Wellcome Team competitive room

I am writing this post because some players previously wrote that they play Team Wellcome to relax, therefore not considering the final result important.
I must say that this seems hypocritical to me for various reasons:

1. the Wellcome Team room is 99% of the time the ONLY room where you can play competitively and earn Elo.

2. If it is a competitive room, it cannot be accepted that players play as in coop mode, building Paladin, Bertha, Silos after a few minutes, wasting metal and putting the team in difficulty.
(in this regard I was banned because following Lu5ck's poll vote to kick a player who had started building a silo after 5 minutes of play: B1735404 27 on EvoRTS-Deserted_Gully-v01),

3. Given the players' interest in this type of room, can two be created automatically where a max ELO limit is placed on one, and a minimum access ELO limit on the other?

Well first, i think the kick in the game was questionable since way worse things going on basically every game, that being said a ban for kicking someone is also highly questionable as it was a community majority decision in this case and i dont agree with that one but thats opinion and not realy the topic.

If something is to happen i dont think a min max elo room is they way and here is why:

Wanting to play in a competitive / casual way is not fully connected to elo since high elo players also want to play more casual at times.

Maybe try to run a clearly distinguishable NO ELO big teams room next to the "normal" one and run it for a week or so i dont see how that would hurt too much just gathering some data.

I understand that one of the main concerns of devs in this game is how this could maybe split the community from one big room since it can be a numbers game, but there is a chance that this could increase the enjoyment of players involved overall and that would be worth it, tryit, AND maybe have the bot send a message to everyone who joins the room informing them what is going on so people are aware.

quote: I do not think the All Welcome team being no-elo is sustainable long-term

This is a guess

quote: As such I am not sure what a short-term trial would tell us that is useful.

It would provide data on a guess, how players would respond to that option, how gamequality and player enjoyment on "both sides" would be, and how the actual number in both rooms in comparsion look like

Not sure why you ignore the direct quote that refers to what the guess is, balance in a true casual no elo no win focussed game obv isnt the top priority, some lobpot players straight up state they dont care if they win or not. It takes minimal effort to just test it out, whats the issue here

It's perfectly possible to "Not Care About Winning" but still want the game to last for more than 5 minutes so you have time to build your Bertha Spam/Krow/Newton Ramp/or whatever.

That said, with a large enough lobster pot, I would expect randomly assigned teams to approach being balanced often enough (especially if the top player in the lobby isn't sweating for a fast win), since there are far more ways for good players to be distributed between the two teams than ways for them to all be assigned to the same team.

Just some comment as a "generally competitive player playing in team rooms", because I think this perspective is missing.

When people say "NO ELO/fun/casual" they imagine somehow that the "generally competitive players" would play the same, but the people that want to play "casual" get to do whatever they want. I think this is wrong. If I would join a NO ELO would have zero reason to care about "winning" (it's NO ELO/casual, no?) hence could do my crazy thing. You can of course test if most people would think the same way or not, but my guess is that rather "games" what will get is "giant chaotic sandboxes", that will finish in 5 minutes with a raid.

Plus, on the philosophical side, why the hell you want to play a "teams" game if you don't care about a) winning, b) the team. There are so many mods (chickens, zero-wars, unit upgrades, etc.), parameters (no cost, metal modifiers) you can make your imagined ideal fun game for yourself. If you want to play with others, there must be some common agreement (play to win).

That being said, I do understand that not everybody can play 100% all the time, and there will be occasionally stupid strategies (ramps, paladins, silos). If people are reasonable (and don't do it compulsively each game) while I don't particularly enjoy it, don't think it's that bad. I never started or voted for a kick for such bad play (ignoring team kill, intentional suicide, etc)

Aquanim

quote: I do not think the All Welcome team being no-elo is sustainable long-term, in that we would then be lacking data with which to balance games. As such I am not sure what a short-term trial would tell us that is useful.

Legitimitely asking, what does Elo lob pot tell us?

Let's say I make a new account and play it exclusively in lob pot, what will my elo end up at? Average of the lob pot value?

I could be wrong, but it seems like even casual elo only matters if users parciticpate in activities other than lob pot, where they can stand out and win/lose elo on their own merit. Events like the non-mm 1v1s, maybe small teams, ffas...

Otherwise, if I only ever play lob pot, I start at the default value and then tend to the group average right? There's only one lob pot and the community is too small to have multiple team rooms at at a time, so there is nothing for me to ascend to. I'll play with the same pool of people over and over.

If I were to make a guess, I would say that if lob pot was noelo and the game would only balance for what players did outside of lob pot, it would perform almost if not exactly they way it currently does.

quote: the player prevented us from playing, not because he was bad but just because he didn't have experience yet.

I don't think there is any meaningful sense in which a player who builds a tacsilo, and fires suitable missiles at suitable targets, is "preventing their teammates from playing".

And if the problem is that they do not have experience yet, how are they going to GET experience if you kick them for it?

quote: I'm not saying remove the elo: but I only propose to make two different team wellcome rooms (always with elo) where one can be accessed, for example, from 0 up to 1700 elo and the other from 1700 elo up (always with Elo).

