sc2 match making style

(tokamak) #101

I won´t even need to. The fact alone that you´re talking about subdivision means you have no idea how the SC2 rating system works.

(Ashog) #102

it’s hopeless…

(Anti) #103

The division system in SC2 is slightly convoluted and difficult to understand for most players, hence the complaints. The reasoning behind doing it is very good though, it gives players a better perception of progress than a straight up ELO system would after a few games.

The matchmaking system in SC2 is entirely under the hood and operates in almost exactly the same way as most other ELO derived systems. It works well, the divisions don’t actually affect it at all.

A good example is tokamak. He’s rated well in his bronze league and has been placed number one. He’s been there a while which suggests is league is mostly inactive or comprised of weaker bronze players. It suggests his matchmaking rating is not that high for bronze level, if it was he’d have probably beat some low end silver players by now and would have been moved up a division. To him, and players in his division, this could be confusing. “How is this guy staying number one but never moving up?”

In truth everybody in SC2 is ranked from number one down to number 10 million (or however many bajillions they’ve sold :)) and they always get to play the people around them in the rankings.

Etek actually appears to understand the whole league-ladder-ratings-matchmaking mash-up pretty well, regardless of who he feels is competitive and who he feels isn’t. These systems generally benefit the player regardless of how competitive they perceive themselves to be, nothing proves this better than Xbox LIVE, where every multiplayer game uses TrueSkill to some degree. If it didn’t make for better multiplayer, that wouldn’t happen!

(system) #104

So Anti, leaving the competitive discussion aside. Do you think you guys might do something like this for Brink or is it a bit late?

And what would be better? A system that uses player’s rank to find him a server or a system that uses play rank to force balance the teams on a server. I for one would hate being moved around servers in a fps game. I like having a list of dedicated servers that have low ping for me and my clan mates and play there most of the time. The force balance can be a simple on/off if the admins don’t like it. I vote for the second one.

And to Bruto1d, because some retards on SC2 forums say the matchmaking sucks for SC2 it doesn’t mean it’s true. There are issues only for those that play so bad the system can’t find anyone at their skill level.

(Anti) #105

What we might do for Brink, unfortunately, I don’t think I can tell you about, not without Badman hunting me down :wink:

As for what might be better for players, that’s a matter of opinion and depends on the platform. Personally I’d suggest matchmaking does actually result in better matches for players because of the way it tends to use ELO style systems to find closely skilled opponents for everybody. The problem is many PC players reject the idea of matchmaking and want full control over their own servers, custom settings, server selection etc. Matchmaking hides those details from them a lot of the time which means they lose trust in it, which they really shouldn’t.

I think in the future a lot of games on PC will go the L4D, MW2 and HoN route, using matchmaking to offer better multiplayer and more services, but still using dedicated servers.

(tokamak) #106

I am actually beating silver players, just less than I win to them. I even won from a gold player last night. This suggest that the system is pitting me against players who are doing poorly for their league and are about to be demoted. It also suggests that I’m in the top of bronze but losing too often to (players with rankings corresponding to) silvers too break through that barrier. That means I’m not somewhere in the middle but on the border of the two lowest leagues.

That’s what I’ve been saying. The matchmaker doesn’t look at leagues, it looks at your ranking (your actual ranking as well as the matchmaking ranking which is based on how well you’re doing at the moment). You play in the ratings that are in the bell curve that falls around you. The fact that this is hidden in six very inaccurate leagues isn’t confusing it’s frustrating. In WoW the system is open, your rating is visible and the players ARE ranked 1 to a bajilion (okay not really they’re still divided in battlegroups, but those are horizontally divided, not like leagues).

The thing is, your rating is a very clear indicator on your standing. If a WoW player told me he had a rating of 1953 I would know exactly where he’s standing. What was brilliant about wow as well is that your rating became your ‘token salary’ each week as well. The higher rating the more brownie points you were handed out at wednesday. But, and here’s the catch, you have to play at least 10 matches in that week.

