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People falling from ladders is not fun?

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3 years ago
Should be self explanatory from the header, but...

Ive been enjoying mostly good balanced team games for months, but few days ago that totally changed. I found myself way up in the http://zero-k.info/Ladders having over night gone up to casual position 15 or so(from 25 or so) and unlocking the secrets of top20 zero-k players, for a moment. Then suddenly game balance was totally against me, because I had way too much ladder points? 2650 or so, so about 50 too many. I counted from replays that I lost 12 more games than I won in last few days. 12 shit joke balance games over from the start, loss after loss after loss. And before that sudden up-jump in ladder, in 6 days I counted, I had 8 more wins than losses, so its a big, sudden, change.

Now after falling from the top 20 part of the ladder by 50 points/15 positions thanks to shit un-enjoyable games, back to my normal, after which I now counted 8 more wins than losses.

So: up up up up up up down down down shit down down down down down up up up up up. Dont seem and feel balanced? Or Im I wrong on something?

Same thing happened months ago for few days. For no reason, win after win turned for loss after loss because of suddenly weird balance being totally against me.

= few top ranked, forgotten and kingly players fell from the ladder few days ago, messing balance? Falling because no games played in a months time?

I quickly looked at few other peoples games, they dont seem to get such a losing streak as me, so maybe this is all in my head after all.

Also not really related to the topic, but looking at my rating history, my line is going down even when Im winning more battles than losing, whats up with that? I dont mind, its just weird as hell.
+2 / -0
3 years ago
I also get streaks of wins and losses. I think its not due to rating weirdness but rather due to autobalancer weirdness. Given the same basic group of people, it seems to repeatedly create losing/winning teams for the same people.

Then again it could be random bad/good luck and our human tendency to see patterns is playing tricks on us.
+3 / -0
3 years ago
Well, my losings very, very clearly started when I magically got too good for my skill. So cant be a case of bad luck.
+0 / -0


3 years ago
Sometimes i get win/lose streaks

in 1v1
+5 / -0


3 years ago
Losing streaks and winning streaks are common in multiplayer games.

You can temporarily gain enlightenment or pick up a bad habit and fall into a rut.
Not sure of the mechanism, but it's not specific to Zero K or to our balancer.

In Dark Souls III I would have a run of 20 matches without a loss, then have a couple of bad matches and then I'm losing almost half my matches.
+2 / -0

3 years ago
quote:
= few top ranked, forgotten and kingly players fell from the ladder few days ago, messing balance? Falling because no games played in a months time?

The balancing algorithm doesn't care about ladder position, only about raw rating. It doesn't care whether you're #1 or #20 or #1729.
+0 / -0
3 years ago
I think only the ladders themselves, the afk channel based on the ladders, and rank colours care about relative positions. Colours are particularly sensitive to, say, the #1 player idling off the ladder, since the rank colour thresholds change quite a bit in response.

[Spoiler]
+1 / -0

3 years ago
I've had a protracted streak of fail lately (not a feeling, the graph shows it, apparently I'm playing only at the level I was this time last year) and struggling to work out why. Is it me? Is it vagaries of the ladder? Could it just be more people playing due to COVID-19 which is somehow resulting in proportionately more good players in any given public team game? Light blues to purples definitely make up more than 10% of the players in most pots I see so the better players seem to be more likely than average to join those games e.g. in last pot I played, 8 out of 17 players were light blue+.

The more I think about it the more I wonder if it genuinely might genuinely simply be more bodies. I don't play many games in the matchmaker, but the fall in rating has not been so precipitate in my MM ladder position (only about half in fact).

I appreciate you've specifically pointed out that it happened a few days ago and the COVID bump we've had in players has been going on for some time, but maybe you were riding particularly high for a while, fell from that elevated level and finally been caught by the rising tide?
+0 / -0
3 years ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just Covid fallout making the stronger players have more time to play. You're mostly playing the big team game so you won't be affected by matchmaking for finding opponents at least, and a lot more new players have been around lately so if you're on a team that has to fight Godde and there's some new players on your team that will get bad.

Personally I'm having a hard time finding matches when I'm available to play them, having to wait in queue for 15 minutes to have an opponent show up because my MM rank is weirdly high :(
+0 / -0
3 years ago
Its worth noting that player stagnancy does tend to create repetitive matches, though. If you decide to play 10 MM games in a row, chances are its going to be mostly against the same players because there are never that many people in MM.

In team games, if nobody left or entered after a match, the auto-balancer will tend to create the same teams again. If a team was dysfunctional or just bad across the board before, chances are it will remain so in the next game.

I don't know exactly how it works so I don't know if the few persons that leave/enter between matches of a lobsterpot room are enough to shake things up or not.
+0 / -0
3 years ago
NaaaaaaIdont believe in losing many battles in a row is bad luck or whatever. I know if one messes up something, like a news reader says wrong words, its prolly going to happen again during that newscast. Same for single battle, if you lose focus or morale. Every battle is different, unless you get trolls and new guys in your team battle after battle and enemy does not(ok thats bad luck, but this does not happen often. I havent noticed teams being much the same). I do very often give my best to win, so I do not believe in luck being the reason for those win/lose streaks. Again, I blame the magical ladder climbing I did which resulted in poorly balanced games for few days. I shoulda taken a screenshot or paid more attention, but Im pretty sure I was the highest blue player in the ladder, and it looked wrong, and it was wrong.

