I don’t know if that’s what you mean, but I think it’s a brilliant idea to ‘weigh’ victories according to the average amount one side wins the map.
If the defenders win 60% of all the (full) matches played on container city, then they should get only 80% of the rating increase, whilst the attackers should get 120% if they win.
[QUOTE=tokamak;265011]
I had no idea, makes me appreciate the game even more.[/QUOTE]
They are pretty fanatical about it. They removed LAN because of Hamachi or similar networks, and threaten to sue anyone who manages to create a battle.net simulator, they also sued three guys who were making hacks for multiplayer.
[QUOTE=tokamak;265024]I don’t know if that’s what you mean, but I think it’s a brilliant idea to ‘weigh’ victories according to the average amount one side wins the map.
If the defenders win 60% of all the (full) matches played on container city, then they should get only 80% of the rating increase, whilst the attackers should get 120% if they win.[/QUOTE]
Allthough it’s not what I meant that would by a very good system to compensate “unbanlanced maps”.
I mean that how well you played should also be a factor, not only if your team won the round.
Your team can win a round because of you but also despite you. 
Ofc this would make the system more complicated and it would probably not make difference on the long run but imho it would “feel” better like “hey, I played great that round and I took a very big part in our victory, good that the ranking system acknowledges that” or like “pooh, I didn’t played well that round, gladly we still won the round because the others compensated my poor performance, they deserve to get more ranking points than me”.
I can’t agree with that. A win is a win, no matter what you did. An otherwise useless player might have made a pivotal kill or completed the last objective. Your work itself already being rewarded with xp.
Correct, there’s no proper why to quantify player’s actions and decide what and where a decisive action took place. It will only add false information when in the end only the result matters.
It’s just like those losers in football talking to the press at the end of a game and saying “We should have won, because we played better”. No, you lost, you suck. If you played so much better why didn’t you scored? A thing they don’t understand, wining in football means giving more goals, not artistic impression.
It’s really great to hear from Anti on this topic.
For selfish reasons, I’m more interested in the implementation of TrueSkill matchmaking for Brink on consoles. However, I can appreciate (based on the lively debate) the issues of implementing TrueSkill matchmaking for the PC community.
re: Heroes of Newerth and ELO Matchmaking:
To accommodate server-specific issues, Brink could, perhaps, assign multiple ELO rankings to players, one for each respective game mode (or unique set of server game settings in this case). I understand that this would be more back-end data management, but it would provide a clearer indication of player skill in a given format. Likewise, you could have the ELO ratings “bleed” / “weight” into other game modes. For instance, I know that the SC2 system assigns ‘unique’ ELO ratings for each of your distinct multiplayer (2v2, 3v3, 4v4, etc.) teams but that your existing ELO (in other modes i.e. 1v1) is used to help determine your initial placement (when the matchmaking system has insufficient data i.e. when you’ve only played 1-9 games).
Issues with Custom User-Generated Content:
Similar to the way that SC2 implements custom user content (i.e. an in-game interface), Bungie (makers of Halo 3 and Halo:Reach) also hosts custom user content. Based upon the popularity of that content, some game modes have ‘earned’ their own playlists (as set by Bungie in this case). For instance, there was a “Community Slayer” playlist a while back that featured popular and well-designed maps. As usual, players could vote for their map preference in the pre-game lobby, and this data was used as feedback for Bungie in determining the popularity of those maps (and their subsequent likelihood of appearance) within the playlist.
On the issue of custom content, I’ve heard Blizzard developers lament that they struggle with finding effective ways to both discover and highlight unique and creative content in the SC2 community. One of the problems lies in how they ‘rate’ what is considered “popular”. Part of the rating algorithm has to do with the number of unique games that are created for that map in a given time interval. As such, popularity favours those maps that don’t take too long to play (i.e. ~ 5-10 mins) and have fewer players (i.e. ideally 2 players).
When Blizzard thinks it’s found something special in the map making community, they ‘feature’ the map, but featured maps often don’t even manage to attain or maintain high popularity ratings, in part, because of how the aforementioned algorithm scores what’s popular.