This prompted the players to be active and that way the ratings stayed up to date. Unlike SC2 where my mate got to platinum in the first 20 games he played in the week after the release and then stopped playing ladders because he didn’t want to be demoted.

That character customising is golden and can be used as a big dangling carrot to attract players to be doing anything.So although the SC2 interface is what I would like to see for Brink, I actually want the transparency and incentives WoW had regarding it’s arena systems.

This already happens in Brink without any ladders. If you play the campaign online you’re bound to be moved servers once in a while. But of course Brink also has normal server lists for free play that are available at any time.

We don’t need to chose between both. SC2 also has a server list for unranked games set up by players themselves. I especially like the mode where you can hang around with 16 players in a game, watching two players duke it out while the rest chats and bets until someone else opts to go against the winner. Those servers can last a whole day if you want to.

It’s mainly the case with team matches. The 1v1 is matchmaking is perfect. But with teams the skill can vary. In SC2 this is especially frustrating as the players are much more dependant on their team players than any other game. It’s seriously a case of the weakest link here. Put 3 diamond player with an uncooperative bronze player in a team against 4 cooperative silver players, and these experts will lose.

In a game like Brink teamwork is important, but the dependency doesn’t seem to be that high. A good player may wing it on his own for a while and ‘carry’ the team. This was especially true in W:ET and even more so in ETQW.

(system) #107

[QUOTE=tokamak;264981]I am actually beating silver players, just less than I win to them. I even won from a gold player last night. This suggest that the system is pitting me against players who are doing poorly for their league and are about to be demoted. It also suggests that I’m in the top of bronze but losing too often to (players with rankings corresponding to) silvers too break through that barrier. That means I’m not somewhere in the middle but on the border of the two lowest leagues.
[/QUOTE]

If I may suggest you to stop playing random for awhile, play something like 30 games terran, 30 games protoss and 30 games zerg. I do play random myself but only because I get so bored in playing one race all the time. Playing random put another layer of difficulty on top. It’s hard to fine tune a build for a specific match-up when you hardly play that match-up.
And also, I reckon you know about Day9, by now.

Interesting, looking forward to see how this will actually work.

The main problem with 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 is when two friends of totally different skills play together. I’m gold and I play with a friend who’s high diamond, about to promote to master. Our combined skill varies like hell, also because we play random and because I’m not as crisp as he is, hell, I make mistakes all over the place compared to him. So if I get killed first, he may be able to survive and win the game alone, not the other way around. This is the only matchup, battle.net has issues finding opponents for me, but how is it supposed to when the skill difference is so great. Even if it did find another diamond and gold player, it still feels weird.

(badman) #108

Hey now :frowning:

(tokamak) #109

Blizzard and Valve demonstrated that matchmaking is widely accepted by players. This is mainly because everyone knows what to expect. You won’t meet different settings in a match of SC or WoW arena, and L4D will go as far as having different voting options.

It goes wrong when you have varying settings indeed. That’s the case with UT3. The matchmaker was functioning. But A- players could chose at what level they wanted to play themselves (making the entire affair meaningless), and B you risked ending up in wacky servers with unconventional settings and mutators.

For a ladder system to work you need everything to be fixed. The environment to play in needs to be the same each and every time. And when it does change, it needs to change across the board (like Blizzard modifying map lists).

If you’re going to give players control, then it should be done in setting their preferences. A player could chose their preferred maps, and their preferred side.
I also thought about whether the ranked games should be all stopwatch for the sake of fairness. But then I realised that if you simply let players pick their preferred side, this would pan out right without having to play the same map twice (which seems to raise the bar rather than make the ladders more accessible). It would be similar to a SC2 player checking off the maps that he feels are disadvantageous to him.

It’s also important not to do it half-assed. The ETQW auto-selection got rejected because it was implemented as an after-thought. In the first weeks or even days of a game the conventions are set and people will find out what gets them in the best servers the fastest. Players would click the auto-join, then end up in an empty server, don’t want to wait around, and leave before the next player entered the server using the same process.

