topics.
The whole thing stalled and the only suggested alternatives I spotted were tracking stats on everything (which isn’t an actual skill measurement) or simply not measuring anything at all (idem). I consider both cop outs.
Or doing it completely wrong with blind ignorance which is worse than a cop out. Actually no that’s not fair, it’s more of the ‘well that’ll do’ approach, knowing it’s not accurate but just going with it anyway.
How about the lesser of two evils then? 
Seems everyone is fine acknowledging flaws and yet there is a clear resistance to trying to fix them or even try something different. I just get a little fed up with the usual “play on an admined server”, “quit and join another server”, “that’s pub games” stuff, they’re avoidance techniques and not ways of addressing a problem.
And the 15 other players? I get what you’re saying but it seems to imply this moral and competitive responsibility that I just don’t see pub gamers exercising in enough concentration to achieve what you’re saying should happen. As I’ve said, PUGs or competitive/skrim matches are not the question here, for those games you are as much facing off the composition of two teams as you are the skills of those teams. But a pub game, which is a big part of any MP game has little assurance of players being decent and sporting, hell you’re lucky if they even acknowledge the 15 other players are as entitled to a good time as they are.
As for lowering skill, how does that occur? You’re employing handicaps on the team that is performing well to increase their challenge. If you’re spawn camping it kind of says to me that you’re vastly over powering the other team and are not being challenged. Where does it hurt you to instead to then face a stronger enemy? And yes, you’re giving the losing team a boost but it’s hardly like they were learning anything by being killed in 5 seconds. Instead maybe that armour boost would be enough for them to break out, give them enough breathing room to coordinate a push, something they could repeat the next time but perhaps without the breathing space.
50% of the server always loses, this isn’t about making everyone a winner. It’s about removing the issues involved with having 16 random players divided into two teams (sometimes with intentional bias) which are rarely balanced. Not sure about you but I play for fun, winning is fun, losing is fun too if you’re having a good time trying. You know what isn’t fun? Contending with team balancing issues to the point that you spend more time managing a game than you do bloody playing one. That all out sucks and is something I’d love to see gone.
[QUOTE=tokamak;404104]Or option C: Neither, we go back to the actual topic and keep discussing how skill should be defined and measured. Everyone is beating around the bush right now with lots of great points that can be saved for future topics.
The whole thing stalled and the only suggested alternatives I spotted were tracking stats on everything (which isn’t an actual skill measurement) or simply not measuring anything at all (idem). I consider both cop outs.[/QUOTE]
It progressed, not stalled. There is just simply a strong case not to revolve an FPS game around an RPG model. Not to continue to corrupt a simple score into an all consuming beast that has more weak spots than a Sony E3 presentation. Scores, skill points, xp are there for a simple reason, to give people an impression of progress and a yardstick to measure their performance. If you give people something else to drive for, make it even more satisfying, then you no longer need to be fudging the numbers.
What you’re doing now is discussing things that are only marginally related to skill measurement. All subjects worth discussing but just as well topics that can easily be encompassed into new community questions later on. Right now we’re asked about our opinions about skill measurement so that’s the opportunity we ought to take.
I’m not saying it should specifically revolve around my suggestion. Hell, that was why I stopped pushing it so hard in the first place, to leave room for other ideas. However, I’m all too happy to drag it all the way back up if you guys can’t think of something else. I can take all the vitriol and negativity in the world about my ideas but I won’t stand for people polluting a discussion and merely pretending they’re actually striking at the core of the issue, because right now you’re anything but.
[QUOTE=tokamak;404140]What you’re doing now is discussing things that are only marginally related to skill measurement. All subjects worth discussing but just as well topics that can easily be encompassed into new community questions later on. Right now we’re asked about our opinions about skill measurement so that’s the opportunity we ought to take.
I’m not saying it should specifically revolve around my suggestion. Hell, that was why I stopped pushing it so hard in the first place, to leave room for other ideas. However, I’m all too happy to drag it all the way back up if you guys can’t think of something else. I can take all the vitriol and negativity in the world about my ideas but I won’t stand for people polluting a discussion and merely pretending they’re actually striking at the core of the issue, because right now you’re anything but.[/QUOTE]
Weren’t you pissing and moaning earlier in the thread about throwing around empty ideas? Now that people are discussing them you’re saying it’s going way off the original subject.
Also it’s a little laughable you feel the need to moderate the thread when Badman only yesterday posted about how great it was. Guess you know better than the people soliciting the feedback.
BTW - On that point, I’m really not interested in arguing with you further on the semantics of the thread topic and trust me I don’t want to hear about your magical fantasy XP system again either. But congrats on the derail attempt.
