Hacker News Reader

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I played countless hours of the first destiny. I loved exploiting all the glitches and finding new ones. The pvp was chaotic and random. Some matches I topfragged, others bottom.

I've tried going back to destiny several times over the past few years. It's too clinical. The good glitches get overnight patches. The bad ones last forever. The pvp is a non-stop sweat fest of me getting killed over and over and over and over. It just stopped being fun.

I game to escape the mundane reality of my relatively poor lot in American life. As soon as I start feeling that way when playing a game it's all over. I haven't found a game since the original destiny that gives me that escape. Games like pubg, fortnite, csgo, cod, battlefield, halo, all feel the same to me. I don't like most indie games, or 3ps, and don't have the time for games like ksp, factorial, civ and can't get immersed in single player games anymore. So my options are limited. It's been good though. With virtually no games worth investing money into a PC, console, or iaps, I've broadened my social circle and learned new skills. I imagine the market is going to swing back around to cater to the coop centered gamers when they realize that middle aged families with teenaged children or older have far more disposable income than the current demographic of school aged kids and young adults.

Space Station 13?

Been there. We just load up an old copy of openarena on our server and as a group play that. Simple FPS you can jump in and out of.

Something I've loved to prevent games from getting too clinical is when custom/modded maps are popular. It's fun when you're in a match on a custom map and gametype that no one has seen before and everyone is on a level playing field of trying to figure it out as they go. Halo has been one of my long-time favorites for enabling this sort of thing.

"The pvp is a non-stop sweat fest of me getting killed over and over and over and over"

Isn't this an argument for skill-based matchmaking rather than against it? (Since the OP whom you agree with makes a case against optimizing for SBMM, I presume you're also against it)

Before sbmm matches had a wider range of results for me. Last I played, with sbmm, matches were consistently average.

In other words. I love the idea, and the feel of overwatch which uses sbmm. However the game stacks teams to make matches frustrating.

Some games I'll be the highest rated player on the team and have an amazing game. Despite playing better than my average I will still lose skill rank points if my team loses. Conversely, I can spin in spawn for an entire match, get carried to a win and gain points. By naively averaging team vs team the fun is taken out of the game because too many factors are ignored when averaging leading to exploitable metrics. Exploitable metrics left unchecked causes a games community to splinter, shrink, and grow toxic as more players get frustrated and quit leaving behind a less savory group.

League of Legends doesn't seem to suffer from bots - if you don't want to believe me, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/eieyz2/why... , and their regional rank system works well enough and not only useful and provide good values to the players, it is absolutely necessary at higher ranks.

Likewise, AFAIK, dota2 doesn't seem to suffer much from bots, and their rank system seems to work ok.

Arguably Fortnite / Overwatch / PUBG style games do suffer from aimbots, but whatever downside they bring, those games seem wildly successful. And the regional / global ranking system seems integral to their success.

Given that a large number of highly successful games do have it, I don't think your argument has much of a merit - it's surely a challenge to implement them but it seems like a worthwhile problem to solve, rather than avoid, at least if your goal includes global / regional success beyond small niche.

Not going to argue get into an argument on this, but I believe a large portion of both League and Dota's widespread community toxicity problems have their roots in the global ranking systems that they use. I also think that their ranking systems make them much, much less accessible to new players, and encourage their existing playerbase to experiment less.

To the extent that some games can legitimately get away with global competitive ranks without suffering bots, that doesn't mean it's a healthy choice for every (or even most) other games. Of course, no design rule is absolute, we're just speaking in generalities.

That being said, both League and Dota are investing massive resources to prevent botting on a system that arguably would be just as if not more enjoyable if it was redesigned. I feel the same way about games like Overwatch, even some inherently globalized systems like Pokemon Go that would be difficult to change -- I don't personally believe the ranking systems are making them better. I think they're there because they're expected to be there, not because they're reinforcing the core design of the game.

If you think DotA2's matchmaking is unfriendly to new players, I don't think you ever experienced DotA1 matches. Every single game was wildly unbalanced, and as a result of one or so players, every single game was an absolute stomp where the losing team never had a chance.

