Yup old system was better. Encouraging those who only care about doing damage was a wrong path to take. Modes where you are on a team there is supposed to be some semblance of teamwork and that isn't necessarily possible when players are baiting to deal the most damage.
The idea previously was it would be better for the community overall if people didn't care if they won or lost and would freely change teams mid game if the game was unbalanced.
Unfortunately it was just abused too much by people hiding in attempts to get more damage alone, selling their team up the river and dragging the games on pointlessly as they're hunted down, typically not actually getting them any more damage in the end as they're wiped out by multiple players.
You'll still get some heroes thinking that they'll win by hiding and clearing up what's left, but hopefully that will be less often soon after they realise how unlikely that is to happen, and how much better the win gain is too.
Basically, sensitive shits ruined even clan arena who moan and bitch about uneven teams. That whole idea defeats the purpose of having any sort of rating system to rely upon, maybe we could just play without any rating and we could expect players to make the intelligent choices of balancing them out? Who the fuck had this idea? And this 20% increase? Who is this sensitive shit who can't stomach that clan arena has been as worse as it can get, because of this "winning doesn't matter, let's all play together for fun and good things in the world", maybe let's fucking sing a kumbaya song while at it?
Individual performance should be a minor increase at most.
Clan arena has been so fucking shit since the old system went downhill.
Do you want
(1) no stats;
(2) stats dependent on which team wins only;
(3) stats dependent on individual performance regardless of which team wins;
(4) some mix of (2) and (3)?
I was just ranting, not necessarily providing any tangible solutions, but since you asked.
There are only two ways on how make it work.
Option (2) by making stats dependent by only winning.
Or the best option would be a mix of having stat distribution dependent 80-90% on winning and the rest 10-20% at most by individual performance.
Individual performance cannot outweigh or even be comparable to the bonus of winning, otherwise it will heavily promote playing by using your team as a meat-shield for victory. Performance rating should just be a softening factor of stats for being on the losing team by doing well and just a bonus, nothing more, of doing well and being on the winning team.
The whole idea of balancing players mid games defeats the purpose of having any sort of system to rely upon, because it manipulates of how the ratings should evolve. Rating is not an absolute, but a relative representation of the players skill, we can't expect balanced games just because some number is equal, but we can expect for the rating to categorize the players between the most balanced, expected teams over time by letting it rate the players which takes a certain amount of unaltered games for the rating to represent the most accurate level of skill.
Players have been playing like total idiots because of the current system, the team success is what matters the most, now it's just however you can get more damage done is what matters most and as long as performance will have such priority, nothing will change.
The only way how to abuse this is tied to the very game type the rating is designed to rate, clan arena lacks objective.
Even this way playing by using your team as a meat-shield is the most effective way on how to gain rating, but in comparison to the existing system the player risks pulling his team down and being penalized for the loss. Not worth the risk, but if someone can perform and pull out a victory, its a justifiable gain.
No system can solve deliberate manipulation of rating and since we are talking about a team game, even more impossible to make the influence of your team not relevant to your rating.
It's a problem the community itself needs to deal with, the individuals responsible for such "violation", let's call it that, should be recognized by the community and dealt with in one way or another.
A 20% bonus means you still have a performance on which you get that bonus. Not that, of your elo, 20% comes from the win and 80% from damage and kills. I see why trump won tho, u fooled yourself and got angry.
I'm fine with performance having some significance but maybe at most 50%. Doing damage should not necessarily override playing intelligently. Anyway truth be told applying some kind of individual ELO rating on a team mode, especially one that is generally played with randoms, is probably not very accurate anyway.
My experience (both theoretical and direct) is that it takes a while to get in line with your skill bexause it's hard to differenciate between your performance and the one of your teammates, and if u only play with the same teammates you will never be judged properly... but once it gets to guess your skill properly, the games become awesome
Losing to a team with average 400 elos more is pretty grey, no? You shouldn't lose even more elo to that. (Or win more elo as a high elo team for that matter).
i still don't understand over reactions of some people. I think the guys in charge of qlstats did a great job. It's much better than games with no rating in terms of balance.
Any systems has pros and cons i think.
System where only win/loss would mater would mean someone could on purpose get a lower rating just by losing and still doing x2 the damage of any other players in the teams.