There are similar issues with the way that Bungie promotes user content. Both franchises (SC and Halo) have robust map-making communities, and both companies struggle to promote and disperse creative, high-quality content to its userbase. Promoting and tapping the creative efforts of a custom community seems to be a true challenge for developers, and I haven’t really seen an example of it being properly implemented. Counter-examples welcome.
God, that game was fun. Jedi Outcast II is probably my all time favourite PC multiplayer game.
Having a mandatory network connection (and controlling that network) seems to be the only way to maintain proprietary control of your software title and the user experience these days. Piracy is rampant. That is just a reality of the current environment.
My personal opinion is that companies should be entitled to enforce (through maintenance and control of a proprietary network) the player experience. ‘Other use’ (such as offline piracy) is nearly impossible to enforce, and, as such, I don’t have strong objections to those who wish to pirate & play or off-license mod under those circumstances. My :2cents:
Agreed. A win (in ELO) takes your performance into account, by virtue of your opponents’ rankings and your teammates’ individual rankings (in ELO). Performance varies game-to-game, but your ELO will stay relatively constant. Consistent deviations in performance lead to shifts in your ELO. That’s it.
You (Bullvyer) may be great at doing some things, but your ability to pull out wins depends on a special combination of performance, skills, abilities, etc. You might not think you are being adequately rewarded for those abilities, but in cases where you “did really well but lost the game” you were actually sub-optimizing. Sub-optimizing is when you focus too much on one activity and fail to achieve your greater objective.
In the example you gave, you were disgruntled that a teammate didn’t pull his/her weight… Don’t sweat it. ELO assigns you each a different skill. When he’s not dead weight on your team racking up wins you don’t think he ‘earned’, his ELO will reflect his TrueSkill. Maybe part of the reason your ELO is such-and-such is that you can’t win in spite of dead-weight. There are those who can. You might not like it, but the system is doing its job and working perfectly. You aren’t going to win every game… That’s not what ELO is about. It shoots for a 50% Win:Loss. Likewise, ELO isn’t going to pad your ego when you win games with lesser allies. ELO roughly balances teams and makes a simple prediction about which team is more likely to win the game. When it is proven wrong by virtue of the result, adjustments are made to the ELO ranking(s).
EDIT: Also agree with Etek on this.
I know that real performance would be hard to determine.
[QUOTE=Coolaguy;265052]
You (Bullvyer) may be great at doing some things, but your ability to pull out wins depends on a special combination of performance, skills, abilities, etc. You might not think you are being adequately rewarded for those abilities, but in cases where you “did really well but lost the game” you were actually sub-optimizing. Sub-optimizing is when you focus too much on one activity and fail to achieve your greater objective. [/QUOTE]
I was talking abou really doing good, not only thinking it, and I think I can say that I can judge my performnace pretty well. 
In every match different people have different performances
In the example you gave, you were disgruntled that a teammate didn’t pull his/her weight… Don’t sweat it.
ELO assigns you each a different skill. When he’s not dead weight on your team racking up wins you don’t think he ‘earned’, his ELO will reflect his TrueSkill. Maybe part of the reason your ELO is such-and-such is that you can’t win in spite of dead-weight. There are those who can. You might not like it, but the system is doing its job and working perfectly. You aren’t going to win every game… That’s not what ELO is about. It shoots for a 50% Win:Loss.
My example wasn’t about complaining about bad teammates but about my own good (or bad) performance.
Imho if only win/loss is taking into account it’s probably hard to rank up because in a team shooter it’s harder for an individual to shift the game, especially for people that don’t play 24/7.
Likewise, ELO isn’t going to pad your ego when you win games with lesser allies. ELO roughly balances teams and makes a simple prediction about which team is more likely to win the game. When it is proven wrong by virtue of the result, adjustments are made to the ELO ranking(s).
That doesn’t mean you can’t use it to additionally pad the players ego.
People like the game to pad their ego and every shooter does it in some sort of way (final killcam, end scores, …)
I guess the distinction we are talking about then is Performance Indicators and Rewards vs. TrueSkill i.e. ELO.