The skill gap between good and bad players is ludicrous. It's like putting LeBron James against middle schoolers. There simply isn't a fun game when the game is determined by the singular best player, and the other nine players are being carried to victory regardless of their contribution, or being pounded into the dirt because they're less than exceptional.

I could never go back to random matchmaking after experiencing global rankings.

Of course, using a bad metric is often better than using no metric at all, but it doesn't follow that the current strategy is optimal.

It especially doesn't follow that global rankings should be a user-visible metric, or an explicit player motivator (a la seasonal rankings). People don't bot because they're unhappy with the players they're matched against. They bot because they want a publicly visible number to get bigger and because player rewards are locked behind competitive rankings.

But there are no bots available that can play the game for you competently. Even deepmind had to have quite a few restrictions to do so and such a system most likely can't even learn an evolving metagame.

People who join ranked want to compete. If you don't want to then there is another queue available that's not a public ranking.

> But there are no bots available that can play the game for you competently.

Then who cares whether or not players bot? Let them. Heck, go all the way and actively support it if it's not an issue.

On the design side, I'm seeing a number of people commenting on here that getting rid of a publicly-facing global ladder would mean that these games couldn't be competitive. I don't believe that's true. We have wildly competitive games in the physical space that don't use global ladders, and they don't suffer for it.

Global ladders are a very specific, very narrow mechanic -- they have some advantages for competitive play, and a whole lot of downsides. And we have options. At the very least, even if we do nothing else, we can shrink the size and make them regional. Or because things are digital we can throw out geography entirely and base them off clans.

Competition in small groups is often preferable to competition in large groups anyway, since that can foster rivalries, and because repeat matchups between competitive players are usually more interesting than random ones.

The game wouldn't work without a ranking system. At least you can't go from a matchmaking system back to one without, because there's a segment of the player base that is so good that if you throw them together with the average player then the average player won't have much fun. Games like LoL and Dota snowball too hard for it to be fun to lose at every stage of the game. It also wouldn't be much fun for the good player, because they won't face a challenge.

Also, I have some severe doubts about the origin of toxicity in that game being in the matchmaking system. Dota was the game where you were abused as a noob when you started out ("welcome to dota, you suck"). It's a niche game from 2003 after all.

leagues toxicity has its roots in them not allowing players control over themselves. You can get stuck in a game with an asshole and they force you to play it out. That would put anyone in a shitty mood, and is why I stopped playing the game.

This is wildly offbase.

The toxicity, for the most part, doesn’t come from ranks. It comes from being stuck in a bad game for 20-60 minutes. Competition just exacerbates it because now ranks/points/money are on the line.

I’m talking about being stuck with an asshole that rages for any number of reasons, then decides to kill themselves the whole game to the enemy (feeding). Or people who flame you for any number of reasons. And you can’t quit because then you get a strike for being the first person to abandon the game, with penalties for doing it more than a few times.

Being 1 person down in a 5v5 can be incredibly hard to come back against. This is also why Overwatch is so incredibly toxic. A 5v6 fight is almost unwinnable, one person throwing is enough to lose the match. Dota handles this with comeback mechanics, but that’s only if a player actually disconnects/abandons. If they stay in the game purposefully throwing, you’re trapped and out of luck. Unlike Overwatch, TF2 isn’t quite as toxic because matches consist of 24 or 32 players, meaning each person’s actions aren’t as crucial as a 5v5. You can also freely leave and join casual matches. For the majority of the playerbase, that’s fine. Ranked introduces a bit of toxicity but that’s unavoidable in a team game. It’s also unavoidable whenever you have anything at stake- whether it’s money or points, etc. That’s just the nature of competition. No one forces anyone to play ranked matches instead of casual ones.

Competitive ranks and matchmaking can be fun, but you have to balance it right. With team games it’s very difficult, but it would be the same without a global rank system. Actually it would be worse because of imbalanced matchmaking.

And for many people, that rank is -why- they play. It’s fine to not be competitive like that, but understand that a lot of people are indeed competitive like that. Ranks are an indicator of skill and time invested, and there’s no reason to take that away from people just because one personally doesn’t care for ranked or whatever. Dota still has casual mode, and it’s still toxic, because of the length of the matches and having to rely on random teammates.