Rating on team games is something hard to do.
There are some other things that could be fine tuned to determine rating :
- is it the first match of the day of player x?
- is he playing with his average ping or higher?
-etc.
If you guys have more ideas it would be good to hear about them.
If you don't want people to play with consideration of stats, get rid of stats. :D
CA isn't even a team mode anyway. It is a solo game in which you are ostensibly placed on a team. So many players do not play for the team win, but for the damage, KDR, MVP, and accuracy stats, for being last man standing and showing off. The fact that you can play this essentially ignoring your team and their score is a big part of what makes it popular.
Much of what you list has only really been the case for a significant percentage when losing didn't effect the rating, which this change is here to resolve.
The stats only exist at all to try and create more balanced games.
IMO stats should be completely invisible and only affect internal skill balancing functions. But if that were the case, how could we brag anymore?
Yeah, and I think CA has always been like that---even among people who never look at qlranks or qlstats. You can consider it a "win" for yourself if you play well personally at the expense of your team---even better if you topped the losing team because you can lord it over them.
The problem is it being a 3rd party site they had to show the numbers in order for people to tag the servers with ranges for the users, or let people know how far short they are for a rating gate etc.
Yes, but the previous qlstats system definitely significantly increased such behaviour.
I can't imagine how retarded it must have become since my last game if that's the case.
Maybe they could make access API only, conceal the numbers in game, and use tiers for gating. It didn't seem to cause a problem before, not knowing under what exact conditions you rose from one tier to the next.
But yeah, don't see it happening. People would soon find a way of making the number public anyway. Hopefully, QC will not fall into this trap.
Edited by CaptainTaichou at 10:59 CDT, 25 May 2017
Well, I'm sure they could be added just as easily as permitting people to enter servers based on elo. It's basically the same without the ranges being known or elo advertising---in much the same way as it was in pre-steam QL.
Anyway, just a thought. I don't expect it to happen. :D
Quake Live dropped the tiers because when they moved completely to steam they no longer hosted any services/stats etc, no where to store client info, ranking etc, so no tiers. And there are no updates planned for QL in the future (everyone was moved to other projects including Quake Champions).
Qlstats is a 3rd party system, they can't create tiers within the game, the game web browser and steam browser won't support them, all they can do, is what they're doing, encourage people to list ranking levels in server titles or tags.
Why could it not theoretically be standardized by the community?
I'm guessing the main reason is that there is too much demand to see these numbers, so you won't be able to get every server to agree to hide them.
Tier 1 could be 0-1200 elo.
Tier 2 could be 1200-1600 elo.
Tier 3 could be 1600-2000 elo.
Tier 4 could be 2000+ elo.
Then everyone could tag their server with the tiers they allow and configure their plugin to kick or whatever tiers outside that range, without ever telling anyone what their elo is. People can check which tier they are in in the same way as they check what their elo is now.
It's essentially just a course grained elo that serves the purpose of keeping people of different skill levels apart while not giving enough detail for stats to be usefully abused.
Sorry if I'm missing something glaringly obvious. I've only touched QL a few times post-Steam.
Edited by CaptainTaichou at 13:07 CDT, 25 May 2017
But someone would have to write a modified game browser to handle the tiers in the same way as the duel matchmaking workshop item, which has to be subscribed to and a command line option added to the game, which shuts out a lot of people even from that first step.
And that still wouldn't effect Steam's built in server browser which would always be a problem.
Well yeah, all of that non-id, non-steam code floating around has been specifically written around letting people see the stats. It could have been done differently, but I'm not expecting it to be.
I do think it is done this way because of the demand to see these numbers. Whether it actually benefits the game, who knows, but it does create a few problems.
I've played a lot of CA, but you're not wrong. Its attraction is that it is the easy, relaxing, and social mode of Quake. It's like hanging out at the pub.
It appears a bit more popular than it is because of the fact it doesn't take any effort to organize games (team balance isn't half as important since you can play only for yourself, and bad balance doesn't mean you're stuck with MG for 20 minutes) and the fact it is the mode people settle for when it is too difficult or impossible to get a game in their preferred mode.
As much as MM can suck in other ways, it could have helped in making organizing those CTF and TDM games a lot easier.
