Rankings - let's talk about it

(Press E) #1

It’s no secret that ranked can be horribly unbalanced a lot of the time. But what I found surprising was that in my case, matches are often even more unbalanced than pubs.
Imo the reason behind that is because mainly your ranking is based on whether you win or lose. Meaning a good player stuck with a bad team would drag down the good player’s rank if they lose. Get enough good players who have been dragged down because of this, and sooner or later they’ll all be put on one team, against another team that the system thinks is at their skill level.
The way it is now, a lot of it is based more on luck than actual skill. Yes, ranked is based around teamwork and communication, but while that is true, no amount of communication will help a truly clueless team. Now, I do believe your ranking should still have some basis on wins and losses. I don’t want ranked to lose that atmosphere of everyone trying their hardest to win, but sometimes people simply aren’t skilled enough to win, whether they tried or not, which drags down the rank of people who, based on their actual skill, should be ranked far higher. And as I said, this leads to unbalanced matches when the system groups people who have been dragged down together.

I do believe your ranking should still be based around whether your team wins or loses, but it should also be based around personal performance too.

I’m definitely far from the best player in DB, but even then I’ve had to carry a lot of teams. This is just my opinion as to how ranked could be improved, and I’d love to hear that others think

(boerhae) #2

(Hey this is Laughable!)

It was said at some point that personal performance would be considered in ranking, but if it’s there, it’s really tiny. At one point during this season, I had a losing streak because I lost a game at my rank, dropped, lost some more, dropped again, then had to try and carry my team alone, which didn’t work because it was like a 1v5 sometimes, so I lost, and kept dropping… Ended up dropping four ranks total.

While the current algorithm isn’t terrible, it needs improvement. It’s too dependent on wins and losses. They should still be factor, but personal performance needs its chance to shine too

(scrub_lord) #3

ELO has always been a terrible system and only gets amplified when the game has such a low populaton like DB. Games need to adopt a new system, but I doubt they will because devs are lazy and ELO is simple and easy to implement and is basically engraved into the comp scene at this point.

(Nail) #4

“devs are lazy”

what a stupid thing to say, armchair programmer

(Sithas) #5

Because of the low populations, ranked is 75% luck 25% skill.
You can sometimes change the outcome with your skill, but usually its just praying that you get higher ranked players in your team then the opponent
I agree with starrysock, even pub games are usually better balanced than ranked.

(scrub_lord) #6

@Nail said:
“devs are lazy”

what a stupid thing to say, armchair programmer

The difficult part would be the math involved in weighing all the extra variables to be fair and make sense; general balancing which they already do in other parts of the game. These studios just dont care to invest any resources into creating a ranking system that actually makes sense for ranked PuGs. Even though ELO was created for fixed teams and 1v1s, it is ‘good enough’ for these studios in games that dont utilize either of those. Lazy.

Nice to see the quality of posts on the forums are still closely related to the quality of players in-game. lmao

(Press E) #7

Except it really shouldn’t be that difficult. Balance is something the devs have been getting complaints about forever, and it’s in their best interest to fix it. With all the work the devs have been trying to do on the rest of the game, do you really think they’d avoid one small code change because its too hard or whatever? After they developed an entire game?

Stop pretending that fixing the game is something devs do out of their own charity. If a game is unbalanced and not fun to play because of that, it’s in their best interest to fix so they don’t lose players, and by extension, revenue.

(DrRageQuit) #8

For the average person solo queuing, rankings right now are almost solely an indicator of how lucky you’ve been with the matchmaker. It doesnt matter if you’re top of the team every single game, or making potentially game-winning plays regularly. If you were unlucky enough to get matched with a group of players who think a three man Vasilli rush on underground is a viable tactic, your rank will be punished.

Is that ranking system a fulfilling game mechanic? Nope. Does it make people want to play more? Not really. Is there any point trying to fix the ranking system while the matchmaker is still stacking silver teams against cobalts? Probably not.

Its a tricky situation, and realistically the developers should be working harder on bringing new players into the game (and existing players back) before it is worthwhile working on a new ranking system. As it stands theres not enough players in queue for the matchmaker to work properly and as long as that is the case, your rank is meaningless. This means new maps, new mercs, new skins and shiny things to get people actually playing to win.

(Sawbonez) #9

This thread on Warchest really stood out to me re: ranked and its issues. “fighting tooth and nail” and “soured” are statements reflecting my own experience of this ranked system.

http://forums.warchest.com/showthread.php/57305-Ranked-mode-punishes-you-for-playing-well-It-makes-me-not-want-to-play-the-game

(doxjq) #10

Ranks will never be accurate. There’s always going to be good players who are held back by bad luck with bad players, and at the same time there’s also bad players who queue dodge, and only play when they are guaranteed a win, so they have a higher rank than they should.

This is why I’ve always felt it should take personal performance more into consideration, but I doubt we’ll ever see it happen.

(Melinder) #11

As @Dox mentioned, I believe the best way to balance out such a small community is to rely heavily on individual performance over whether the team wins or loses in all queue types other than 5’s.