See, this is just absolutely true. When 7 or so of the top 10 most successful games of the last decade all share features like global matchmaking, you can't tell me those features bring more trouble than value. I agree there are hard challenges there, maybe ones that cannot be solved perfectly, but for success at that scale they are clearly worth attempting.

7 of the 10 most successful games of the last decade listed here also offer in-app purchases.

I don't ignore success -- Overwatch, League, Dota, and Fortnite are all objectively well-designed games. But that doesn't mean that every decision they make is good design. If success was the only metric I used to judge design quality, I would have to conclude that Farmville was a better game than Hollow Knight.

I do agree Hollow Knight is a so much better game than Farmville (and most games, for that matter).

But in this case, global/regional matchmaking is an essential part of those successful games and their game experience (unlike in-app purchases which are essential for moneymaking but not essential for game play experience). If those games didn't have regional matchmaking, they would provide very different experience.

You keep saying you believe the global matchmaking is not important, but I'm afraid you have presented no coherent argument or evidence so far - hence it looks like you're simply ignoring the reality unfortunately. Given how much core part of the experience the global matchmaking is for those games, the onus is on you to prove the otherwise. So we'll likely have to agree to disagree.

Those online competitive team games are pretty unfriendly, though. If you try something new or fail to keep up with the latest flavor-of-the-month playstyle, people will flip out on you. You're suddenly preventing this guy from realizing his life goals of climbing to the top of the ladder and becoming a world-renowned player.

I love MOBAs, but I can't bring myself to try out LoL or DotA2 again since I don't want to deal with angry teammates

> I love MOBAs, but I can't bring myself to try out LoL or DotA2 again since I don't want to deal with angry teammates

I don't know about lol, but DotA 2 has a setting to mute all chat, so you're just playing with quiet teammates. They can still ping the map and use the chat wheel, but that stops pretty much all the chat abuse, especially if you're stuck with a 4 stack that picks on the lone player.

Value to the company is not necessarily value to the players.

> League of Legends doesn't seem to suffer from bots

Depends on where you look. I used to see them a lot in certain game modes and when playing with friends that were new. As one commenter put it:

> To play devil's advocate here -- If you were to play summoner's rift AI games, ARAM, or even some summoner's rift on a sub-30 account late night EST you will be DROWNING in bots. They are EVERYWHERE. They also go almost entirely unpunished. You can track their summoner ID's through OPGG and watch them play the same champion 24 hours a day until 30, change name, and swap champions entirely.

> I tried to get some friends to come to league, and they all quit because their teammates were AI every single time. Not "lul ur bad r u a bot??" but a literal bot grinding exp to sell level 30 accounts. Sure, scripting Xeraths/Cassio's are much more rare -- but League has a huge bot problem sub-30.

They've shut down entire game modes PACKED full of bots.

Low level ARAM and TT you would often have out of 10 players, 1 = you, 9 = leveling afk bots that run around to prevent auto-kick.

What improvement can a cheat offer a League of Legends player?

I think the big one right now is dodging skillshots, or having the cheat make skillshots for you.

> Second, I think these systems ignore player incentives. I think that global competitive ranking encourages the worst of playerbases, that skill is an arbitrary mechanism to optimize on instead of something like how close each match was, or player-reported satisfaction levels, or variety of play-styles, or any other of a dozen other metrics.

I think you're totally missing the point. Computing a global competitive rating isn't intended to optimize for skill. Rating is a proxy for skill, sure, but generally it's being used in matchmaking because (a) rating gap is a not-completely-terrible proxy for closeness of matches (because skill gap is a decent proxy for closeness of matches), which contributes to player satisfaction, and (b) you can derive it from easy-to-measure data and while there are fiddly details, everyone is roughly on the same page as to what you're trying to approximate.

It happens that, once you compute that, it's really tempting to sort and report. Perhaps that's a mistake and invites the worst of people's instincts to make numbers go more and bigger.