You need a critical mass of players to get the ball rolling for these systems. So it either needs to be there at the start or it needs to be introduced with much bravado.

Another thing Blizzard did right is the promotion of custom games. They indicate which game modes were popular and to keep things fresh, they tag one or two mods as ‘featured’ so everyone starts playing it. If you want a lively map/mod community, you’ll have to focus on one mod each two weeks in-game (call it the snap to grid tag) so players don’t disperse over multiple mods and the community becomes divided and unstable.

(system) #110

[QUOTE=Anti;264977]What we might do for Brink, unfortunately, I don’t think I can tell you about, not without Badman hunting me down :wink:

As for what might be better for players, that’s a matter of opinion and depends on the platform. Personally I’d suggest matchmaking does actually result in better matches for players because of the way it tends to use ELO style systems to find closely skilled opponents for everybody. The problem is many PC players reject the idea of matchmaking and want full control over their own servers, custom settings, server selection etc. Matchmaking hides those details from them a lot of the time which means they lose trust in it, which they really shouldn’t.

I think in the future a lot of games on PC will go the L4D, MW2 and HoN route, using matchmaking to offer better multiplayer and more services, but still using dedicated servers.[/QUOTE]

I wanted a forced balance on servers because the ‘balance by xp’ from Quake Wars only took into consideration the last game or the one in progress and it didn’t actually work. If it used the actual player skill, it might have been something different and could prove to work.
This is still a feature that admins would like to use instead of constantly switching teams to balance things out, or forcing players to this side or the other.

(tokamak) #111

It would work much better if it used xp/min. Xp/min is still the best pub indicator.

(Anti) #112

The thing is, for matchmaking by a skill rating to work well the rules of a game mode have to be very rigid.

Heroes of Newerth is a good example of how this can get messy, all the players get a single Matchmaking Rating (MMR) but the game has five distinct modes, including one where you can always pick the character you want and one where it’s entirely random. If a player gets a high MMR of 1800 in random games he really is quite skilled, he probably knows all heroes quite well. Another player could get 1800 MMR from playing the pick mode, always playing the one same hero that he’s very good at. If he was to jump into a random game though, and got a hero he’d never played before, chances are he’d play far below his 1800 rating. Ideally ratings should be unique per game mode, this is how TrueSkill normally works.

What this might mean for PC matchmaking is that you could only matchmake to very specific servers with locked configs. The easiest way to achieve a large number of those secure, reliable servers is to have them hosted by GSPs. Sound familiar? It’s essentially the model that was used for ETQW’s ranked servers, albeit we didn’t have skill based matchmaking.

Now back then there were plenty of guys on this forum that hated ranked servers because they felt it distracted players away from moded/custom servers. Has the mood changed enough amongst PC players that they would accept more close matches, and tournament or ladder support, via matchmaking ahead of custom content? That’s a question I’d love to know the answer too! :stroggbanana:

(system) #113

I think the problem was that custom or better yet, community maps are not allowed on ranked servers. Why are you guys afraid to include community maps in ranked servers? TF2 doesn’t have a problem with this.

(tokamak) #114

Yeah I may be the wrong person to ask that question. I was a big proponent of the ranked settings of ETQW. It’s a purity seal on the game’s stock content which I believe should be available in great abundancy to the player at all times. It ensures that one can still play the ETQW game that he bought on the release day(give a few patches) with a small but sufficient playerbase online right now. W:ET didn’t have this guarantee and it resulted in the custom community cannibalising it’s own playerbase as it succumbed to all the wackiness and lack of ‘pure’ servers to play.

I’m also not really concerned about match-making, I just really want to see competitive ladders. I think small and subtle preferences, spawn time, player indicators, radar settings can be sacrificed and absorbed into one standard that all ladder games can be played with. I would certainly give my preferences up for it.