For example, in the match shown below, I had a teammate leave in the first two minutes of the game, and continued to play my heart out to try and win, but sadly I failed to do so. What did I get for this loss? -50% in rank progression. It hardly seems fair when you couple in the fact that the enemy team consisted entirely of high silver/low gold

(ThunderZsolt) #12

Couldn’t agree more. ELO only works if you only allow 1 vs 1 or full team vs full team games, like chess, hearthstone or the duel mode in Quake.

If you play solo and maybe even duo queue, win/loss depends more on the matchmaking/players leaving than your skill. That leads even further:

W/L depends on matchmaking + everyone has the same rank (silver) at the start
-> player ranks depend on matchmaking, which throws everyone with the same rank (silver) in the same bracket
-> W/L is random even if the matchmaking works perfectly, because the game only takes the ELO in account
-> because the W/L is random, the more games you play, the closer your win rate gets to 50%
-> with 50% win rate you gain and lose the same rank, meaning you get stuck in silver forever.

This is a variation of the ELO hell, and only the very good (who can carry 5v1) and the very lucky can get out without getting “ELO boosted” by a friend.

Possible solutions:

  1. Git gud.
  2. Duo Queue with a friend, who already “got gud” - this way you get matched against players between your and your friends rank, meaning if you are really better than your current rank, defeating them shouldn’t be a problem. (this is called ELO boosting)
  3. Play only in a party with friends - so you can trust your teammates doing their job properly. If you play together and still lose, you probably deserve it. Works best if your party can fill any roles in the team (in DB you can only queue up as a full team anyway)
  4. Turn off your computer, and go outside (it is bloody spring, dammit!) until the devs implement a better ranking system.
  5. Pretend there are no problems, and continue to play solo queue until you get lucky, get gud, or get cancer.

Personally I prefer to play with friends.

(Szakalot) #13

can we acknowledge that its not dev’s lazyness but difficulty at balancing the game?

almost all FPS out there are struggling with correct matchmaking, problems only get harder with smaller playerbase. add to that the complexity of the game in terms of skill plus the toss-up of different team compositions and people’s ability to use certain mercs and counters: what you get is a game thats difficult to balance

very good points have been made about stronger factoring of individual performance: especially if game was played as 4v5 for the majority of the map, individual performance should be much more strongly influencing the end result (so a person trying to carry 4v5 isnt punished as hard as one other player who decided to qq and sit in spawn)

(Sithas) #14

I might as well throw my computer out of the window, if i have to wait for devs to implement a better system

(Press E) #15

[quote=“Szakalot;c-225386”]can we acknowledge that its not dev’s lazyness but difficulty at balancing the game?

almost all FPS out there are struggling with correct matchmaking, problems only get harder with smaller playerbase. add to that the complexity of the game in terms of skill plus the toss-up of different team compositions and people’s ability to use certain mercs and counters: what you get is a game thats difficult to balance[/quote]

It’s worth considering that DB already has a fairly accurate system to determine how helpful players are, the score system. Divide the player’s score by the team’s total score to get a percentage visualization of how much that person contributed, and use that weighted with the current win/loss system to see how players rank up or down.

DB already has an excellent system staring them right in the face, tying it into your rank really shouldn’t be that difficult. Definitely not more difficult than adding another unnecessary sniper to the game, cough-aimee-cough-cough or making 900 trinkets when anything remotely interesting happens.
Especially since making ranked actually enjoyable should be a priority for the devs, considering a lot of them seem to be obsessed with it.
I’m surprised none of them seem to have gotten fed up with the current system honestly, lol.

(ThunderZsolt) #16

That is a really good idea - especially the part where you compare to the team, because the winning team typically gets way more score (on top of the +500 win bonus)

The scores would need a little rebalance before implementing this though:

  • I don’t even remember when did I see a half-decent Redeye not top-scoring, even if there was a good medic. Sure, spotting is helpful, but not as much as healing/reviving.
  • A fragger carrying the whole game typically gets 3rd place behind the medic and the engineer, or 4th if playing with double medics, despite being just as useful for the team. I know that supporting teammates gives more XP to encourage picking those roles over assaults, but that becomes a problem when you give ranks based on score.
(Noir) #17

It’s true that Fragger does not get much XP. I still manage to top score in terms of XP in pubs, sometimes in Ranked, but very often, I end in the middle even when I carry.
Redeye gets to much XP just for spotting.

Beeing placed in Silver tier, even after having won 9 out of 10 placement games, I wish my personnal performance was taken more into account (I know it already does).

(Press E) #18

Honestly I’ve heard people say that, but I really don’t see it at all. I know that the amount a win or loss impacts your rank is partly based on the rank of the enemy team, but I’ve honestly seen no indication that personal performance is at all considered at the moment

(XavienX) #19

I agree with your point. I’ve top fragged as Vassili nearly every ranked match but I’ve been on a loss streak of 7 games. I got demoted from Silver 3 to Bronze 4. FeelsBadMan

(watsyurdeal) #20

  1. If you guys are wanting to be rewarded for losing, but top fragging, I’m sorry but are we playing an objective based game or death match?

  2. Tell me more about how you balance matchmaking with a population as small as ours? Now do it for ranked, do you see the problem? It’a very likely the system is working fine but has too small of a player base to work with.

  3. Before you do anything…make sure you r gud, if not, git gud son. Be more like Amerika or Nail

And yes, I did skim through a lot