62 replies to this topic

[MomOw]

You are right about the population issue, and I would love that europe server population rise up to fill-up all the servers, but right now we need something that work for less than a hundred players.

[RedVan]

You are right about the population issue, and I would love that europe server population rise up to fill-up all the servers, but right now we need something that work for less than a hundred players.

 

Currently players smurf simply to be able to play the game at all (no, they don't smurf to "wreck scrubs" or anything of the such, as some would have you believe...).  If players didn't have to smurf to play the game, they wouldn't.  Then people would be able to see who they really are and say "oh, he's just really good, I don't need to feel bad for sucking compared to him".

 

Also, the other suggestions of letting high MMR players join the highest available MMR game with an opening rather than tossing them in a game with super low MMR players...

Edited by RedVan, 25 March 2015 - 06:56 AM.

[LaurenEmily]

There's still a plenty of balanced matches even in the eu region despite it's very small playerbase. I enjoy playing there and of course there's some exceptions to this but 90% of the time that is only caused by people who join mid-match. I don't see the matchmaking being THAT bad tbh. Correct me if wrong but logically this should result in even better balanced matches in the more populated us-servers right ?

[JeffMagnum]

I disagree with your point #1.  Please provide me some examples of how it becomes less meaningful the higher you get.  In order for your MMR to grow you have to have a majority of points in the match.  How does that become less meaningful over time if you can constantly achieve that goal?

 

If theres a game for them to join, there is a game for them to join.  Its as simple as that.  You asked for suggestions, I gave you an idea, is it better than the current system that fails when taking the average MMR of a server?  I don't see any of you offering any suggestions except unlock the flood gates.

 

Something that you've said caught my attention, since Daves skill is no where near as large as the difference of a 1600 to 2050 player or a 2000 and a 2450 player, why should he be allowed to play against a 2000 or a 2050 player?   You've said his skill outweighs them, so its a pure win situation.

 

I keep seeing all the high tier players saying they want to play the game, but all I keep seeing them say is they want to play weaker players.  I don't ever see them saying they want to play more players of their own skill.  Why is that?  Organize more, setup play dates on teamspeak with your fellow high tier country club members.

 

Because there's a smaller pool of equally skilled players to go up against, so MMR increases over the past half year or so (barring organized play and the occasional times when multiple 2600+ players end up in the same server by chance) for the outliers tend to be due to whoever plays enough games that increase their MMR by <1 each match. Someone gaining MMR at 1600 is probably going to be gaining much larger chunks of MMR by consistently outscoring people near their skill level, not by stomping players 800-1000 MMR below them. 

 

Also, another relevant point here: Since Dave is imo the current best player of Assault, the most versatile and likely the most powerful mech outside of Incin in TDM, he has nothing/no one to bring his MMR down aside from imbalanced matchmaking. Lower-MMR players have people above and below them to keep theirs within a specific range, but the system breaks down when there isn't anyone, or there's hardly anyone, above someone.

 

He should be able to because there's no other option, and keeping people who have dedicated significant time and effort to the game from playing at all is stupid. Dave in particular played a lot when most of the Omni members (all of them except him, maybe?) were taking a break, so that basically left Cluster, cond0m, Merl, devotion, and me as the active NA players he "should" have been going against based on MMR. I'm probably missing a few, but those are the ones I saw (except Merl, but I know he played some) online a decent amount. A lot more are coming back now, but that was the situation for a long time. 

 

The thing is that there literally weren't enough active ultra-high MMR players to completely fill a server with competition for Dave, especially after TPG died. Not online at once, but total. No one thought that was ideal at all, but it was the reality. 

 

 

I do not understand how you came to a conclusion that joining a team game somehow turns into a private 1 vs 1 duel.  There are 10 other players you are not taking into consideration in your response.

 

 

Because it does. One time I waited over five minutes to get into a TDM through quickmatch, and when I joined, I managed to go 48/0 in a 40-15 ish match. For the record, I switched after the people on the other side left after the team I spawned on got to a little over 10. Two players being responsible for 90% of each of their team's kills is a duel with added feeding. I'm not bragging, but this is how it is.

Edited by JeffMagnum, 25 March 2015 - 01:39 PM.

[IareDave]

 

And lastly, I think without realizing it you admitted that smurfs destroy the balance of the game with your comment:

 

 

Which happens to contradict your original statement of:

Actually, if you read my post you would know I said that facing against smurfs were my best practice. Playing in a match, where the balance is tilted to their side, was MY best PRACTICE. Perhaps your idea of gaming is not to improve, but to simply enjoy the game. Fine, continue to do so. But I enjoy a challenge, and if a match isn't perfectly balanced, and instead the edge is given to the opposing side, I'm all for it. 

