> With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player.
This is theoretically expected of skill-based matchmaking systems.
This is theoretically expected of skill-based matchmaking systems.
Some games get this right, others (looking at you Apex Legends Arenas Mode) does not and it just winds up being a terrible slog.
Just double my queue time until we find a good match at that point.
Or maybe you should stop making new accounts and stop smurfing?
I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games.
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I get it. A lot of people want to be matched up against weaker players so that they have an easy win. That doesn't make it fair for the losers in this situation. Furthermore, it weakens the community and turns it more toxic. Expert players (or even advanced/intermediate players) shouldn't seek out weak players and stomp them.
50% win ratios, for everyone, should be the default goal. You climb the Elo to keep 50% win/loss, and as you lose, you fall to 50% win/loss as well, or so the ideal is. That way, everyone is on fair grounds.
If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? But a competitive game is zero-sum by default. Half the players lose, and half the players win each game. So community managers need to spread the wins and losses around in a fair way.
Yeah this is easily solved - just go ratting in high sec in a nice specced out Drekavac or something.
I used to think this way until I started to understand what it takes to become competitive at high levels. The most efficient way to improve is to play with and against people better than you. If you take your ego out of the equation and pretend everyone is there to teach you, it's hard NOT to learn something.
Tangential to that, a lot of people would be honored to play against a GM in chess. Yet when placed against actual GMs doing some variation of a "3000 elo speed run", they throw a fit. What? Maybe its cultural. For a while in SC2 GSL, there was a side show where a random amateur for the audience got to play against a pro. You could clearly see the reverence most of the amateurs held for their opponent.
Unless the opponent is purposefully throwing a "teaching game" and/or giving an appropriate handicap of some kind, this is absolutely not the case.
In Chess, games at the 1500 Elo level are won/lost due to a knight fork, a bishop pin, a skewer, and other such traps. GMs literally will give you _zero_ opportunities to find such mistakes from them, because they play nearly perfectly.
Finding such mistakes (in yourself, and your opponent) requires an opponent who makes such mistakes at a roughly the same level as you. GMs who can see maybe 2 or 3 moves ahead of you will prevent such mistakes from even occurring, giving you no chance to learn.
A "show match" vs a stronger player is to be honored, but its not a lesson learned. Its not a teaching game.
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Sure, GMs make mistakes. But the mistakes they make are invisible to 1500 Elo players. There's no hope to ever see it, and no one expecting to learn to play the game studies GM-level chess.
1500 Elo players will improve far faster with skewer puzzles, fork puzzles, outposts, etc. etc.
You learn skewers by practicing them a thousand times. Not by having a GM show you your mistake once over the next hour. Chess, at 1500 Elo, is decided by one mistake like that.
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There's also the chance that the GM performs a checkmate in 7 vs you. This is too far ahead for a 1500 Elo player to see, but something easily within a GM's grasp in the midgame. In this case, you learn nothing (you shouldn't be looking for checkmate in 7 or that depth as a 1500 Elo player)
This is why playing vs Stockfish (superhuman AI) is useless. It doesn't teach you how to think like a human or how to get better at chess as a human... all of Stockfish's moves are so deep that they're AI only.
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Its different if the GM is explicitly performing a "teaching game". (Ex: Hey, you can be pinned with this move, lets go back 2 moves so you can try to avoid it). But if the GM is there to troll you with shitty strategy because they're way stronger than you (ie: most online smurfs who are +200 or so Elo above you), then you learn nothing and simply serve as the opponent's entertainment for the night.
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Same thing with fighting games: go into training mode, and perform your combos another hundred times. You learn nothing from the opponent comboing you though.
Same thing with RTS games: go into training mode, and practice your build orders another hundred times. You learn nothing by the stronger opponent executing their build order perfectly.
Same thing with League of Legends. You learn nothing when the stronger opponent team combos / ganks you out of position. You need to practice your ganks (which are likely a different character, so you'd need a different set of spells used at different timing).
Etc. etc. Training / getting better at a game is very different from actually _playing_ the actual game.
But what's more important, is that if you apply the same logic to other players from 1 league higher than your real ELO - you should be the one losing over 50% of the time to make them happier :)
The result is that you'll go on win and loss streaks and if you play long enough it becomes obvious it's being manipulated that way.
Winning 1 or 2 and losing 1 or 2 are just fine.
winning 10-15 followed by losing 10-15 just feels bad and isn't worth it. And if you've played long enough you can start feeling when the tipping point is about to happen. The wins will start getting more and more difficult as more people on your team obviously don't belong in the game. Or vice versa, and you'll start getting people on your teams consistently such that nothing you do matters because you'll just win.
Then you add in a dash of streamers and people doing "bronze to plat" challenges and it's just not fun. Either they're losing on purpose to tank their rank or they're pubstomping people far below their skill level.
The end result is that it all just feels bad and the only people that end up playing a significant number of games are actively addicted to it.
Anecdote: My friends played the first few ranked seasons on my Xbox Overwatch account, they started at Bronze and eventually got to Silver. I decided to pick it up and play ranked with a different friend, we won 9/10 of the placement matches. I got ranked Silver, he got ranked Platinum. A month later, I make a new Overwatch account on PC and rank Platinum with ease.
In these systems, if you gain a lot of skill in a short amount of time, or have bad luck early on in your ranked career, you can be held back in rank gains to the point that you are essentially stuck in place. Creating a new account generally allows you to advance significantly faster through the ranks.
Also, to improve, you probably have to lose a bunch of games while you're unlocking that new knowledge. The toxicity of teammates kind of steers people away from that. Thus people get stuck at where they place and never go up or down significantly.
It still averages out to 50% winrate. Just because you can force a point of convergence does not mean it is the correct point of convergence.
The competitive ladder climbing meta is really about recognizing when you shouldn't be playing and not playing then. Interesting angle to optimize.
Achieving an equilibrium is step 1. Allowing for upward mobility is step 2. Enabling that upward mobility to occur (correctly) over fewer and fewer games is step 3.
Alternatively, you could also skip step 3, and profit off of smurfing.
Winning is a zero-sum game. If they target something higher than 50%, there would have to be a reservoir of players willing to take less than 50%…
Now, winning a single game of LoL is zero-sum, but you can't say that the ratings themselves are. Without knowing what the actual system is doing, we can't assume that players are losing/winning the same number of ranking points in a game.
Trying to draw parallels with singleplayer content where you can progress regardless of actually getting better is a lost cause.
Settlers is so fun because you really feel like you're on a journey the whole game, and while it is nice to win, you remember the interactions and experiences in the game as the valuable thing(IMO).