This still has the constraint that all the players are playing the same game, but as long as you can somehow avoid ascribing value to rank placement then many forms of cheating just stop mattering; the cheaters self-sort themselves into a tier where they don't interact with anyone who can't deal with them.

I think my argument there would be that despite common assumptions, rating is actually a very poor proxy for skill, and an even worse proxy for a good match-up. Similarly skilled players won't always like to play with each other. Nor do I think that win-percentages are the only metric we have to work with -- most multiplayer games have reams of much better data to sort through, particularly in games with high variability of play-styles, player types, and team compositions and setups (games like League/Hearthstone/Overwatch, etc...)

That being said, I would be more amiable to a system that used player skill as a matchmaking tool if it didn't report those numbers to players.

However, I'm not sure I would say that sorting and reporting is usually a side effect or minor mistake on top of those systems, given that many of these games have seasons, rewards, an entire meta-game built on top of their rankings. The rankings aren't just serving the purpose of getting players matched together -- they're serving as player motivators. The responses that players have can't be seen as a purely accidental side-effect when designers are going out of their way to present this information to the player and to encourage the player to pay attention to it.

Hearthstone is a good example here. Hearthstone has brilliant design, but its ladder system is horrible and dumb. It explicitly encourages net-decking and grinding instead of experimentation. Fast decks are objectively better than slow ones with the same win percentage, because ranking is largely determined by win percentage combined with the number of games you can fit into a season.

Season rewards are then tied to rank, so the best way to get new cards if you want to experiment is to build a boring deck and grind. This is despite the fact that for most players, knowing within the first few turns whether or not they're going to win is not fun.

So of course people bot Hearthstone, because before you can build creative fun decks and play against interesting people with interesting strategies, you have to pay the "fun tax" of grinding on the ladder. Everything brilliant about Hearthstone is bogged down by being tied to this kind of toxic experience.

There's no way to say this about such a popular game without sounding naive, and I'll take the criticism, but I do not believe for one second it would be difficult to build a better public ranking system for Hearthstone, especially given the ludicrous amount of player data they have. Even something as simple as balancing rank with deck variety so players got fewer rewards the more times they played the same cards would go a huge way towards getting rid of net-decking.

These systems do increase engagement among very invested players, so maybe that's the only intention. But to heck with engagement -- is laddering at the higher ranks of Hearthstone fun? People do it, people say they enjoy it. Again, I'll take the criticism a statement like this warrants, but I don't believe them. I don't believe the experience of grinding a single 55% win-rate deck for hours and hours is an experience that is worth having or producing.

And when I think about why players do that, the only cause that comes to my mind is, "the game tells them to."

> I think my argument there would be that despite common assumptions, rating is actually a very poor proxy for skill

you can't know that without knowing the specifics of how that rating is generated.

I promise you ELO for chess is a hell of a lot more accurate than ELO for league.

I do know how the specifics of how these rankings are calculated because they're publicly visible[0]. I'm not arguing that behind the scenes Hearthstone's matchmaking isn't sophisticated enough (although it probably isn't), I'm arguing that publicly, the public mechanisms for determining rank are really bad and encourage bad play habits.

Hearthstone ranking is not a good proxy for skill, it's a good proxy for the amount of time you have to play and the speed of your deck. Objectively, the best strategy to get good ranks at Hearthstone is to build a fast, >50% win-rate deck and then to grind. That's not a good proxy for skill.

[0]: https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Ranked

I'd love to see the details on League of Legends ranking algorithm.

Sure!

https://dotesports.com/league-of-legends/news/league-of-lege...

> As players win games in ranked, they gain League Points, also more commonly known as LP. They also lose LP when they are defeated. Upon reaching 100 total LP in a given division, players enter a promotion series to try and get to the next available division.

> Players must win a majority of their games in order to advance to the next division. Promotion series within certain ranks, like Bronze III to II, are a best-of-three series. From one rank to the next, such as Silver I to Gold V, promotion series are best-of-five instead.

> If a player doesn’t win that amount of games, then they’ll need to get back to 100 LP to try again.

----

Yes, the exact details of how your MMR is calculated is kept secret, but it doesn't matter if you still know exactly what you need to optimize for: winning sequential games, often in chunks, and going out of your way to avoid losing streaks which can result in demotions.

