in before “levels don’t matter”
I’m sick of being on an 8v8 server, I’m level 30, and nobody else on my team is higher than level 10, against an opposing team with three or four player level 20 or higher.
I rage quit, the team gets rolled, and people who might have liked Dirty Bomb are put off by the awful “balance” of one-sided matches.
Hiding levels before the map starts was pointless, and hiding them all the time wouldn’t fix the problem.
My opinions is, levels do matter, skill varies for different individuals.
Levels indicate experience (unless farmed)
Skill indicates the score
Level without skill is not a problem, they will play medic probably because they are not very good at aiming, they are still helping the team
Skill without experience is bad, for example newbie skyhammer never helps the team with ammo, and if he is the only ammo giver on team, then its bad. Like very bad.
So matches should be based on levels and not on skill. It will be more balanced in my opinion.
But levels really don’t matter, the experience that they poorly represent does but only in the sense of newbies being at a disadvantage only because they don’t know how to play yet. This is a game that touts itself as “hard to learn, impossible to master” or something like that, when I started out I too was getting my shit slapped, playing pubs and trying to grasp what was going on, I didn’t really expect to win, only to learn so that then I could start mimicking what the others were doing, improve and then start winning. The only thing that visible levels do is to give people a scapegoat for complaining about balance instead of taking a loss and striving to improve.
I’m pretty sick of my level (110 as of writing) being commented EVERY SINGLE MATCH, it feels stupid even in min level 10 servers. My weapons don’t do more damage because of my level, if I win or lose a fight against someone else it’s simply because one of us got outshot/outsmarted by the other one, end of.
Some of the best players I’ve seen in Dirty Bomb were kicking major ass even before level 20, and I’ve seen people past level 50 who are an absolute abortion at this game (heck I was complete garbage until level 60 or so and even now I still have a lot to learn).
[quote=“Dawnrazor;189833”]But levels really don’t matter, the experience that they poorly represent does but only in the sense of newbies being at a disadvantage only because they don’t know how to play yet.[/quote]By the time you’re mid 20s you could have unlocked all of the mercs and bought or traded for the best loadout card, which you’re probably aware of because you’ve had the experience playing the game.
Before level 10 most players have maybe 5-6 mercs including the free rotation, and they’re probably going to play one of the free rotations to see what a new merc is like. This means they probably don’t know how to play that merc, they probably don’t know how to play to win, and they’re going to hang back afraid of dying to the detriment of their team.
My point is I shouldn’t be starting a match the highest level player against a team with 3-4 players with higher levels. There should be better balance than that, and not having it hurts gameplay.
My sig says it all:http://puu.sh/pAjaa/78ae8511a4.png
@Dawnrazor Sorry but I have to disagree. People barely learn anything while getting steamrolled. If nothing at all.
I agree with Dawnrazer. Levels are not the problem. Idiots are the problem. Flame me all you want for saying this but in my experience with Dirty Bomb, it’s the truth. As I said in another thread, 9 out of 10 new players in this game literally represent someone who has never played a modern FPS and it has nothing to do with their level. I’ve honestly never seen so many cabbages in one game before. They run with their gun out (or not run at all), they can’t seem to turn and walk at the same time, they have 2 second or slower reaction time, hit 10-15% accuracy (on a good game!) and generally just no awareness in regards to anything. Most of them look like / are comparable to someones 3 year old kid with little to no general motor skills. Heck this even applies to some guys who are level 20 or higher. Say on Chapel you have the EV 5 metres away from delivery, and there is some level 15 Skyhammer repairing the ramp back in the second stretch of the map just because XP. Explain that crap to me. This is just one example and I see this kind of stuff all too often. That has nothing to do with being new or about their level, it is just because that person in particular is a total numpty. Anyone with half a brain can figure out that kind of stuff just isn’t useful.
I have a friend right (goes by the alias Lorien or Lrn) now who only just hit level 11 and he will easily stomp 90% of the level 50 or higher guys over here. He has played games for many years at high level and is a well rounded player, even though his aim is still slightly lacking. He’s already being accused of hacking and being a smurf by some guys who have been around longer than me even though he’s only been playing Dirty Bomb for not even 4 weeks. My other friend Aph is probably one of the most skilled Dirty Bomb players I have ever seen, and he is only level 15. Both of these guys were stomping level 50+ players when they were level 7.