Badman said that the thread itself had been useful. Anyhow, I’m free to hold different standards to this than he does. I’m not a moderator, I say this out of pure fascination with the subject. It may sound OCD but this particular issue is something I’m really passionate about and this is the only place where a discussion with people who care as much about this particular genre of gaming is possible.
It’s not a derail attempt, it’s a rerail attempt. What you’re now discussing are incentives and balancing. How the hell can you even get to the point of talking about raising or lowering the skill ceiling while the question was about the measurement of it?
I stopped pushing my ‘magical fantasy xp system’ a while ago because I wanted to make room for other means of measuring skill to be discussed. Instead everyone started discussing something else entirely. Definitely worthwhile subjects and definitely off-topic. Save it for another day.
So yeah I’m disappointed that so far we have failed to come up with anything else. I think my idea is brilliant and sadly that leaves me too clouded to come up with viable alternatives. I simply can’t see anything that is as potent as what I constructed. I hoped for others to find something better, or at least, equal. That way a discussion can move on, we’re simply not done here.
Your idea was discussed, the topic has progressed.
It’s not a derail attempt, it’s a rerail attempt. What you’re now discussing are incentives and balancing. How the hell can you even get to the point of talking about raising or lowering the skill ceiling while the question was about the measurement of it?
Are scores/xp incentives? Don’t XP unlocks and levelling impact balance? You seem to think that measurement of skill is a requirement, a given, and we must only discuss it’s implementation. This isn’t true, the option you don’t want to acknowledge is that you don’t measure individual skill (or at least to a point where it drives other gameplay).
And if you remove individual skill and so score/xp the next question becomes, “how do you drive other gameplay mechanics?”
You can’t just barge into the thread because you’re feeling left out and demand everyone only take at a level you’re interested on. And if you plan to do so why don’t you come up with an alternative to your own system that isn’t reliant upon the flaws people have pointed out, or just make up an entirely new system? Seems that would add more to the topic than “Shut up and look at me”.
I stopped pushing my ‘magical fantasy xp system’ a while ago because I wanted to make room for other means of measuring skill to be discussed. Instead everyone started discussing something else entirely. Definitely worthwhile subjects and definitely off-topic.
“make room”? Oh you are modest.
Again. You seem to only want to take from the discussion that which feeds on your already decided opinion. You’re clearly not a stupid person but I’m stunned by how often you allow your confidence to form your opinion rather than your intellect to adapt it.
I know what your saying here, don’t get me wrong, but I am just highly skeptical about the extent at which some might be willing to push it to in order to gain results. A lot of these ideas are based on achieving “perfect world” solutions that I think are just too big to properly deal with. There are so many factors that contribute to one-sided games that I think would be ignored if there was auto-boosting in play. When a team does get rolled over they realize the importance of communication, teamwork, and individual play; which forces people to actually become better rather than just satisfying the moment. There’s always going to be individual skill difference present, but it was very common to see games sway in every direction regardless of what appeared to be happening. I find it much more fun when my spawn camped team suddenly stops to regroup after acknowledging our mistakes, and then attempts to coordinate something as a team, which does happen even in the pub. Better to climb the stairs rather than install the escalator, but that’s just my view on the subject.
Yeah, I accept there could be some pretty catastrophic situations that totally break the system, one thing I’d be concerned about is a clearly better team consistently losing to a poorer team. The balance would really have to deal with steps of imbalance large enough that a losing team would still need to get its **** together to win but wouldn’t lose in some steam rolling situation.
That said, we do need to accept that apathy towards the current system and its repercussions shouldn’t be a reason why we don’t explore options. However, if it did work based on some simplistic rules that were easy to manage by an AI then it could add some interesting dynamics to the genre which would ultimately mean lots of happier gamers because games would be more challenging for everyone.
And yes, people need to learn on so many levels. I think this is something that SD has struggled with in their games, and I’m not knocking their efforts here as it’s not an easy thing to do. Yet I think they need to adopt a different way to get people to pick up core mechanics to build on. Right now that is to bride them with XP, something that either locks people into a mouse and cheese cycle or they just all out ignore it.
How do you think you can effectively teach other players to say, coordinate better and break out of a spawn camp without needing to code specifics that would become outdated.
Im curious sockdog - have you thought about maybe sticking to CO-OP or even SP games?
I would assume they would offer a better emotional experience, than SD’s MP.
