1v1 games should not alter team balance

The current ladder separating being Competitive/Casual doesn't really fit its descriptors in practice, it would be more accurate to describe the separation as MM 1v1/everything else.

1v1 players tend to care about their Competitive rating. Team game/FFA players care about their Casual rating. This is because its the one tied to the main variant they play.

I actively avoid playing Sortie/Battle as then I would have my tough-to-get 1v1 MM points at stake.

In current day if people want to play a real "casual game" it means they turn noelo=1 setting on

I propose separation in ranks as such:
1v1
small teams (2v2-4v4)
large teams (5v5+)
FFA

with either MM or player hosted/autohost games all counting to their type, and if people want to play an unranked game they can do what they do now and noelo=1

edit: Also fixing games to alter ranks should not be something going on.

dyth68

When doing my FFA ladder shenanigans I found this:

https://github.com/pfmonville/whole_history_rating

However, I think DeinFreund had a specific way to integrate team/free for all games. Could probably just ask him how he handled those situations.

quote: I'm not going to claim some higher understanding of statistics, but how can you claim any sort of improvement/regression based on data that did not implement the discussed change?

If you can prove that your algorithm can predict the outcome of a match better than the existing one, then there's reason to believe (but yes no proof) that it can also produce a more balanced game.

Potentially, a perfectly balanced game each time doesn't produce the maximum amount of fun, or hours played, or player retention, or whatever it is we actually want to optimize. In that regard, it would be interesting to collect thumbs up / down from each player at the end of the battle and potentially feed that into balance.

I don't know how current system works, but it would probably be sensible to throw some noise in there to discover surprisingly interesting balances and also provide useful data for analysing the results.

It is fine to test a rating system on data that has not been balanced with it because a rating system can also evaluate unbalanced games. You only have to replicate the rating history of the tested system instead of using a rating history of a different system. As fiendicus_prime said, there is a strong correspondence between predictiveness and balance.

I think that it would make sense to have a 1v1 and a team rating instead of a MM and casual rating. Further separation like small and big teams would probably not be worth the probably worse predictiveness and therefore probably worse balance.

quote: FFA should not be rated

If implementing / changing / adding a new / existing ladder is not so easy to implement I think this is the best idea.
Well you could change the autohost to "no-elo" but most of the players are in a non-autohost lobby and you don't go to the autohost to wait for players while there are several players in the non-autohost lobby - so you can wait yourself to death...

quote: -All FFA Game automatically as "no-elo" to count no matter if it was played in the Autohost or in a "custom" Lobby.

Is this easy to implement?

quote: Well you could change the autohost to "no-elo" but most of the players are in a non-autohost lobby and you don't go to the autohost to wait for players while there are several players in the non-autohost lobby - so you can wait yourself to death...

This has already been done, and since then there has been a definite shift towards seeding non-autohost lobbies. We are aware that making FFA truly no-elo will require more than modifying the autohost.

I think that there are two different questions here.

I think that abuses of the system like throwing away casual elo to other players in 1v1 or FFA games is a problem, and in the past it's been a problem addressed by moderator action.

I do not think it is obvious that, outside of deliberate abuse cases, 1v1 and FFA elo being linked to the rating used to balance casual teams games is a problem.

I am coming around to the opinion that the best solution to people abusing FFA to manipulate rating is to make FFA always no-elo. (Or stick it in its own rating category, but nobody has mana for that.) I am not as convinced that forcing custom room 1v1 to be no-elo is a better solution than moderator action in the rare cases that it is significantly abused.

quote: Is [forcing FFA to be no-elo] easy to implement?

In theory, I believe it is not too difficult. In practice, I am not sure what is going on with making any server updates at the moment.

Good 1v1 players are probably solid team players. Solid team players aren't necessarily great 1v1 players. (me)