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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

It wasn't that this player was disrespectful/racist/etc., it's that they were so much better that playing against this player was almost a guaranteed loss.

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That sounds like a valid reason to avoid playing against that player.

Not in ranked games. I'd be the greatest chess player in history if I all I needed to do was block the grand masters.

True, I suppose it depends on why you're playing the game in the first place. I was thinking of someone just playing them to have fun.

Maybe the system was different back then, but now Avoid will only avoid the player as a teammate, they can still be on the enemy team. So if someone is too good, there's no incentive to avoid them.

Wouldn't a good skill based matchmaking system take care of that?

That’s the problem.

this player was at the top of the matchmaking ladder

that (very small) population had a lot of people who wanted to avoid him

he couldn’t get games at his current level, and he couldn’t rise above that level, because there was nothing above that level

Maybe that means he won the game and it's time to do something else until someone with similar skill comes along? Or maybe there should be a handicapping system.

There were players of similar (and higher) skill — but they didn’t want to play with him because he was “annoying” to play against.

Which is a normal part of a competitive multiplayer game, except that people got the option to avoid him (rather than learn to beat him), so many took it!

If they were playing the game to have fun, it's an entirely rational decision to make, even if it's unfair to the good player. In fact if the developers were optimising the game for fun they should have kept the feature as it was. In my opinion it should be more important to optimise games for fun than for fairness, but I suppose the developers don't share that opinion if they changed it.

Optimizing for fun is kind of impossible, at least in the sense of making a fun but unfair game. Fun games are inherently ones where you're matched with players at your skill level, and you're actually being challenged while still getting kills. Going 30-0 is only fun for so long (and for the people who don't get tired of it, they often go and download a cheating program).

I mean, this are competitive games after all. Racing against Max Verstappen on iRacing is not an issue, it's what makes those games interesting. You don't ban Federer/Nadal out of tennis, you let people compete to raise the bar.

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