TrueSkill i.e. ELO:
In the case of ELO, one doesn’t ‘rank up’. The ELO system is for the purposes of matchmaking and achieving balanced gameplay experiences (through balanced teams). As such, indicators of your ELO ranking (say the number itself or some normalized approximation) are a poor performance indicator, because it is a relatively static metric (i.e. numerically it doesn’t change much). ELO systems often only take ~10 games to adequately assess your skill. They become more confident as you play more games, but the initial ranking can potentially be reasonably accurate.
Performance Indicators and Rewards:
As you (Bullveyr) stated, players like to be rewarded for their performance and they like to feel a sense of progress or development as they play a game. This is the category that XP, statistics, and leaderboards fall under. It is my impression that Brink will feature in-game XP leaderboards, and that your character customizations will, to an extent, reflect your in-game performance and progression. When you do well, you will be rewarded with XP, and that XP can gain you levels and allow greater kit customization and so forth.
My point was about improving your “skill” by learning the game better and omproving your basic skills (aiming, reaction time, etc.).
For example I’m not on the same level in MP games as I used to be simply because I don’t play that much anymore, one reason for that is that I don’t have the right game atm.
If Brink turns out to be that game I will start playing more, maybe joining a clan again and therefore most likely get more skilled again.
Your improved skill should be represented by a higher rank and that shouldn’t take ages.
Sure, we still have many awarding things but another slap on the back doesn’t hurt.
For the individual tasks there’s xp. That’s enough consequences. What we want is weight and context to the games.
I have to say i didnt know anything about starcraft system and its ladders,so i borrowed an account from a friend to play a little and see why all the fuzz about the famous ladder of sc2.Well i have to say im simply stunned .This implementation is absoultely the best for team play games .I wish they could manage to add something like that in brink.This system lets u play with players of your own skill and motivates u for playing more seriously and competitive.I have to say it well done blizzard and hope we see something like that in Brink!
+1 to tokamak i completely agree with u
In a way it even fits Brink better as the skill levels dictate the game less. In a game like Brink, an unexperienced player can still be useful, even a player that is idle isn’t that much of a disadvantage. In Starcraft 2 it matters enormously. Small differences matter a lot. So in that regard there would be much less issues with grouping up players from different levels.
SC2’s rating is explained in depth here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=118212
And it’s also the little things. Battle.net now has universal chat channels, the facebook integration is sublime, all of these things make gaming more and more a social event.
I don’t think there’s something like this for Brink planned or we would have heard about it by now 
Yeah it would be a major selling point. But it couldn’t hurt to lobby for it.
Q: I bought a 360 for my son for Xmas, and both of us have become seriously addicted to Halo 3 on XBox Live, particularly Team Slayer matches. Basing the skill change only on the team performance yields pretty counterintuitive results. For example, I often play a string of team slayer games where I am MVP (Most Valuable Player), which means I outscore everyone. But if my team loses those games, I gain no skill. Then, I can play poorly, but if my team wins I gain skill. This lack of feedback from individual performance is frustrating and makes your skill level beholden to the performance of the rest of your team, which is usually not under your control unless you explicitly team up with friends
A: Great that you are enjoying your 360 and Halo 3.
The question you are asking has indeed been raised by quite a few people and we had many discussions about it. However, we always return to our point of view that in a team game the only way to assess someone’s skill towards the team objective is to consider the team objective only. Any auxiliary measurements such as number of flags carried, number of kills, kill-death spread, etc, all have the problem that they can be exploited thereby compromising the team objective and hence the spirit of the game. If flag carries matter, players will rush to the flag rather than defend their teammates or their own flag. Some may even kill the current flag carrier of their own team to get the flag. If it is number of kills, people will mindlessly enter combat to maximise that metric. If it is K-D spread they may hold back at a time when they could have saved a team mate. Whichever metric you take, there will be people trying to optimise their score under that metric and this will lead to distortions.
Another problem is, of course, that we would like to use the skill ratings for matchmaking. The current system essentially aims at a 50:50 win loss ratio for each team. It is unclear, how individual skill ratings based on individual achievements would change the calibration of such a system.