[QUOTE=SockDog;404150]
How do you think you can effectively teach other players to say, coordinate better and break out of a spawn camp without needing to code specifics that would become outdated.[/QUOTE]
I think that well designed isolated mini-games oriented around helping players master the learning curve would be a good means of getting closer to the goal. Brink had a few of these motivated by a global leaderboard, but the mini-games themselves could have been much more in-depth and meaningful (though the simplified mechanics really limited its potential there). In almost all games however, publicizing the competitive community has always benefited the growth of the player base in terms of understanding and improvement. When new players can easily access both basic and in-depth tutorials on game play/mechanics the hurdles tend to be jumped much quicker. I might use LoL as an example- recommended items are shown in game, but user-made guides give insight into the conceptual understanding of it all. A game with a complex learning curve tends to be the most enjoyable for me as it is the learning process that I find fun more so than instant satisfaction. Getting thrown right into the fire can seem discouraging at times, but some of the best games I’ve played have the “survival of the fittest” mentality.
How about the lesser of two evils then?
Seems everyone is fine acknowledging flaws and yet there is a clear resistance to trying to fix them or even try something different.
There is clear resistance, because the solutions impede realistic competitive play.
Its based on creating an illusion that a match is closer than it really is.
Look no further than Brink to see what I mean.
You keep misconstrueing my point. Right now people are NOT discussing skill measurement. The discussion hasn’t ‘progressed’ or ascended to a ‘whole new level’. It simply ceased to revolve around skill measurement. The current subjects (balancing teams and skill ceilings) deserve a new thread. I can assume good faith and see it as a genuinely unintended digression but somewhere it feels like people diverted from the main topic simply because they no longer like dealing with the problem at hand.
So far the options suggested were:
- Track all statistics in minute detail and let players themselves decide whichever they find more important (though that still leaves the scoreboard at the end of a match unadressed)
- Track nothing, winning is all that matters
- (rating adjusted) Xp/min
- A formula containing a couple of statistics (like accuracy, k/d, battlesense).
- W/L ratio
- ELO rating
Those are the ones that have been seriously suggested. At least there seems to be some consensus that a singular variable like kills, k/d or battlesense won’t cut it. Still, from there on only a few people took a stance for one of the discussed options.
[QUOTE=DarkangelUK;402905]I’m going to be completely honest here, believe me if you want to or not, but I knew that comment was going to be the next post you make. Suggest an already broken feature, then blame the devs when it doesn’t work. Here’s a clue, basing it on XP is broken and won’t work. Give me a detailed XP distribution method for your suggestion and i’ll give you easy ways to break it and cause the system to fall flat on it’s face… the easy part is that it doesn’t take much imagination to break and unimaginative and already inherently broken suggestion… lucky for me, eh.
You also don’t seem to know what adds value to a team, by your definition its who ever has the most XP. Let me refer you to every game in existence that rewards menial repetitive tasks with XP and causes farmers to exploit that process to reach the heights of the XP table.[/QUOTE]
its not hard to find those things that worth xp, and that any noob can do.
but its hard to perform them (with sucess) and still be able to lose.
@Sockdog Been reading this stuff on and off, might have missed something crucial, apologies if so. /disclaimer
The thing is this: I’m here to play other people, good and bad. If I ever felt like my primary opponent was a balancing system and not the opposing players, I’d just quit and do something else. I can see that an L4D director thing works in the context of a basically PvE co-op thing, but I can’t think of a way to have a gameplay-level balancing system in a multiplayer game be both effective and unintrusive enough to not make me want to leave.
I can’t see anything working except using players to do the balancing by evening out the teams. And if you want to encourage that, I keep coming back to ELO rating. Make wins the primary stat, and weight each win by ELO.
I guess maybe some sort of gameplay-altering balancing system might work in a training match environment? Like an arcade mode thing. I’m quite fond of the idea of putting in a powerup-tastic pink hats arcade mode for people just starting out or for players to have fun with.
it is also very hard to kill many people and still lose.
maybe we could all forget about my last post.
i was stating that idea, because there are some strange things about xp whoring.
if you played obliterator in ofensive maps (etqw) you get to the point where you have to make a decision: will you shoot 2 rockets in a turret and leave it damaged, going next for the next turret, and so on. or, second choice, destroy any turret to ground before moving to the next one ?
i would expect that shoting the 4 rockets would be better for whoring xp whitout winning, while damaging would be better for winning, but less xp.
but it was the other way around.
i have tried both choices and got unexpected results. if i rase turrets to ground i would win more times than if i leave them only damaged. this was very noticed in volcano, but also in other maps like ark or quarry.
probably because it reduces the defending ability of the engineers. less xp repairing = less upgrades.
ok, now is the moment where someone step in and say “hey edxot, you think anyone cares about your turret destruction rate, as a measure for skill ?”.
so, its the end of talk …
but for me the talk is not over before i say
12 NEW MAPS FOR ETQW, WHEEEEEN ?
i cant believe it is easier to create a new game, then 12 maps for an old one.
the game is old but the best so far. if new game, requiring more sofisticated machine (hardware), it will have less players.