New players and the rating system.

[Evan_]

I think that having new players play against 1200s and 1500s is harming the ladder population. Now I don't know exactly how the matchmaker works but the result is a lot of downsides and no real benefit that I can see.

New players can easily get discouraged playing against people way above their skill level. They don't learn anything from getting crushed in 6 minutes, or by being overwhelmed with random advice from some well meaning opponent. It's true that you need a bit of a thick skin and patience to improve in supcom but newbs should be able to learn at their own pace, against players of their own skill level. A new player that I befriended told me he was still playing against 1k rated even after his 10th ladder game, and after stabilizing at 300 points. Granted this may be because there were no other newbs searching, but the point is he was made to think that playing against people 700 points over you is normal. That's understandably a tough idea to face and made him quit ladder entirely. If he had started against new players and had time to build up confidence, I think he would still be searching today.

It's not exactly fun for the more experienced player either. It feels bad knowing that you might be the reason someone quits, or spending 20 minutes giving advice and explaining stuff when they might not even come back (and with good reason if they think playing against someone with 200+ games is normal for newbs). Other players I've listened to seem frustrated by this; it certainly puts me off searching ladder when I know that most of the time it won't be an actual game but 20 minutes of talking and then steamrolling with 40 blaze tanks because I get bored.

And don't get me started on the new players who search when no-one's high enough to play against them. If you ever visit FAF during dead times you'll see why many new players think the ladder system is broken. There are many timezones that simply don't have any regular ladder players in the 1-1.5k range, so no first timers can find a game to get them started. I'm not saying that reducing the starting rating will turn Australian FAF into ladder heaven, but I think it would help a little. At the very least if a newb complains about getting no 1v1 action you can simply state that noone his level is searching, instead of explaining how he has to return 7 hours later whereupon he will get crushed several times in a row.

high starting deviation and playing your first game against mediumish ladder players doesn't deter smurfing either. In fact, I'd say it actually encourages smurfing as ~1k ladder is still pretty relaxed (and we rage and call everyone a smurf which gets them laughs). If they feel like playing against newbs anyway they can simply lose the first few games on purpose. And at the same time, because the system treats new accounts like an average player they give the same rating when defeated. I've probably grabbed about a hundred points from games where I shouldn't earn any, I'm sure others have gained more.

It's pretty clear to me that most 0 rated accounts actually are new, and not returning 2013 pros, GPG vets, or old players on a fresh account. Of my last 5 ladder games, 4 have been against people who were completely new to ladder, only one of which had played a couple teamgames before and gotten a bit of global rating. Why can't they play against each other?

I'm not saying we should have them fight only against other 0's. Perhaps shift it back so they look for someone in the 0-500 range and slowly widen the search if noone's within that rating. But please do something, this is making new and old players alike stop playing.

[Katharsas]

It's quite simple:
The mean rating of starting players is set to be 1500. This means we have a massive inflation in rating, because the relevant average is much lower (between 850 and 900 according to stats, see below) and the mean mean-rating is even lower (about 790). This means on average players need to loose about 600 points to settle into the expected rating distribution, and 50% of players have to loose more than 700 points.


New players are SUPPOSED to start with the average rating to keep the system inflation/deflation free. This is not the case currently, but could be easily fixed. Set starting mean rating to 800 (lower than average if we predict more new players relative to old vets to make new accounts that play ladder). It will cause new players rating to show up as -700 in their first game, but whatever.


Numbers found in stats thread are from here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

[Blodir]

Now i'm no expert here but i imagine we probably don't have a lot of total beginners playing ladder so they don't really have anyone of their skill level to match against. Better to get imba match than no match imo

[Evan_]

It's quite simple:
The mean rating of starting players is set to be 1500. This means we have a massive inflation in rating, because the relevant average is much lower (between 850 and 900 according to stats, see below) and the mean mean-rating is even lower (about 790). This means on average players need to loose about 600 points to settle into the expected rating distribution, and 50% of players have to loose more than 700 points.

New players are SUPPOSED to start with the average rating to keep the system inflation/deflation free. This is not the case currently, but could be easily fixed. Set starting mean rating to 800 (lower than average if we predict more new players relative to old vets to make new accounts that play ladder). It will cause new players rating to show up as -700 in their first game, but whatever.