Bad balance does mean you're stuck in spec not playing at all though. That's the main reason I've still usually suggested new players don't go to CA if they can find any other game type going.
Balancing isn't completely irrelevant in CA, but it does better than the other modes in its absence, which is obvious since for the vast majority of its existence, there has been no balancing system in CA, and it was still popular.
Unless you're a completely new player, you can usually survive long enough in a round due to large starting stack and weapons, and if you die, then you get to enjoy the social element, which, for a lot of people, is more fun than being repeatedly fragged while only having MG. Each round is also a fresh start, the bad plays of the past erased. If you're down one man for a round due to a leaver, it's only that round that is ruined.
A completely new player is probably much better off playing FFA than any team mode.
Honestly I don't even know what mode megaman plays or who his ingame name is. I've never seen him or anyone else mention it.
But I do know that TDM is dead. CTF is dead. Duel might as well be dead. In fact, wasn't there a post by the admin of 125fps a few weeks ago saying that there wasn't really anymore money for duel weekly cups? So that's pretty much dead, cause if I understand it was mostly just Alexy A paying for all that shit, primarily.
Only gaining elo when you won was the best system.
More true emotions in the game, people were fighting for the win, talking to their team, tactics, flaming etc.
Now playing CA there is only white noise.
Some high elo dude who plays like shit is trying to keep or raise that fake elo, the rest doesn't care about anything. Tell them to go top, they answer something incomprehensible. They don't care, why should they? Win, lose, the same.
Do you believe someone actually thought this would be good for the community? Well, that happened and this 20% increase still shows ignorant reasoning and observation of what is happening in the servers.
I haven't played QL CA in years, but perhaps it is a stupid idea to introduce elo into a mode not meant to be played in a competitive manner. Does anyone actually believe that 8 people accumulating on bridge at the start of the round is the optimal way to play CA? If people played to win, both teams would gather at different locations at the beginning and then it's peek-a-boo with rails for 2 minutes. Somebody camping at some location on their own would do worse. In this scenario, elo based on dmg would make perfect sense, cause that's what wins you rounds.
Consequently, the guys currently camping at rail rightly get the highest elo reward because that's still a better idea than instant death by joining the general fuckery happening over at bridge.
anyway, it's kinda funny that people claim to play in this manner in order to have fun, cause it isn't. Anybody who ever played cpm or warsow CA knows what actual fun CA looks like.
no one since 2002 have won any ca tournment playing like that. since introducing 200 100 hp and 80 dmg rail, being in the face has won all significant matches.
In the only LAN event in which CA/RA has ever been featured, Quakecon 2013, the champions won by playing more strategically than just 'all bridge'. The guy who you are replaying to is right.
This is a good opportunity to remind you all that rapha -the guy criticized for having lousy aim and for criticizing CA- is among the top3 CA players in the world. Being at the top of the scoreboard in a public server (like heartless and jigglywiggly) is fruitless and an indicator of nothing, since nobody there is playing to win. "All bridge" has never been the optimal, but merely the laziest.
15 years of clanbase data or
1 tournament at a duel only conference in a country with no community in a format never played before or after. (like 3on3, best of 7 rounds?, selfdmg and never seen before or after maps)
take a wild guess what I find most the most compelling data to comment on.
Your choice is to think online tournaments matter, while mine is that only LANs matter because that's the only opportunity when players take the game seriously.
Colwn/IC attended. That's the best EU clan by far, in Quake history.
What stupid reasoning is this? There are plenty of competetive players in online cups and even in public who take the game seriously, one LAN is no indication of anything. This guy Vium knows what he is talking about, solid player.
"Playing more strategically" outside of the most strategical and important position is very disadvantagous, there's good reason why players fight over fixed points in the maps. The maps don't change, they are asymetrical and they don't allow for much flexibility for teams to start off in atypical positions, because they suck.
I've seen the 2013 QuakeCon CA, you don't really see anything new from them in comparison of any 2k+ average elo game on public.
So winning 50 public court matches matter more than winning one grand final of Roland Garros, just because players took it seriously in both and it was a steady result over time?
That event was the only time when the best names showed up (colwn is not a groups of amateurs -- unlike all CA-only players), with players from all over the world (not only one region), when players had a reason to deliberately practice (money and pride), when the playing conditions were the same (LAN) and when pressure became a factor (not playing from the comfort of your mom's place or subsided by the government). All those factors bring more legitimacy to live events than online play.