What Blizzard did is basically saying “Here, we watch over the game that you bought, you can play it within seconds of starting the game, and it will always be here in decades to come” and then follow with “oh and also, in this special tab right here on the interface screen, we got a whole list of mods you can try out, we even recommend a few and our employees have even build a few themselves during work-hours”

It means players no longer feel they have to dedicate to either one. Custom and ranked can exist together without splitting the community as long as the developer steps up and ensures quality over both so both formats remain accessible. SD DID support custom content with their blog, but it was too obscure and it only reached the real fans of custom content. This underlines the importance of reaching out to the community through the game itself. When Valve or Blizzard find something might add to their game, be it home-made or coming from the community, they announce it through their games.

And let’s not forget a third party here. Next to ranked and custom, we also have the ‘pro’ leagues. Players that organise scrims and tournaments. With a strong ladder system, it shouldn’t be difficult to take the scrim organisation out of their hands. As for tournaments, these can be integrated into the interface as well.

Integration is key here. The average modern gamer is far less hardcore than say, ten years ago. They don’t scour websites and community pages for what’s new. It all needs to be accessible within the game. It ties the entire playerbase together and when that happens, the different ‘niches’ within start to overlap.

(system) #115

[QUOTE=tokamak;265002]Yeah I may be the wrong person to ask that question. I was a big proponent of the ranked settings of ETQW. It’s a purity seal on the game’s stock content which I believe should be available in great abundancy to the player at all times. It ensures that one can still play the ETQW game that he bought on the release day(give a few patches) with a small but sufficient playerbase online right now. W:ET didn’t have this guarantee and it resulted in the custom community cannibalising it’s own playerbase as it succumbed to all the wackiness and lack of ‘pure’ servers to play.

I’m also not really concerned about match-making, I just really want to see competitive ladders. I think small and subtle preferences, spawn time, player indicators, radar settings can be sacrificed and absorbed into one standard that all ladder games can be played with. I would certainly give my preferences up for it.

What Blizzard did is basically saying “Here, we watch over the game that you bought, you can play it within seconds of starting the game, and it will always be here in decades to come” and then follow with “oh and also, in this special tab right here on the interface screen, we got a whole list of mods you can try out, we even recommend a few and our employees have even build a few themselves during work-hours”

It means players no longer feel they have to dedicate to either one. Custom and ranked can exist together without splitting the community as long as the developer steps up and ensures quality over both so both formats remain accessible. SD DID support custom content with their blog, but it was too obscure and it only reached the real fans of custom content. This underlines the importance of reaching out to the community through the game itself. When Valve or Blizzard find something might add to their game, be it home-made or coming from the community, they announce it through their games.

And let’s not forget a third party here. Next to ranked and custom, we also have the ‘pro’ leagues. Players that organise scrims and tournaments. With a strong ladder system, it shouldn’t be difficult to take the scrim organisation out of their hands. As for tournaments, these can be integrated into the interface as well.

Integration is key here. The average modern gamer is far less hardcore than say, ten years ago. They don’t scour websites and community pages for what’s new. It all needs to be accessible within the game. It ties the entire playerbase together and when that happens, the different ‘niches’ within start to overlap.[/QUOTE]

Couldn’t agree more. But you have to realize that Blizzard can afford to loose money with a product. I don’t know how much profit they make of Starcraft 2, running the Battle.net servers costs money, has a team focused constantly on game balance, has a team making maps and balancing others… They are a company that can afford to make a game just because they too want to play it, even if they loose money maintaining it.

(tokamak) #116

I don’t think Blizzard is losing money over SC2. It’s not like WoW is such a big success that the rest of their projects become charity. Their success just allows them a big budget. The website might have to carry a lot of trafficking but the battles are all p2p (another luxury Brink doesn’t have).

Their custom content comes from a policy similar to google’s, where employees get to work on their own projects within a portion of their work-time ensuring the company remains innovating and the employees keep enjoying their work.

I do understand that what I’m asking requires an enormous amount of resources, but in turn it will also ensure a great longevity and a bigger player base. One effect SC2 had on me was that I convinced at least three to four other guys to start playing it with me as well, just for the fact that it’s way more fun if you can compare yourself to friends. And now I think of it, this is exactly how it worked out for WoW as well. For each initial player, there can be a whole bunch of friends following in his wake. Companies also cater to this by handing out guest passes to players, making it more easy to drag their friends in. Guest passes don’t do the trick themselves, it needs to be the game that you want to pull your friends in, but they do make it easier.