 

Also, no. I don't know where your 'data' comes from or how you have any relevance to the impact a high mmr player has on the game. I'll give you my own 'data' since I'm actually the one who can tell you from firsthand. if I join a lobby of 11 other players, the in-game balancer will do a fantastic job creating a balanced match. Unless people leave/join, or if theres a smurf in the match, then it will be a near tied score throughout - and isn't that the same with every other lobby? 

Edited by IareDave, 25 March 2015 - 02:37 PM.

[JeffMagnum]

I'm sorry but I strongly disagree with opening the flood gates for above average skilled players to play anyone they choose for conveniences sake. If thats the case then MMR needs to be completely done away with, and so does our stats, because they become meaningless. The game needs to just operate on a first come first served basis, and no balancing applied at all

I'd like for you skilled players to offer some ideas OTHER than open the flood gates and allow anyone with high MMR into any match of lower MMR players. I welcome them openly to analyze. Opening the flood gates is a bad idea for anyone but you.
  
  
I'm sorry but what I interpret from your story is that you were able to dominate lower skilled players in a lobby where you were you had a significant skill advantage. That is exactly the sort of thing I'm opposed to happening and want fully eradicated. My question to you is if it was no "fun" why did you do it, and why did you continue to do it? Just because you want to play?

I think the thing many of you high tier players overlook is compassion for your weaker enemies. You as that overly skilled player should of lowered yourself and self regulated your skill when you quickly realized you were up against much lower skilled players. I don't see that happening in your story. I see the best player in the match going FULL ON HAM and just completely obliterating anyone that approaches. That drives away those players, that quicky makes them not want to play the game. It ruins the experience. Nobody likes losing and worst yet, nobody likes losing badly like that. Its just demoralizing.

Please compromise somehow.

 

 

I don't think that should be the case at all. Right now it's not that bad, but making it even more restrictive would alienate the top players and probably kill the comp scene. I don't even participate in that, so I'd leave 100% if I could never play normal matches.

 

I honestly don't know of a decent solution that doesn't involve a much larger population. It sucks, but I don't see any way around it. Someone is going to be shafted no matter what you do, but I'd prefer for all levels of skill to be shafted equally than for the top 0.01% or whatever (that also happens to make up a lot of the comp scene the devs want to encourage) to be completey screwed over. Also, FWIW, it's mostly average players who are feeling this issue more than the brand new ones that people are worried about. 2500+ players tend to get dropped into 1600-1800 servers, not 1000-1400 ones.

 

I was actually on a ~2500 MMR alt because I couldn't get into a single match on this account, and I used a stock CRT. I've even just used TOW only on a stock CRT before and gone like 20/0 in a match I QMed into. What do you want me to do?

 

I try to assist them whenever I can, and if they actually seem interested in advice, I'll stick with them for at least a couple of games giving feedback. Sometimes I even go to FC and show them what they're doing wrong without having to deal with teams interfering. I don't want to stomp people; I just want to play the game, and right now, it's not really possible to do the latter without doing the former to some extent.

Edited by JeffMagnum, 25 March 2015 - 02:54 PM.

[Ashfire908]

I think a good suggestion would be a background script that scans servers during games for high mmr players and builds a hypothetical, balanced matchup. Once this hypothetical matchup is built, it creates a lobby and pulls the players from their matches and drops them in the lobby.

There are implementation details to consider, like how and when to ask for player consent, opt in and opt out flags, and algorithm efficiency, but I think my idea would serve the Hawken community well. A point to keep in mind is that Hawken already has a drop-in-drop-out feel to it and this sort of solution would simply make the best out of an unfavorable situation.

I was going to propose this as a system yesterday w/ intent to implement, but was too tired after work. Will post later today in it's own thread.

[OdinTheWise]

btw, it would be nice to get rid of the stupid star rating thing, i can never tell if its above or bellow my skill level. cant we just have the SRD posted next to a server instead?

[JeffMagnum]

Odin, you can do that here. It's not as convenient as an in-game rating next to each server, but alt tabbing out to check isn't too hard. 

[MomOw]

btw, it would be nice to get rid of the stupid star rating thing, i can never tell if its above or bellow my skill level. cant we just have the SRD posted next to a server instead?

 

yup, why herokuapp is not implemented in-game, I have to have both hawken and a web browser opened to find a server :-)

[OdinTheWise]

Odin, you can do that here. It's not as convenient as an in-game rating next to each server, but alt tabbing out to check isn't too hard. 

thats not the point. my point was that the star rating is aterrible way of distributing information

Edited by OdinTheWise, 25 March 2015 - 02:53 PM.

[JeffMagnum]

Well yeah, that's pretty much a given. It's always been an awful solution. I was just suggesting a workaround since you said you could personally never tell. 