Arguing that hiding the exact MMR formula means that players won't alter their behaviors to fit its approximate contours is like arguing that because Google's page-rank algorithm isn't public that SEO is not a thing.

(Some of) the consequences of this setup include:

A) losing matches becomes much more costly, which exasperates the problems League has with feeders and trolls, and lends itself to a more toxic environment.

B) Experimentation and learning new heroes is best done off of the ladder until you feel like you're competitive with that hero. Experimenting on the ladder is not only bad for your rank, it's also likely to get you reported by other teammates as a feeder (see the toxicity mentioned above).

Players are effectively optimizers. If you give them a system with a clear success metric (ie, a public rank going up), they will optimize their play-style to fit that system. Designers often assume players will stop doing this at some point. They won't grind in an RPG because that's boring. They won't bot a competitive game because that's not fun for other players.

Most players don't think in those terms during gameplay (myself included). Thinking that way is hard. As a designer, if you want a player to optimize for creating a fun experience for themselves and others, you have to explicitly build your publicly-facing systems to encourage that behavior.

That's an overview, not specifics and not details (verbiage that first you and then I used). It's a shitty sleight of hand, so I'm going bring this back around and then I'm done with you.

You stated that rank is a poor proxy for skill. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21952133

I stated you can't know that without details. Knowing that winning gives you more LP and losing takes it away is not detail nor specifics.

You can't know, but you're going to hold onto that branch rather than be a little introspective and consider that you may be wrong.

>That being said, I would be more amiable to a system that used player skill as a matchmaking tool if it didn't report those numbers to players.

Almost all of these games have an "unranked" mode in matchmaking that doesn't publicly report your rank.

>Hearthstone is a good example here. Hearthstone has brilliant design, but its ladder system is horrible and dumb.

Hearthstone is probably the worst collectible card game I've ever played. The actual gameplay of it is poor and heavily RNG reliant. It's not bad if you put in an inordinate amount of hours into it, because then you'll get a feel for what the opponent likely has and how likely you are to succeed, but this is generally not something you can just easily reason about without an absolute metric ton of experience. That's why net decking is so common - it's too difficult for most players to figure out near-optimal combinations, because they don't have as full of an overview of the game as the experienced players. The search space is just too large.

> Hearthstone is probably the worst collectible card game I've ever played.

:shrug:

I'm not going to argue about what games are good. Substitute out another online card game you like, I promise 90% of the time it will have the same problem. My experience with MTG Arena has taught me that net decking there is just as common, and I consider MTG to be a much more skill-based game than Hearthstone.

Like Hearthstone, MTG Arena has "unranked" modes, but like Hearthstone, the majority of rewards and design is meant to force you into ranked modes.

> it's too difficult for most players to figure out near-optimal combinations

Take a step back. Why do most players feel that they need to find near-optimal combinations? We have a ton of research on card-game archetypes going back over a decade. It is generally understood by every designer in the field that competitive optimizers are one player archetype of many, and often not even the largest one. But the design of our ranking systems explicitly encourages players to become competitive optimizers to the exclusion of every other archetype.

Of course, everyone wants to build good decks, but the experience of playing paper MTG with people even in semi-competitive settings is often very different than the experience of playing MTG Arena -- the "need" to optimize is on a whole new level. It's the same game, but the incentive structures of the metagame that surrounds it changes how the players act.

That's not to say that competitive players don't exist, but it is to say that in every area of card-game design, we recognize that the design space needs to be wider than that. And in our ranking systems, we don't. It's also not to say that stuff like tournaments are bad. It is to say that every online card game I have ever played suffers from these problems, and every one of them uses the same exact ranking system, and maybe the problems are related to that common element.

>Like Hearthstone, MTG Arena has "unranked" modes, but like Hearthstone, the majority of rewards and design is meant to force you into ranked modes.

Is it that the game designers sat down and deliberately designed a system to get you to play more ranked or did the players demand rewards for ranked (or the designers anticipated such a reward)? I've seen the latter happen in an online game. The players in World of Warships demanded more rewards after seeing the initial competitive game mode (team battles). Eventually the developers gave it to them.