Of course, one might use a weighted combination of team and individual measurements. However, whenever individual measurements enter the equation there will be trouble, maybe less trouble if the weight is less, but that is not really good enough.
Looks like MS sees my point at least as a valid one.
Of course they would if you’re their customer. They still don’t implement it and explain why they don’t. It would be beautiful to have such a smart system that could exactly asses who made the team win. But you can’t.
Instead Brink uses xp to asses the bulk of how useful a player was. The player with the most xp most of the time contributed the most in flat results (kills, objectives, tasks) but there’s no way of telling which tasks made the team win and which did not.
Just saying that they put a lot of though in it for the reasons I wrote, doesn’t mean I’m right.
i am totally against stat tracking or ranking built into any multiplayer game… If i let someone try the game out on my account, and they do poorly, does that mean i am going to be matched against noobs for the next month, and not only am i going to be miserable playing against incompetent players, the incompetent players are going to be miserable getting spanked by a good player. Or What if i am pre-occupied while playing? does that mean i should either not play the game at all until I am completely free of distractions, or risk performing poorly and being matched against poor players because of it? It has always been very simply in the past. You play in random pubs, if you want to take it to the next lvl you form a team and play competitvely… I don’t see whats wrong with this system. I don’t want to be afraid of playing because i am not playing under the most ideal circumstances.
I did the following in SC2. I got so pissed off at some point and I just started loosing on purpose, join game, quit, for about 20-30 times, until battle.net decided to demote me, which it did. I started playing noobs again, started winning, it took about 50 games to get back.
SO! The idea is that the more you play, the more confident the system gets in figuring out your skill level. A few games played while drunk do not affect your rating that badly, and even if it did, you’ll have some easy games afterwards.
[QUOTE=Bullveyr;265572]
Q: I bought a 360 for my son for Xmas, and both of us have become seriously addicted to Halo 3 on XBox Live, particularly Team Slayer matches. Basing the skill change only on the team performance yields pretty counterintuitive results. For example, I often play a string of team slayer games where I am MVP (Most Valuable Player), which means I outscore everyone. But if my team loses those games, I gain no skill. Then, I can play poorly, but if my team wins I gain skill. This lack of feedback from individual performance is frustrating and makes your skill level beholden to the performance of the rest of your team, which is usually not under your control unless you explicitly team up with friends
A: Great that you are enjoying your 360 and Halo 3.
The question you are asking has indeed been raised by quite a few people and we had many discussions about it. However, we always return to our point of view that in a team game the only way to assess someone’s skill towards the team objective is to consider the team objective only. Any auxiliary measurements such as number of flags carried, number of kills, kill-death spread, etc, all have the problem that they can be exploited thereby compromising the team objective and hence the spirit of the game. If flag carries matter, players will rush to the flag rather than defend their teammates or their own flag. Some may even kill the current flag carrier of their own team to get the flag. If it is number of kills, people will mindlessly enter combat to maximise that metric. If it is K-D spread they may hold back at a time when they could have saved a team mate. Whichever metric you take, there will be people trying to optimise their score under that metric and this will lead to distortions.
Another problem is, of course, that we would like to use the skill ratings for matchmaking. The current system essentially aims at a 50:50 win loss ratio for each team. It is unclear, how individual skill ratings based on individual achievements would change the calibration of such a system.
Of course, one might use a weighted combination of team and individual measurements. However, whenever individual measurements enter the equation there will be trouble, maybe less trouble if the weight is less, but that is not really good enough.
Looks like MS sees my point at least as a valid one. :)[/QUOTE]
First of all, no one has discounted the issue that you are highlighting. Assessing individual skill in a teamplay environment is an arduous task, and in-game feedback can provide an inadequate reflection of your performance and abilities as an individual player. This is not in dispute. What I have stated all along is that I am in agreement with the developers at Bungie (under Microsoft’s ownership at the time) that the only truly viable method for gauging skill is through assessing your ability to complete the primary team objective: winning the match.