The thing that happened there was that the CA event was won by using a different playstyle than usual and by different players. That's what the footage shows and what we are discussing, and it did happen. You can't argue against the footage. Then I'm saying that happened because that's what happens when a game reaches more exposure. Better players show up and they tend to play strategically, hence brings legitimacy and the previous online matches matter none.
For example Evil and Strenx have won everything online for the past 8 years, winning hundreds of online cups, but we know all those online cups matter less than winning one Quakecon. 50 public court wins equals 0 wins of the actually competitive play. I assure you Evil and Strenx think their best achievements in Quake were the second places they got on LAN, outclassing the hundreds of online cups they won. But of course CA people think backwards, as per usual.
Or for another example, Rapha doesn't play CA online, just like Federer doesn't play in public courts, and then he showed up at only cup that mattered and won, by playing strategically as that's what wins in Quake rather than mindless +forward. The actual achievement is to beat him, and when it matters/counts (online doesn't count because good players don't play to win online -- sorry Heartless).
Good thing in the real world only live events matter, and ESR 's opinion doesn't. If it was for ESR then 125FPS cups would matter for something, rofl. Luckily people that actually go to LANs know that's the only thing that matters, and that online play is just mere warming up for the event so the online match results don't matter, whether you call it cups, ranked elo or whatever. Guess it's a difficult concept to grasp for somebody that only plays the warmup mode of the game, the Soccer Tennis of Quake, and especially for someone that tries to give it credibility.
And before this is brought up, if he or other known player didn't attend then it was their decision and it doesn't diminish the legitimacy of the event. We are all adults here so we all could have went there if we really wanted to, and the best players of the two major regions did attend. It's just one week of vacation and we all here in a mere month earn more than enough to go to Quakecon. And yes it was fun to write the words legitimacy and CA in one sentence, since it sounds like defending competitive Soccer Tennis.
well I will agree 100% that if we had a format like the one played at quakecon regardless of it being, online / at a lan / even stacked with quakelive ca only players, the top teams would be the same as at quakecon 2013.
playing a more standard format of CA I doubt the result would be the same. Taking into consideration more teams/players (not only duel players attending a ca tournament), 4on4, clan arena maps, no timer etc.
clown/IC best clan in EU history? They are one of the strongest team in tdm, but never saw them playing any ca before quakecon 2013. They did bring Hal over who is a top ca player for sure, and the rest aint bad either.
I'd like to see this data as i think you are comparing some CPMA cups (air control = much more agressive playstyle potential) vs VQ3.
You forgot that in QL you don't have to eliminate the whole team to win a round, that's what made the big difference in gameplay at QC CA and that's why its also smarter to not forget about that.
fact is that we saw u playing CA, you hide at start most of the time, you don't straight out engage, you attack from the back while your team mates are already engaged.
well I did play ca/ra3 back then, when RA3 introduced 200 100 as start dmg the gamestyle changed significantly, much more aggressive and less rail heavy. Changed the game and rocket jumping teams like EK started winning. :)
Well I don't deny that I shot people in the back, if they are stupid enough to go 2on1 and leave me free, I however always start at the same place as my team. (at mp)
The distortion of Elo ratings combined with the huge difference between players on some of the servers is more of an issue than people who just chose to stay alive. I always thought a tier system positively influenced gameplay and must admit now we are playing without them In a Royal rumble of noobs and pros, I do certainly miss them. Even though a player could be classed as T4 at 1600+ which was totally bullshit, it still stopped an 1100 player joining and forcing peopleto play in a more passive style.
Even with all that said, the apparent constant influx of "new" players (more like smurf acc) just puts a huge strain on system. Since the change I have seen no difference in the way people play. Somebody commented on the way quake live CA is now played and they are totally correct. 8 players all rushing to 1 spot on the map to brawl it out like a gang of fools is just absurd, something which I never understood about QL. Coming from previous quake CA scenes, players where encouraged to explore the entire map and not be obsessed with the outcome.
All of this combined just turns the CA scene into the Atlantic of hell, full of salty twats. We have to appreciate predator for trying to improve things, but, anything which is used is only as good as the players who inhabit the servers.