[talon70]

Replace the 3 star rating which is confusing with maybe a 5 star system based on skill level and server settings. A 1 star could offer some newb protection and features like maybe bigger radar if desired. Whereas a 5 star servers would be the hardcore mode with different settings for instance maybe no giant orange box saying its the enemy or smaller radar ect. Perhaps earn different rewards to encourage playing in the harder levels.

 

More pilots are needed for a quick working matchmaking system imo.

 

It would be really nice to have  servers capable of manually adjusting the teams. 

[IareDave]

This discusion is going nowhere, because you underestimate and doubt the effectiveness of the in-game balancer. MMR is a very accurate measure of skill, slowly losing 'true' skill measurement the higher you go (2700+ or so). So, if I join a full lobby, with no players leaving/joning, and no smurf accounts, the game will balance the teams accurately. Am I going to be the best player in the match? Will I always win 1v1 engagements? These questions are not important simply because this is a TEAM shooter. A team is only as effective as it's weakest link, and a good player carrying can only do so much. 

[crockrocket]

I was going to propose this as a system yesterday w/ intent to implement, but was too tired after work. Will post later today in it's own thread.

 

I'm really finding it pretty funny that once a potential solution to at least help alleviate this problem (I know it won't eliminate it) is brought up, AND Ashfire says he wants to work on it, the main parties continue their argument with no acknowledgement of this.

At this point I don't think you're making any progress, so stop arguing for a minute and think about an actual proposed solution!

 

EDIT: For your further perusal

Edited by crockrocket, 25 March 2015 - 08:09 PM.

[DM30]

I think you underestimate the power of the highest MMR player and his ability to carry a team to victory. I am able to do it in rounds that I am in when I am the highest MMR in the lobby. That is the crux of the issue at hand. One good player upsets the round when there is nobody to confront him equally, and has for a very long time. This isn't anything new.

And I think you are overestimating it. If the skill disparity is high enough, then there can absolutely be a limit to what the highest rated player can do to swing the odds to their team's favour. If the one or two lowest ranked players on the team are unable to hold their own against the more moderately skilled players that fill the other team to balance the game and just feed for the entire round, then no matter how well the best player does they won't be able to overcome that deficit. It has happened to me many, many times. The game WILL heavily stack teams against the best player to try and balance in a strictly numerical sense, and there are limits to what any one person can do in a game this team-dependent.

You ask people not to discredit your personal experience, but that's exactly what you're doing when people come forward to say that their personal experience contradicts yours. Highest MMR player =/= guaranteed win.

It seems to me that the issue you are more frustrated about is in-game joins. By your own admission, when a new player joins a balanced game "regardless of their MMR" that team becomes overpowered. Maybe that should be the aspect we're focusing on, rather than trying to lock the best players out.

[palad1ne]

Hawken is still the only game where a collection of people support filtering games by skill level to protect lower skill level players. Brand new players sure, however players that have been playing the game but simply aren't as good as another person complaining being in the same room as those people blows my mind

 

Other games have much more players to choose from. This kind of autobalance as its actual installed simply dont work because you dont have the big casual players base between the Twitch stars and the Startup Fred's . Thats the point. 

 

So instead of waiting and give the Stars some private scrim grounds where they can fight against each other, the discussion goes in direction "how to rekt Pub Servers and still feel good about" . 

 

The Solution is simple. Private Servers with some nice Mods, like Hardcore Mode, for the advanced player and Noob Servers where the new players have their playground and could learn some basics to grow. This includes Auto Admin which will kick "high performance" Smurfs from the server. 

 

But i really doubt that this solution will find many friends @ the Stars because every High MMR Player know that he can only feed his MMR when playing against Noobs. No one will lose his precious MMR, even when the Game die because of this. 

 

Anyway. Maybe the new  patch and content bring enough new players so Hawken could return to a nice and fun game as it was.

[PoopSlinger]

I wish I had the attention span to write or read this much stuff.

[Superkamikazee]

I observed a huge difference in match balance tonight. Joining a nearly full match games were generally lop sided by the end of the match. A full server before teams were selected ,generally speaking, made for a fairly close match.

 

Not sure what match making is doing or looking for when a match is already in progress and an empty slot needs to be filled. Is it simply grabbing anyone that's available that's hit quick match or is it picking a good fit to balance the match? From my experience it seemed like it was just grabbing whoever vs trying to balance the match. It may just be too difficult to balance a match that's already in progress, and ADH probably felt with the low pop count it was better to just get anyone in to fill the void.

 

I'm still of the opinion MM was designed and ultimately limited by a relatively small player pop. There's probably only so much you can do with a limited pool of players to choose from at any given moment, and keeping things running quickly. Again, it seems to work pretty well with a full server, otherwise it struggles.