Half the time you’ll find it’s one person throwing the game totally out of sync any way, not that the teams are unbalanced or stacked. The amount of times I’ve seen a top player carry his team and go 60/10 in an objective game with a 25k score when his entire team are all on 5 kills with a 2k score yet still be accused of “stacked teams” is insane. How is one guy doing everything with 5 carrots on his team make it stacked? The top guy could be on either side with any garbage players and still carry them to victory. People basically assume teams are stacked when they are losing, and that isn’t always the case.
Team stacking is a real issue in servers without level limitation though. It’s not uncommon that I end in teams with a huge batch of level 20-30 stacked against level 3-8 players. When that happened, I used to at least suggest a shuffle, but most of the time I ended up with a tempest of “no” coming from the stacked team while the low level team was too clueless to state the vote system. About 7vs5 scenarios, I would mainly blame rage quitters. But we can’t really blame people for leaving a casual match. Some kind of autobalance would be good.
If anything, it’s mainly a player maturity issue. It should (hopefully) be fixed with the incoming casual matchmaking feature though.
Anyway, since you are level 30 and you complain about stacking, why don’t you go on a server with level restrictions (min 10 or min 20) ?
The casual matchmaking if anything will be even worse for stacking though because people are going to play with their teams and/or their mates or good players. It’s only going to attempt to find balanced games afaik, but it won’t rule them out if there isn’t enough players on to match you properly. If there is only better players to play, you’re basically screwed.
People just need to learn to not care so much about losing games and get better at the game. At the end of the day it’s the only thing that is truly going to work. It’s an FPS game, one team is going to lose regardless. Deal with it and move on.
In the current system, some times I don’t blame people for “stacking” tbh, especially if it isn’t done intentionally. Most of the time it is not about winning but more about wanting to play with your friends. I’m sick of the game not having a play with your friends function, so if I manage to land myself on the same team as my mates Quantum, Aph and Lorien, I’m going to F2 a shuffle vote regardless of balance because I only got on to play with my mates.
It’s not always about trying to get a win, it’s about wanting to play with my friends, and if we do happen to be on the losing team so be it, we take the loss and move on, we don’t sit there shuffling and crying about it being stacked. I’d rather play the game with my mates and lose than F1 a shuffle vote and win by playing with randoms. Why people care so much about winning and balance in a fricken non-ranked pub game I will never understand.
level maters imo, it shows your experience in this game, it dosent show the skill its true, but i am lvl 50 and its my first fps like that and i am only getting kills because i know the game well, i am getting these godlikes not because i have super aim, its only because i learned to flank, when to not flank, what to expect from players, and that 10th lvl player with amaizing aim probably dont know this game that well, he will probably outgun my but i will try to counter him, or flank and i know how to do that because i played a lot and my level shows that
but on other hand its still just me and some people are brainless
hiding level will only help with getting rid of the hate, because it dosent show how skilled you are and you will need to learn every time who is the skilled player on the server and levels dosent help in that
and matchmaking is still in progress, because we know how the ranked matchmaking worked and its a lot of time before we will have good matchmaking
and keeping server browser in stupid imo matchmaking is pointless with it
This is a rare example though. I can guarantee any veteran FPS player with years of experience will be better at level 10 in Dirty Bomb than the average level 30-40 if Dirty Bomb is the only FPS game they’ve played. By level 10 it’s not hard for a veteran to know most of the maps, they understand the physics and movement system and most of the gameplay mechanics from other games are transferrable, so they understand flanking and when to engage/disengage from battles etc.
Generally speaking yeah you guys are right. Levels show your experience in the game, but they don’t show your overall FPS experience or your skill, so I never ever assume a high level player is a good player. Believe me I know level 50-90 players who are worse than my friend Lorien who is only level 11, and he isn’t even an PC FPS gamer. He has many years of FPS experience on console (Call of Duty), but he understands the basic mechanics of team based FPS shooters and what makes for good team composition, so his skills were very transferable.
Honestly people are too tied up on levels, even if levels are vaguely relevant. Take the other day for example. In a game I scored 15k with 47/22 k/d (I am level 76) and Lorien scored 19k with 62/13 (level 11) in an objective game. We were on the same team and it was very one sided our way. At the end of the game people were absolutely obsessing about my level saying it’s impossible to beat a level 76, and that my team was lucky I carried them etc, and they never mentioned Lorien once even though he did all the work.