(Halo 3’s ranking system is an interesting addendum*)
A Discussion of Metrics; Performance Indicators; Secondary Endpoints; and Leaderboard Statistics:
Any metric or indicator other than the match outcome is a secondary endpoint.
Despite the fact that there are many secondary indicators of skill, most of these are subject to exploitation (and, hence, they are false indicators; false endpoints). Even if a secondary endpoint is perfectly correlated with your ELO rating (i.e. your win/loss ratio scored as it factors in the difficulty of your opponents), then it would still be a secondary endpoint.
So why do people use secondary endpoints when discussing performance? Why are secondary endpoints relevant? Well, for one thing, they are easier for players to understand and interpret. As this discussion illustrates, ELO systems can be difficult to understand, and they often work in the background, completely hidden from players. Secondly, secondary endpoints are often easier to measure (though this may not be completely relevant in this instance i.e. the ELO system and its algorithm are available in the public domain). On the topic of measurement and providing user feedback, primary endpoints are, by definition, based on outcomes and results. Thus, they are lagging indicators of performance. By contrast, secondary endpoints can be predictive of future results. They can help to tell you how you are doing as you play. Thus, they can be leading indicators.
In instances when players seek to optimize their score under a given metric, then they may, in fact, be sub-optimizing on the overall team objective by decreasing their likelihood of winning. In such cases, optimization of these secondary endpoints does not correlate well with ELO.
In instances when players seek to boost secondary endpoints that are indeed perfectly correlated with skill as determined by ELO, then they are improving their skill, even if they are only doing so in an attempt to exploit the metrics tracked by the system. From a development perspective, such metrics are the types that you would likely seek to track and display on leaderboards for players.
The system used in Halo:Reach is interesting, because it is well-correlated (not perfectly, mind you) with ELO rankings (the primary endpoint measure). The system I’m referring to is a crude algorithm calculated by Bungie to gauge individual skill with an emphasis on team-play in a deathmatch environment.
Algorithm:
Skill Correlation as set by Bungie (in Deathmatch)
–> Ranking Number = Kills + Assists - Deaths/3
i.e. ELO is directly correlated with Ranking Number (see equation above)
Bungie reasoned that you were more likely to win deathmatch games when you maximize the above formula rather than maximizing the following:
Kill count
Kill/Death ratio = Kills / Deaths
Plus-Minus (in reference to kills) = Kills - Deaths
Bungie has placed an emphasis on team play and discounted the importance of deaths in their Halo:Reach secondary endpoint. In their view, it is well correlated (well enough, that is) with ELO, and surpasses ELO as a measure of individual player skill for team deathmatch game modes.
Useful Secondary Endpoints for Deathmatch Game Modes:
The following secondary endpoints are proposed as useful indicators of individual performance in deathmatch game modes. Some of the following statistics are commonly tracked on leaderboards or through the award of in-game medals; others are not.
Team-Deathmatch Primary Endpoint:
Team-Deathmatch Secondary Endpoints:
It is interesting to compare this team deathmatch secondary endpoint list with what we’ve heard about the experience point rewards in Brink.
Statistics - Activities Rewarded in Brink by Experience Points (that we know of):
Halo 3’s Ranking System:
Halo 3 player progression and ranking are handled by using a normalized representation of your TrueSkill ELO rank (players are ranked from Private to General and from 1 to 50 in ‘Skill’ to determine if you are a ‘50 skill General with 600 wins’ or a ‘20 skill Lietenant Grade 4 with 600 wins’. The frustration with such an ELO-based ranking system as the predominant ranking system is that it provides very little in the way of progression or advancement. Halo:Reach and Starcraft 2 still employ ranking systems based upon ELO, but they are more obscure, electing to denote performance success by grouping players into leagues. Brink might not even employ ELO, although comments from Anti suggest that TrueSkill is implemented (to some extent) in pretty much all XboxLive matchmaking games (confirmation???). In any case, Brink’s ELO system, if it does indeed have one will likely be completely obfuscated from the player. What will be more readily apparent in Brink is that you will be matched up against opponents within the same Tier of rank as yourself (i.e. 1-5; 6-10, etc.).