That's very possible -- a lot of game features come out of that process.

But, I would say the responsibility of a designer is to be able to parse player feedback and disregard bad suggestions. If your players knew how to design a game, they would be game designers.

One of the big reasons design is so hard is because you're trying to understand another person's motivations better than they themselves do. Feedback shouldn't be ignored, but neither should it be implemented verbatim. Players just aren't good at sussing out their own motivations -- they'll tell you, "we want more rewards for ranked" instead of "we don't want to feel obligated to dip into unrelated game modes", or "we want to feel more like we're progressing towards something."

Players also aren't good at giving feedback about what feels wrong, their feedback instead takes the form of half-thought ideas of how to fix what feels wrong. Responding to that feedback means digging under it to find out the actual problem and addressing that specifically.

Note that this isn't just me talking. Rosewater himself has talked about this phenomenon a lot in his design blog on MTG, and he has a good quote on this[0]:

> The key is whether or not what the players want will in the end make them happy. Players ask for things all the time that if we actually gave them would make the game less enjoyable for them. We do spend a lot of time trying to understand what they players want, though, because when we are able to give players things they want, we do.

The point being, I have no doubt that if MTG Arena announced tomorrow that it was getting rid of ranked rewards and seasons, the playerbase would be livid. I still suspect an alternate system for rewards would be better in the long run.

[0]: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/s...

> Personal plug, with my current project, Loop Thesis, LAN play is the only multiplayer.

What do you mean by this? A lot of game developers seem to be obsessed with the term "LAN" but I don't really understand how that has anything to do with application level network protocols that build on IP, which does not care about physical network topology.

It is very irritating because each developer seems to have their own made-up definition of "LAN." For example, there are games that won't let you connect to IP addresses outside the private ranges. There are games that won't let you enter an IP at all, and instead require the host to be found by broadcasting on your subnet. There are games that won't let you connect across subnets for other, arbitrary reasons. And then there are many games where they use the term LAN but it has nothing at all to do with LAN and works exactly like online multiplayer in any old game -- select the host (or enter its IP) and bam you're connected, whether the connection is local or intercontinenal is none of the game's concern (this is how it should be).

I have no idea what I'm buying whenever I see a game that sells "LAN multiplayer."

There are no centralized servers for Loop Thesis, and each server hosts one game.

The game ships with tools that allow players to very quickly connect to running games on the same network as them, even if they don't have anything installed. Anyone with a copy of the game can turn on hosting, and the game will not only handle being a server, it will also serve a web-based client for the game.

In practice what that means is that if you own the game, you can pull out your laptop, connect to someone's wifi, turn on hosting, and all they need to do is visit a local IP on any of their devices[0] and they are instantly playing with you.

Of course, networking doesn't force you to be behind a NAT, so there's nothing preventing you from hosting a server on Linode and exposing that IP publicly. But aside from some token authentication options, the game isn't designed to handle a bunch of public anonymous connections. The server also isn't persistent; it's assumed that once you're done playing you will shut the client down, which will also shut the server down.

Short version, you have a traditionally hosted server with an IP address, and it's not pulling any fancy tricks to force you to set that server up in a specific way. But it's not designed to be a persistent server with uptimes of like a month or something, and it's designed to handle a few connections from people that you know. The out of the box experience is going to give you a Intranet IP, not a public one, and if you want to get it working over the public Internet for some reason, you'll need to handle stuff like port forwarding yourself.

That means: no matchmaking (one game per server), no public server lists[1], only minor authentication and anti-spam options, and transient servers that disappear when play sessions are over. Loop Thesis isn't technologically restricted to a LAN, but the experience is designed for drop-in, friends-get-together LAN play.

[0]: No promises, but I am experimenting with touch controls for phones.

[1]: Unless the community builds them and maintains them on their own.

I agree with your points. I used to play online shooters with private servers when I was a teenager, and I actually enjoyed the fact that you had a mix of skills on a given server at a given time, as well as the feeling of running into the same people when you frequent certain servers (i.e. a feeling of community).