It’s not always about loosing, personally I don’t care about a win or a lost (apart for the first win).
All this is about stomping. It’s very hard to accept being stomped because your team is full of low skill players and the other team has some very good players. When you are the only one with a decent score at the end of a half part (hence almost same score as average of the other team) but your team is at half your score if not less than a “just joined” player of the other team, then it’s a stomp.
When a Stopwatch half last 4mn with an EV escort, you know it’s unbalanced. When the EV is only destroyed twice because of the cooldown on your arty strike during the whole escort, and nobody of your team seems to not know how to SEE the objective, even if levels are fine, you know something is not fine. When you’re are in first line, pushing for the repair, and half of the enemy team is behind you because nobody take care of watching our back and go to the kill anywhere in the map, running like headless chicken, you just want to shuffle. Or ragequit.
@Dox
I completely agree with you anyway:
I play sometimes with a friend who is way better than me, but the team balance seems to never get me in the same team. I don’t care about shuffling then. But when I have the luck of playing with him (almost 1 out of 15 game), I don’t want shuffle unless there is a real stomp.
But sometimes, games are fine for a team who get easy kills, but not for the stomped team. And it’s because of the stomper don’t solve the problem, people will say in next game “last time I was stomped, now it’s my turn to stomp the other team, so I don’t want to shuffle this game”.
It’s not fun to be stomped or stomp another team, either way, it’s a bad game.
Levels only indicate time played, not necessarily skill. Sure a person will be better than they were when they started, but some people that start out are really really awful so only say upgrade to bad at say level 40.
Players should not be allowed to switch teams ever. The game should autobalance at certain intervals. This prevents stacked games, which happen A LOT in DB right now.
It’s also one of the two reasons I hardly ever play any more.
The other one being there is nothing new. We’re in desperate need of new maps and game modes. I don’t care for new mercs at all.
Ironically enough, I never notice levels anymore. I just notice the abudunce of Recon and Engineers, and no Medic, or no Assaults. Or said Recons and Engineers not doing their jobs.
In other words, I notice morons, and those of you who aren’t, I follow you everywhere. You are my bro, let’s get some bro shit done bro.
There is no actual way to calculate the skill of a person, the current system takes the player performance from the past matches (i guess i saw this somewhere) to set the teams.
Now the performance of every individual varies with mood, opposing team, computer configuration(fps) and other factors such as ping etc. So the point here is, The skill of an individual cannot be efficiently calculated. if you want to prove that wrong, just give an algorithm (idea) of how the skill can be calculated.
Otherwise, levels are the way to go. It also “looks” more appealing.
[quote=“PlatinumCLAW;189873”]There is no actual way to calculate the skill of a person, the current system takes the player performance from the past matches (i guess i saw this somewhere) to set the teams.
Now the performance of every individual varies with mood, opposing team, computer configuration(fps) and other factors such as ping etc. So the point here is, The skill of an individual cannot be efficiently calculated. if you want to prove that wrong, just give an algorithm (idea) of how the skill can be calculated.
Otherwise, levels are the way to go. It also “looks” more appealing.[/quote]
I disagree, to name one thing the OVERALL xp per minute could already be an indicator for your level. This is a much better indication of your level alone.
The OVERALL xp per minute is much more organic because it changes with the skill of the comunity.
Pretty much. I’ve been playing for over a year, at the very start I was fighting people who would destroy me by the time it took me to start shooting. I knew I was going to get my ass kicked endlessly, and I was fine with it. I learnt how to support well, how to use my abilities, how to give people ammo (just dropping this here because I still meet people who can’t hit E somehow, no excuse), then I played more engineer to aid my team when we didn’t need a Skyhammer or Medic, then went to pure assaults and recons, and now I rival or surpass those who destroyed me when I started out.
It’s practice, I didn’t care who I fought, by level 20 I was pugging with the competitive scene back then just to get better. I never expected to be the best by level 5, nor level 20 and certainly not now as I’m over 60 - even if its hard to find good players 24/7, community servers should fix that I hope. There’s always going to be ways to get better, and there’s always going to be players who’re equal or better to me, it’s how these games work.
Unbalanced games happen regardless of skill anyway, we’ve seen it happen countless times in tournaments where one team, despite being close to the other skill-wise, just happens to completely decimate them.