(system) #117

There is no p2p with SC2, otherwise I would have to forward traffic through my router. EVERYTHING goes through battle.net. This also prevents piracy and still there is no way to play multiplayer with a pirated version.

(Bullveyr) #118

[QUOTE=tokamak;264981]I especially like the mode where you can hang around with 16 players in a game, watching two players duke it out while the rest chats and bets until someone else opts to go against the winner. Those servers can last a whole day if you want to.
[/QUOTE]
Reminds me of the MP Duel Mode in Jedi Outcast, was a lot of fun.

no force, no throw :smiley:

It’s understandable that those who pay for the server want to control it.

That doesn’t mean it excludes a skill rating system but it shouldn’t limit the control the server owner has (optional).

But still most maps will favour either atackers or defenders, I doubt that a lot of maps will have a near 50/50 ratio over hundreds of matches.

[QUOTE=Anti;264994]
Now back then there were plenty of guys on this forum that hated ranked servers because they felt it distracted players away from moded/custom servers. Has the mood changed enough amongst PC players that they would accept more close matches, and tournament or ladder support, via matchmaking ahead of custom content? That’s a question I’d love to know the answer too! :stroggbanana:[/QUOTE]
That also depends on the after release content from the developer and what this content costs.

(tokamak) #119

[QUOTE=Bullveyr;265009]But still most maps will favour either atackers or defenders, I doubt that a lot of maps will have a near 50/50 ratio over hundreds of matches.
[/QUOTE]

I think we shouldn’t fixate too much on that. If you want perfect balance you won’t get anywhere.

It’s true, maps are never perfectly balanced, what’s more they even favour certain playstyles, certain bodytypes and set ups will have an edge on certain maps.

But this is the case with SC2 as well. Some maps favour races, and the three races aren’t balanced either.

It IS a factor but it shouldn’t be blown out of proportion. After all, if the maps were really that unbalanced then we wouldn’t have much reason to play the ordinary games either. It’s just a bullet we’ll have to bite. Blizzard mitigates this by giving players preferences, these aren’t vetos but they simply reduce the chance players end up in maps on sides they don’t like.

‘Repurposing’ is a big word in business these days. The act of fitting your product into a better context where it sell more. The content of Brink I’m sure will be sublime, just like ETQW. But ETQW is a textbook example of a great product in the wrong context.

Game producers will start to devote more and more budget not just to advertising, but also on the network in which a game ought to be played. Because no matter how good your game is, if it can’t fit in your social circle, you’re not going to bother to tell others about it.

I had no idea, makes me appreciate the game even more.

(Bullveyr) #120

[QUOTE=tokamak;265011]I think we shouldn’t fixate too much on that. If you want perfect balance you won’t get anywhere.

It’s true, maps are never perfectly balanced, what’s more they even favour certain playstyles, certain bodytypes and set ups will have an edge on certain maps.

But this is the case with SC2 as well. Some maps favour races, and the three races aren’t balanced either.

It IS a factor but it shouldn’t be blown out of proportion. After all, if the maps were really that unbalanced then we wouldn’t have much reason to play the ordinary games either. It’s just a bullet we’ll have to bite. Blizzard mitigates this by giving players preferences, these aren’t vetos but they simply reduce the chance players end up in maps on sides they don’t like.
[/QUOTE]
After more thinking it wouldn’t hurt anyway, even if someone only plays the “easy side” he only hurts himself by beeing ranked higher than his actual skill level.

Also in a team shooter like Brink not only win/loss but also personel performance should be taken into account for the rank.

PS: Hopefully there are different spawn times (or whatever) for SW and campaingn/single round, otherwise we probably have a balance issue because SW should favour the atackers whereas campaign should optimally be 50/50.