[IareDave]

I believe that is exactly the case. It does not look for the best player to help balance the match in progress, it just grabs whoever. It also gets worse when there are no available matches for your MMR. Today I partied with another player that was 2400 for testing, this was 5pm west coast time. They selected siege, there were plenty of ~2000 matches going on as reported by Shadnesses app. It dumped us into a lobby with 2 much weaker players, one of them was 1100 according to the info from scrimbot. The average of the lobby was around 1600 after we joined, we commented to each other and left. The whole thing is incredibly broken. That sort of thing should not happen party or not.
 

Is this not what I have explained to you several times already? 

[hestoned]

look the bottom line is no i dont intentionaly go out looking for lower level servers. wanna know what i do? i press any game mode and let match making do its thing. theres nothing else i CAN do. i dont think alot of people understand that its impossible for me to join a game off the sever browser.

 

wanna know what i did before this arbitrary dumb as bricks moronic stupid idiotic good for nothing POS skid mark of a retarded server browser mmr lock? i would organize the server list from highest rating to lowest and and proceed to join the highest one available.

 

thats all i want to do!!!!!!!!!!!! thats it!! jesus christ what is so godam hard to understand about that?! just remove this god awfull lock already!!

 

i dont go out thinking man how many scrubs can i wreck today omglololololomg!!! what i wont do is NOT play this game just to apease all these whiny players with fuzzy bunny attitudes.

 

i just dont get it. it was perfectly fine the way it was before when i could just join a server. maybe some dont remember but as soon as this ARBITRARY lock was put into place the forum was flooded with complaints! good players stoped playing because they couldnt get into a freaking game. for the love of ilal just remove this stupid lock already so i can play some decent players holy hell

 

AMERICA

 

i was saying s c r u b y btw not sure why thats censored :D

Edited by hestoned, 27 March 2015 - 07:35 AM.

[DM30]

The CAUSE for this is not the "late joiner" because they cannot enter a lobby that is out of their fitness level with the server browser, the cause is the matchmaker disregarding that restriction. So many times a match has been ruined because someone with 500 to 1000 MMR higher than the average of the lobby has entered and then just driven away everyone on the other team. At the end of the match, everyone leaves, and there never happens to be a "fair" rematch where the autobalancer can do its work. This is not something that just started happening recently, its happened for quite a long time.

 

I don't quite follow this argument. Even if a player is in the skill range required to manually join a server, if that game is a game in progress with balanced teams, now the team the new player joined has an advantage both numerically and in total skill according to MMR. The joining player doesn't have to be a top tier pro that got dropped in by matchmaking. In this situation late join equals unbalanced game, and the player's MMR is more or less irrelevant. If it's higher the imbalance will be more dramatic, but their MMR isn't the cause of that unbalance. The fact that they joined an in-progress, previously balanced game is.

 

If the player got dropped in before the game started, autobalancing would have a chance to account for that. Again, their MMR is of minimal importance here. Sure, if the player is significantly higher than the rest of the server their in game scores and performance will reflect that, but that doesn't mean the game will end up as a one-sided stomp for the reasons that I said in my last post.

 

So, again, I'm not following. If the pro gets dropped in before the match begins, even if some other players are scared off the autobalance will still sort the teams to be as numerically even as possible. If they join a balanced game in progress, thereby giving their team the advantage and causing the scores to start running away, again, the core problem isn't their MMR, it's the fact that the late join screwed over the autobalancer's previous work.

 

I don't think prohibiting high-ranked players from quick-matching into lower-ranked games as their ONLY MEANS of finding a game to play at that time should be the focus here. I would rather see a system where late joins aren't allowed at all (except maybe through invites, or re-joins after a disconnect), regardless of the player's ranking.

 

 

I am not trying to lock the best players out at all. I'm simply wanting everyone to play against the players they have the most in common with. See my post about a +/-400 range restriction please, cause apparently you missed it and don't understand my intent.

 

I didn't miss it. While it's an interesting suggestion, the problem I see with it is that the scenario you outlined assumes there's enough high-MMR players online and queuing for games to allow a match at their skill level to form. The current reality is that a lot of the time, there aren't. In that situation your proposed solution wouldn't be any better at finding a fit game for them to play in than the current system is. The only difference is that a high-skilled player is prevented from joining any games at all, hence me saying "locking out". If the matchmaking system doesn't make exceptions to allow them into an open match, even if it's out of their normal range, then it's a system that's essentially punishing people for being good at the game.

 

You say that you just want to be able to enjoy the game. How much enjoyment would you get if you were in their position and the game basically said, "Nope, can't play right now. Sucks to be you." ?

Edited by DM30, 26 March 2015 - 08:14 PM.

[ThirdEyE]

I'm against you wanting to fight lower skilled players and go 45-0 and not being challenged accordingly.

Just out of curiosity, where are you getting this impression from?  Maybe I missed something, but I haven't seen anyone claiming that they smurf to enjoy stomping people of lower skill...