Numbers found in stats thread are from here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

The idea of curbing rating inflation/deflation makes sense but I'm not entirely inclined to trust it because if a new player starts laddering, donates rating, and then stops, the system stays balanced in theory but actually stays inflated because the active players have a bit more rating to share. Granted that's a player retention problem, and it is offset a little by higher rated players leaving as well. As mentioned before though, me and others have had rating inflated by hundreds of points like this. I'm just worried that this inflation will merely shift down to the <1k players if we still keep starting rating high enough, because going up against someone who is 800 still seems a bit unfair to new players. That said, it might be less one sided and will take fewer games to end up against other new opponents so retention might improve.

Now i'm no expert here but i imagine we probably don't have a lot of total beginners playing ladder so they don't really have anyone of their skill level to match against. Better to get imba match than no match imo

I was under the impression that the lower levels were pretty populated. Some of my friends (SilentWar and AlphaCommander) seemed to have no problem getting game after game at around 300 rating, some against 800s but many with much lower ranked as well.

[FtXCommando]

Now i'm no expert here but i imagine we probably don't have a lot of total beginners playing ladder so they don't really have anyone of their skill level to match against. Better to get imba match than no match imo

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Doesn't make much sense to justify the current deviation with the reality that was created around that deviation when the objective is to circumvent the issue that this reality built itself around.

At the present moment FAF's competitive scene is kept around on life support through the sheer stubborn will of the very few new people that push through the stupid roadblocks the system puts in place for itself.

[moonbearonmeth]

Now i'm no expert here but i imagine we probably don't have a lot of total beginners playing ladder so they don't really have anyone of their skill level to match against. Better to get imba match than no match imo

Given 2/3 ladder matches I play are against fresh meat I have come to the conclusion that there is quite a few total beginners.

[RealityCheck]

Now i'm no expert here but i imagine we probably don't have a lot of total beginners playing ladder so they don't really have anyone of their skill level to match against. Better to get imba match than no match imo

If two total beginners search at the same time will the system match them? Has anyone ever seen this happening?


I am absolutely astounded that this situation is still unchanged after those years. The system is catering to a case that is unimportant. A player who knows the game enough to be able to stand against a 1400 opponent is unlikely to be discouraged easily by some quirk in the system. These days such a player is probably a smurf anyway.

FAF should be trying to make a good impression to the players who are new to the game. They don't yet have a reason to be patient and willing to overcome obstacles - they have so many other games to choose from. They are giving one chance to FAF and FAF is squandering it.

[AdmiralZeech]

Every statistical rating system I've seen (ie. ELO and its descendants, trueskill etc.) seems to start new players at the average rating, with the expectation that if they're truly new, they'll lose their way down to their correct rating eventually. This seems to be a mathematical requirement of those sorts of systems.


Have we seen other games that use these sorts of rating systems do anything different, to improve the early experience of new players?

[Exotic_Retard]

thanks to softly, we know that we do have a lot of beginners playing ladder, infact the rating distrubution has massive skews in the ladder rating, thats not present in the global rating.

heres one of his lovely graphs, we see that the highest proportions of ladder players are really low rated players, followed by somewhat low rated players, followed by average rated players!

so really we see here that ~60-75% of ladder games are 1k or under!

note that this is mean and not displayed rating, which is likely the reason why 1200-1400 is much lower than 1400-1600, since a totally new player starts at 1500 rating. that rating category is severely bloated because of all the new players, and they dont last long either! so it has to be a large number that joins ladder for the first time to bloat it so much since they move out of that category quickly.


it was decided by the council that this is an issue and needs to be addressed, but we dont have anyone who can do the job xD as usual, the issue is in the lack of technical hands, so if anyone wants they can help out!

[Katharsas]

How hard can it be to change the starting rating? The starting rating is arbitrary, except that it should always be the average rating of all active ladder participants (with reasonable low deviation). It should not be possible to break anything by changing it. On the contrary, the current starting rating IS what is broken. Can't be much simpler.

And if you want to calculate the average rating make sure you exclude inactive players and players with a high deviation (any new players that haven't yet reached a low deviation have inflated rating, so exclude them). There is nothing complicated about this.

If that is fixed, other things can still be changed to make it better yet. But the adjusting the starting rating should be the first step.