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Casual Rank Anxiety

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4 years ago
The popularity of the noelo modoption has sparked a conversation about ratings in casual games. Some people wanted noelo to be default. Others suggested hiding casual rating. Last time we raised hiding or otherwise messing with casual rating people were against it, but now that the matchmaker exists perhaps it is time to ask again.

The best proposal I have heard so far is to make the colour of your rank badge solely determined by your matchmaker rating. The ladder page would no longer highlight casual rating, but it could still be looked up. This is essentially a compromise between fully hiding your casual rating and reducing rank anxiety as a result of a visible rating. The cost of this change is that seeing a player's rating can be useful in teamgames. This is partially mitigated by the shape component of the rank badge, as the shape will still show overall gametime.

As a side benefit, the ladders page would make a lot more sense. The massive up-rank leeway could also be reduced so it would make even more sense. Something else could replace the casual section of the ladders page, perhaps just a ranking of total playtime.
+5 / -7
If you look at the Casual rank list compared to the Competitive the two lists have different players. I have no idea why, perhaps team games allows for different playing styles which are not effective in 1vs1.

Honestly I never understood why zerok has all these different rankings. Each ranking is a jumble of different game types. It would make more sense to have one ranking used for balance and several ladders.

Ladders could be 1vs1, 2vs2 3vs3 and FFA.

Ladders could be reset every quarter.
+6 / -0
I would like to preface this by saying that I have never played and do not plan on playing competitive 1v1 games using the matchmaker since that is simply not a type of match I enjoy.

If you hide casual rank display you will make it very hard to gauge team game positioning. Example: you get 4 copper ranks selecting southern part of the map and all higher ranked players clump up north. Seeing players rank in game allows people to reposition and correct their placement to support weaker (in terms of player skill) parts of map. It's a crucial piece of information for understanding your and enemy team composition.

Since there is no competitive team game matchmaking or ranking, it seems unfair to hide what little competition there is in team games.

I propose a few different ideas:

1. noelo matchmaking queue for 1v1 games where people can practice without tanking their ranking
2. noelo matchmaking queue for "Any x v x" games where depending on how many people queue up in x minutes you'd get that amount in a game
3. team matchmaking queue with a new appropriate ladder
+7 / -0

4 years ago
teams and 1v1 require a slightly different skillset. the part that makes no sense to me is that both ladders encompass both gamemodes.
+5 / -0

4 years ago
I don't think rank anxiety is all that important. There will never be a perfect system of rankings, comprising of few enough ladders to be relevant and many enough ladders to be comprehensive. And if there were such a sytem, I do believe people would still be unhappy in ways and/or have rank anxiety.

I would prefer people expand more on the 'small teams' poll, the idea to foster multiple game types that people can enjoy. Clearly the question that joins people into matchmaking is seldom used.

In my unprofessional opinion, the battle list is used near exclusively to join the most active [A] room, which I will be in until I exit the lobby. I don't think there are any people willing to work on chobby and modify it in any way to 'suggest' battle lobbies. which is a shame. I would love if people could be 'suggested' into moving into a different lobby/matchmaking after a clusterpot ends, and if players were suggested to seed other rooms and battles.
+2 / -0

4 years ago
game modes have slightly different skill sets but only slightly, you generally get the same players in both ladders.

I wouldnt mind a core ladder, overall meta ladder or something. But it would be really neat to view breakdown ladders for 1v1, FFA, 2v2, lopbot, etc...Even more ideally would be a ladder filter where you could set your own ladder parameters with the ability to change gametype, maps, date ranges and anything else one can think of.

+0 / -0


4 years ago
quote:
If you look at the Casual rank list compared to the Competitive the two lists have different players. I have no idea why, perhaps team games allows for different playing styles which are not effective in 1vs1.
I think it is quite simply because many players on the casual ladder have not played in the matchmaker. Players that have played both tend to have a difference of 250 or less between their two ratings. This is evidence against the theory that the two game types require significantly different skills. That is not to say that teamgame players will be instantly good at 1v1, just that those who play both show a correlation in skill.

quote:
If you hide casual rank display you will make it very hard to gauge team game positioning. Example: you get 4 copper ranks selecting southern part of the map and all higher ranked players clump up north. Seeing players rank in game allows people to reposition and correct their placement to support weaker (in terms of player skill) parts of map. It's a crucial piece of information for understanding your and enemy team composition.
This is my greatest basic concern. This should be mitigated by the rank shape in most cases, since you will be able to tell a new player by their chevrons. The promise of rank colour for teamgame clout could also entice a few more people into MM, which would not be a bad thing.
+1 / -2
I think making rank solely based off of MM rating would be fine and give people reason to use the MM for 1v1s and Teams.