The practical problem with such an arrangement is that, given the current player population of ZK, it is fairly likely that at any given moment players on one side or the other of the rating threshold will be unable to find a suitable game to play.

It gets more practical if the maximum players in a room is decreased. If you can convince the community at large that that is a good idea, then ideas like this can be revisited. (Or quadruple the playing population of ZK.)

quote: Legitimitely asking, what does Elo lob pot tell us? Let's say I make a new account and play it exclusively in lob pot, what will my elo end up at? Average of the lob pot value?

No, given some time I think you would end up at a rating that accurately reflects your skill level. The outcome of teams room games might feel like random noise, but in the long run a player rated below their actual skill is going to win more games than they lose, pushing their rating up (and vice versa).

I have played essentially only in the All Welcome room for years and (mostly) climbed in rating and ladder position quite a bit in that time. (I did have an existing baseline from 1v1 games and given my timezone I do play a lot of small teams. But still.)

quote: the game would only balance for what players did outside of lob pot

For plenty of players this is "nothing", or "nothing much". So I think there would be a significant difference.

quote: I do not think the All Welcome team being no-elo is sustainable long-term, in that we would then be lacking data with which to balance games.

At the moment we already test if the room is sustainable long-term like that - whatever time-span "long" means. I am a regular player for almost 8 years now, but in the last 2 or so years I have noticed a trend that I find quite frightening to be honest. This being that the average skill-level seems to drop slowly, making the pot less and less attractive to play if you are above a certain rating. This "players moving to BAR"-thing is less a matter of graphics but of the lack of alternatives to the pot. I base that conclusion on the conversations I have with my clanmates and a bunch of other players.

Yes I know, we have that discussion all the time. And I agree with the general consensus that we can`t afford to have split rooms in general. But the situation is moving towards a point where we will get exactly that.

We always had one or two "special" players that... well, you know what I want to say. Now, every time I play a pot-game, there are at least 3 of them. Don`t get me wrong, I completely respect their right to play zk-teams the way they want. But that means I have to stop playing. If I wasnt that addicted to zk, I would have moved somewhere else already, but BAR simply doesn`t cut it for me.

So:

quote: The practical problem with such an arrangement is that, given the current player population of ZK, it is fairly likely that at any given moment players on one side or the other of the rating threshold will be unable to find a suitable game to play.

I honestly think that we are close to a state where one side already doesn`t find a suitable game to play. If its friday and the average number of players rank silver or higher is 3 per 13-player team, what do we have?

quote: It gets more practical if the maximum players in a room is decreased. If you can convince the community at large that that is a good idea, then ideas like this can be revisited. (Or quadruple the playing population of ZK.)

As much as I like big clusterpots, that idea becomes more and more attractive. But given how the pot atm is mostly lower ranked players, I am not really convinced that they wouldn`t find a suitable game. You don`t need to lower the max player-count for them because there are enough of them every night, quite reliably. The situation is different on the other side. I have not played a decent, balanced zk-game for some time now. Its mostly RNG - get player x in your team and the outcome is almost determined already, as unlikely as it sounds. Having more of these players around means that the pressure to carry is even higher for the better players, which is not a nice thing. Because in contrast to the lower-ranked players, playing to relax is not an option anymore. Effectively, playing to relax means you are denying other players their option to relax.

We have also seen in the past that it is indeed possible to have palladium and pot going at the same time. The palladium has (almost?) never killed the pot, more the other way around.

So, long story short, I have to agree with @skel about this:

quote: So any argument to not test something with minimal effort for a week or so if it doesnt work so be it

Maybe a week is too much, but I do think that testing it is worth it. I do think that the idea of "not enough players for 2 rooms" has become dogmatic. Because there is clear evidence for it not being that way already, and on the flipside it has never been put to the test and is relying on assumptions for the utmost part. I really do not think that we will permanently chase away 50% of our player-population if we have 2 separate rooms for a weekend.

Lastly, let me stress that I would really prefer to have a room that fits everyone, where we can all play together, no matter the skill-level. But it doesn`t seem to work out at the moment. I love this game, I love team-games, but 95% of the time I take part in the pot, it is frustrating and I basically play on with the thought: "Pls give me ONE decent game tonight." Looking at it with a bit of distance, aka next morning - this is a stupid idea. I should just not play. And this is true for a lot of the people I used to play with as well. So, if you are okay with the idea that your game for many people is more of a source of frustration than it is fun, and they just play because they are kind of addicted to it, then okay, but that doesn`t sound like a good stance to me.

quote: Maybe a week is too much, but I do think that testing it is worth it.

I think some wires are getting crossed here. As far as I understand your proposal has to do with running elo-limited (in some way) rooms, whereas the post you are quoting was talking about running rooms whose outcome does not affect rating.

I am quite willing to put up Palladium/Platinum if it is going to be used (responsibly).

With respect to "people moving to BAR", I have never felt that it was unreasonable for people who have played ZK for years to desire a change of scenery. I'm not claiming you have no point about people getting frustrated with having to carry game after game, but just in a vacuum the notion that people leave and go play BAR doesn't bother me that much.