Another good example of why full communism is stupid and teaches new players the wrong things. Sap_ru opened with a line of defenders and didn't even build any mexes until like halfway through the game, subsidized entirely by his teammates. Lynx ended up dying from being unable to produce enough units thanks to the resource drain going to Sap_ru's useless porc.

Honestly watching games like this makes me angry, and I doubt I'm the only one. Obviously Sap_ru is new, so mistakes are to be expected, but at the same time he basically robbed his team blind and caused them to do a lot worse than they would have done if it had just been 2v3 without him.

What's worse is that I've seen some 'new' players who have been around long enough that they've figured out how this works and actually abuse it on purpose. I mean, why should a newb bother learning to play well when they can just steal resources from their team and screw around playing com hero and porc fortress until the game ends? There's no accountability anywhere in this.

if i was sap i would be annoyed seeing aeonios and chesti pissing bout his way playing on the forum and the replay as he didnt do bad (specially in context to elo and balance)

quote: snoke you're pretty terrible so I don't really care what you think.

He's 300 elo above you, so how is this even supposed to work?

Or if you think he's a terrible person, not a terrible player then your line is even worse.

quote: you are pretty crap at ZK thus all of your arguments are void

Buuut since you're the one saying that this argument is void too, riiight green hat pleb? :P


aeonios do you randomly watch replays of past battles? I'm just curious, the playerlist doesn't show you as a player/live spec. Also, could you elaborate on "you're pretty terrible"? Is this about skill-at-ZK, is this about something that happened in this replay, is it even related to ZK or perhaps something completely different?

http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/422571

snoke plops next to the one mex in the crater instead of next to the 3 mexes in the corner, then takes forever to take the corner mexes. Loses based on pure eco failure, a newb mistake at best. Am I supposed to take his comments on eco balance seriously? Also if sap gets offended he should make an effort to improve. Is anyone here seriously going to tell me that the way he played was even remotely skilled or that it benefitted his team at all? I don't recall saying anything that insulted him personally and I'm not going to sit here and tolerate snarky comments insinuating that I did.

I haven't played in quite a while but elo seems like it's been inflated badly since I last played, especially in teams. I've seen a lot of players that are considerably worse than me, that have 1600+ elo these days. Means nothing. Also, I was never really big on team games although I did play them from time to time, but the majority of the team games I've seen recently (last 6 months?) have sucked horribly, this one being a good example, and I'm pointing to the recent changes in communism and ROI as being responsible for the decay in game quality. I think having good quality games is a major contributor to new player retention, which is another major concern that this game currently faces.

Orfelius you hardly play anymore, and most games outside of tournaments you tend to resign rush. If you were playing seriously I doubt that I could beat you, but I've also been working on an ai for quite some time now which has given me a lot of insights into the game that are not reflected in my elo.

Elo inflation might account for like... 100 elo maybe? Depends where you are. Just because you can spot mistakes in other people's play doesn't mean you're better than them. It just means they're not perfect. There are very few players here who are even able to play an entire game without fucking up enormously in some way.

quote: I don't recall saying anything that insulted him personally and I'm not going to sit here and tolerate snarky comments insinuating that I did.

quote: snoke you're pretty terrible

My patience with deliberate obtuseness has been ground very thin in the past few days and I do not appreciate seeing it wear out further.

I went and watched this game and the one aeonios linked.

It seems like what is being complained about is an inability for big teams players to adapt to smaller teams/1v1. In big teams, plenty of players can get away with not knowing how to mex, because territory becomes more important once there's a certain player density.

In both cases, the things that Sap_ru and snoke did were acceptable or even good play if it was a more populated game. Hence why snoke's elo doesn't reflect how poor a mexless start is for win-rate. They likely play more big teams than small.

So I think Aeonios' criticism is kind of valid, but it's specific and unasked for, and he has no justification for calling snoke terrible. It's also not grounds for casual dismissal. Snoke is simply a better teams player despite his circumstantially suboptimal eco, and Aeonios's eco isn't so much better than Snokes that he can play the authority card. If Aeonios' was any good at eco he'd be 1700+.

I was interested in this claim that the "recent" communism changes cause elo inflation.

Since the popular approach of just claiming things on anecdotal evidence doesn't seem like something that would actually produce any knowledge, and i don't really have an agenda to push by any means necessary, i've decided to try to check data. Since i'm an unrepentant egoist with an unchecked data privilege, and since my teams elo doesn't seem to have changed all that much in the last few years (it is generally much more stable than my 1v1 elo), i've decided to check whether the "recent overdrive change" can be seen to have affected my teams win rate.

1) First, i needed to date the "recent mex overdrive changes". I assumed that any commit that changes the income distribution would appear here. On this assumption, the latest candidate commit would be on Jan 5, 2015. The earliest date on which the change would have affected my winrate, however, would have been on the next day, when it went live.

2) Second, i needed a table of my teamgame battle results, with small teamgames (in which i'm likely to only play with highly competent people),duels, etc filtered away. That was easy enough to acquire. It seems i've played no games on fifth or sixth, so this minor dating difference is not relevant.

3) Now, it's eyeballing (and statistics, if anyone cares) time! It seems i didn't play that many games, so the results are not going to be very reliable. Still, they are going to be better than calling names and explaining how i am superior to everyone else (that doesn't need explaining, anyway).

Simply eyeballing the data doesn't seem to suggest i've started winning much more in 2015 in general (except in the last week where i get a nice 5-streak). So let's do some simple rate comparisons.

There are 77 games in this dataset played after 2015-01-06; of them, 36 were won, giving a win rate of ~46.7%.
There are 86 games in this dataset played between 2015-01-06 and 2014-01-06; of them, i've won 46, that is ~53.4%.

It seems that my win rate has slightly decreased after the overdrive change. If we consider this difference significant, then it conflicts with the hypothesis that elo has inflated significantly after 2015-01-06 due to the overdrive change, because it would pit me against players with an inflated skill rating, and elevate my win rate.

I think the prediction of the specialization hypothesis on my win rate would be an increase, because it implies that the economic skillset becomes rarer. I carry that skillset in a rather unchanging form, and that should be a powerful enabler for those non-economic specialist allies to win in whatever non-economic way they would choose.

On the other hand, maybe it took my wetware a long time to catch on to this and i've begun specializing on macro and ground control in teamgames only recently, and **that**'s the explanation for the five-streak.