Casual rank can still be looked up so I don't think its a big deal really. Ranks imo are suppose to represent the percentile of what a player ranges skill wise and having it based off of only MM would be a better approach since that is more competetive
+2 / -4

4 years ago
Some players are quite efective and useful in large team games, with what ever troll or rushes they do. (example if they were just great eco grid builders). Those players u dont mind on your team and they would generally grow a respectable rank with their lobpot strategies. That said they would be completely useless in 1v1 \competitive
+12 / -0
Considering MM teams can still do 4v4 I wouldn't say they would be useless. Also I do not think encouraging trolling and "rushing" to be an appropriate way to earn a respectable rank
+1 / -5
4 years ago
quote:
quote:
If you look at the Casual rank list compared to the Competitive the two lists have different players. I have no idea why, perhaps team games allows for different playing styles which are not effective in 1vs1.
I think it is quite simply because many players on the casual ladder have not played in the matchmaker. Players that have played both tend to have a difference of 250 or less between their two ratings. This is evidence against the theory that the two game types require significantly different skills. That is not to say that teamgame players will be instantly good at 1v1, just that those who play both show a correlation in skill.
It is not obvious that this is in fact correct it could be that people who play both tend to be good at both.
+3 / -0

4 years ago
i actually think the problem is made up.
i personally choose "no elo" when i want to slack of, try stuff out or if i am simply too tired for serious gameplay.
+2 / -0
I find that no elo is where we come together to have fun, and play games that we would otherwise not play.
Having this space of "does not affect my (visible) rating" streched to all of casual;
makes it feel like sunshine at the beach
+1 / -0

4 years ago
i do not think that that would be true to be honest. "no elo" has this effect because it´s a contrast to the normal gameplay.
i would also fear that derping around could become a lot more if people would get the feeling that the game has no results anyway.
+1 / -0
4 years ago
Then players that want more serious games could graviate towards mm.
Leaving sapce for the derps to learn in casual.
+0 / -0
4 years ago
Players flock to activity, not to 'serious games' or whatever. This is pretty easily proven by the contrast between guaranteed high level games at the fortnightly events and the rarity of a lobpot breaking down to smaller high-skilled games.
+5 / -0
Some people seem to have mistaken this as a subtle attempt to force people into 1v1 MM.

I have not seen a single person mention having a problem with their rank being visible, it seems to be a misunderstanding of why people enjoy noelo games. When it's late in the night, there's not many players on for normal team games and I don't feel like playing my best anyway so I just want to watch things blow up. I went and spectated a game usually. Now there's a choice to actually be in a game without any stakes at such a point, so I did that a few times and tried stupid things in 1v1 and even played a FFA because I knew it wouldn't unfairly skew my rating based on games practically unrelated to what I usually play.

In my personal opinion, I don't consider FFA with 1 player per "team" relevant to team games balance, neither do I consider 1v1 to be relevant to team game balance. Both of these should be considered noelo games automatically for purpose of casual ladder as they are a different gamemode than team games and there is no actual balancing taking place as everyone is their own team.

quote:
This should be mitigated by the rank shape in most cases, since you will be able to tell a new player by their chevrons

Chevrons are frankly meaningless since you have people that have played for years and hundreds of games but are still terrible at the game with high chevrons. Rank color at least implies win/loss ratio which is the single most important measure of determining skill in terms of ability to win a gamemode. Even though it's a bit contaminated with games not relevant to said gamemode as I mentioned above, it's still infinitely more accurate than what is essentially time played (chevrons).
+1 / -0
Games will have to be balanced regardless of whether MM is the sole definer of rank, so in effect this means that casual elo becomes invisible.

quote:
In my personal opinion, I don't consider FFA with 1 player per "team" relevant to team games balance

As a matter of personal opinion, i disagree.

The ladders don't precisely mirror each other, but they correlate pretty strongly.

And most of the cases where a person has a significantly different position between ladders, this is because they have no played enough games in one of the categories to converge to a number that would reflect their skill accurately.

That is, the difference is to a large extent (but of course not totally) caused not by their different skill in the respective game mode, but by the amount of games they actually play of that mode.
+1 / -0
4 years ago
Knowing who is a better or worse player is important. Soon there will be end game graph anxiety from people seeing how poorly someone performed.
+2 / -0
My primary usecase for displayed ranks is to quickly determine in teamgames which players can probably be counted on to hold up their end and which are likely to need my assistance. Unlinking displayed rank from casual rating would not be helpful for this usecase.

One could argue that that usecase is outweighed by however many people feel anxiety about their casual rating. I don't really have a position on this besides my aforementioned personal preference.
[Spoiler]

[Spoiler]
+0 / -0
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