Casual Rank Anxiety

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Then players that want more serious games could graviate towards mm.
Leaving sapce for the derps to learn in casual.

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).

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.