Yesterday was another shitty game day for me, few more losses than wins, but battles had(clear stupid) reasons for losses. Balance was good-ish, but playing(or players) was stupid. Quickly thinking I-feel-reasons for yesterdays losses, my team and enemys... because new guy with elo 1500 playing worth negative 200 elo, good players fooling around while enemy gives 100%, good player doing risky shit and failing, letting pluk live free and not making anti, too many copper players in team, too many good players rushing super weapon... well, thats just too many idiot players doing wrong things. Unenjoyable. Big team room had one 4v4 that I saw, it was good.

Ok, lobsterpot is pure cancer. Add trolls to the mix. Nevermind ladder strangeness in that case.
+1 / -0
If you flip a coin for a while you are quite likely to get a fairly long run of heads or tails fairly often. That is pretty straightforward statistics; tedious to prove analytically, much more obvious if you read some simulated output.

This link prints out the outcome of 1000 coinflips, which is about the number of games you've played. I tried running it a few times and routinely found "loss"/zero streaks of 12 consecutive games or more. The event you described (losing 12 more games than you win over a longer period) is FAR more likely than this.

[Spoiler]

Your position on the leaderboard has literally nothing to do with any of this. Only your rating number matters.

The rating system is opaque enough to me that I can't rule out your rating going up a lot suddenly (especially in conjunction with the server move or some such).
+3 / -0
3 years ago
This almost 50% win/lose is fine even if its like 6 loses in a row sometimes. Im sure those games feel balanced anyway, if there is no trollish stuff to mix battles up too much. Its just this few days of total unbalance after the ladder thing, oh and also that rank thing said "win one more battle to gain rank", it was wrong. So it was 99% progress, now its 83%, and its balance again. Same few months ago, total unbalance for days suddenly, and !predict was "always" not in my favor.

Anyway, I feel like this topic can die now.
+0 / -0
I've been noticing some oddities with the games that I've been in, where the chance for victory of each match shows around 53% victory for all games I've won, the games I lose end up having around a 47% chance of victory.

Thought that was strange, so I did some digging and scraped all games with >20 players from the past month and pulled out their chance of victory for some simple stats. Turns out that if there's even a slight chance of victory advantage, it reflects a greater than slight advantage. This chart reflects the chance of victory for both sides for 441 games, so adding all up from 0% - 100% winning on each side, there's 441 wins and 441 losses.

Lost # Won # % Chance of Victory
11 11 50-50.5
19 26 50-51.0
27 47 50-51.5
34 63 50-52.0
42 80 50-52.5
50 102 50-53.0
55 125 50-53.5
57 151 50-54.0
71 185 50-55.0

Balance might be a bit wonky!

Edit: going further, every game from today is like that -- no winning team has a positive % chance of winning. I'm willing to bet that's because each player's stats are boosted post-game, which causes post-calculations to heavily lean in one direction or the other.. but to see that with every game is a bit odd IMO.
+1 / -0
3 years ago
Is the chance of victory from after battle results page? That % is not the same as with before battle !predict. I think.

With !predict even 5% difference is noticeable in game. 40% vs 60% is huge.
+0 / -0
Yeah, for sure that's the case. Just checked out an old game that was very likely 50/50 in !predict, but now shows 40/60.
+0 / -0
Not people from falling lader it not fun. Staying all time in ladder is not fun. Dats why pluk is playing at such level.
Btw this loosing and wining streaks is also in Dota2. And i think not only there. That's interesting phenomen.
+0 / -0
3 years ago
Win chances on the website are not accurate for the battle at the time it was played.

The relevant elo of all players at the time the game was played is recorded in the demo files, but the website will display win chances from newer elo. If you win a game where you had a 31% chance of winning (when you were playing it), the website will try to calculate retroactively and might say, for example, you had a 52% chance of winning that battle.
+2 / -0
NZrankesainane is right. WHR will try to refine the elo prediction of past days using future information. So it is to be expected that most battles will have their win chance slightly shifted by their own result. In any bigger team battle the !predict chances when the match starts should be perfectly 50%, since the server tries all combinations to minimize the Elo difference.

Looking at the predictions of past battles will give you an idea of how well the balance was predicted, but there's no quick fix without implementing a better balancing/rating algorithm.
+2 / -0
3 years ago
Ok now I just have to say, falling is weird. Ive been going down steadily for the last week or so. Yesterday I happened to leave ladders tab open, then "played" two 2v2 games with my team having like 10% chance of win, and after losing I reloaded ladders and my score had dropped by about 40 points/about 7 rankings.

Yes, rank and elo is life. I breathe elo. Its all that matters. I own many ladders.

After that:
Win, up 1 point
Lose, down another 20 or so points
Win, up 1 point
Lose, down 18 points
Lose, down 13 points
Lose, down 11 points

Its just that does this affect balance? Because its been a weird week, Im down about 200 points/30 ranks. Ladders trying to fix itself? People not having played a lot are now balanced with too many points, because not losing enough hasnt dropped them/evened out balance?
+0 / -0
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