New players and the rating system.

[keyser]

Another problem that needs to be solved is separated rating for ladder. Complete bs. If a player farms single 1v1 map he gets overrated AF; if player plays 30+ different maps he doesn't get any global rating to "prevent him from being overrated in team games". A lot of sence here!

System needs to go back to single rating or at least make ladder affect global again. Although knowing how things are done in this community we'll more likely to sit with broken things for years and ignore them.

you don't fix an issue by creating another issue.
rating from ladder influencing the "global rating" was an horrible thing.
The "global rating" is already completely fucked with people playing only same map all the time (no need to make the global rating even more unreliable), so i guess we can't just unrate the custom 1v1 so we have to stick with 1v1 being a way to get over-rated for teamgame too.

Although knowing how things are done in this community, there will still be people complaining about some random stuff while dev tries to make the best out of their time.

[nine2]

as a 1500 rated ranked player i have played zillions of noobs. they get demoralized about being crushed i have had to rehearse a little speach about how it all works because i dont want them to give up.

its also annoying to me to play 5 games and 4 are vs noobs.

we should definately change something. we have new players coming in to ranked and their opening experience is to get raped. we drive the new players away.

what the heck

[moonbearonmeth]

i have had to rehearse a little speach about how it all works because i dont want them to give up.

I prefer my one line, much more efficient

Spoiler: show

[SpoCk0nd0pe]

Despite the obviously long overdue change to the initial rating, you might also want to think about a noob ladder.

Sure, it would take coding time to make but I think it would greatly help player retention.

The most striking property of SupCom is it's very complicated flux eco and the resulting very complicated and often very map specific build orders. Smaller maps with less reclaim are usually easier to learn. New players could get more games decided by correctly judging strategic situations, unit movements etc. instead of just having way more stuff because someone spent more time learning to copy advanced builds. At least in my view this is the fun part about playing

[uteten]

I'm way too tired to quote and/or read all of this, but this has never stopped me from adding my two cents.
there currenty is two mayor problems with the ladder and these are:
-new players not finding any opponents
-new players getting demotivated to play more than just a couple of ladder game

Regarding the first point, I had to answer the same questions both in newbie chat and in discord multiple times: 'why cant I find a ladder match? does ladder even work?' There is imo 2 easy things that can be done to make the problem far less worse.
1. coding a popup windpow that open as soon as a player searches ladder for the first time explaining the problem to new players.
2. expanding the range from which to get their first opponent from 1200-1400 to 1000-1600 fe. (please note that im strongly arguing against my own interests here since i am 1500 and these games just suck)

So I dont really understand what the fuzz is all about when these solutions are not that difficult to come up with.

Regarding the second point, I fail to understand why loosing your first games would take a hit at your motivation. It didnt affect me back then. Who on earth joins FAF as a new player, queues up for the first game and thinks: 'Oh yea, I have a decent change of winning!?' Of course you gonnna loose! Its the same in any other gaming community which has a rating system. Do you actually believe lowering the starting rating would fix this? A new player; a truely new player and not some 'old GPG pro' horseshit wont see the difference and quality in playstyle between a 1000,1200 and 1400 rated player. The only reason i can think of that would make lowering the starting rating useful, is that it would take fewer games to get to you real rating and a low enough deviation, thereby reducing the number of losses you have to endure. But I dont know enough about the rating system to know if this is actually true.

[Apofenas]

you don't fix an issue by creating another issue.
rating from ladder influencing the "global rating" was an horrible thing.
The "global rating" is already completely fucked with people playing only same map all the time (no need to make the global rating even more unreliable), so i guess we can't just unrate the custom 1v1 so we have to stick with 1v1 being a way to get over-rated for teamgame too.

Easy stacking that nobody notices. If you have 2 players with similiar rating you just go to their replays. You put the one with ladder in your team and the one with gap in enemy team. Balance number stays same, but you get superior player. Funny thing that this logic applies even to some 2k players...

One knows how to make units, play everything, do his own scouting, air, power and take map control; other may start t2 mex before 2d factory, flood your chat for e, poke air player everytime scout passes his base and whine about his team when he dies. Will you need 2d guess to know who is who?

Currently ladder players end up hardly underrated. Just going to throw a couple names i heard this week: Blinchik(1600/1800); frodon (1100/1500); SYSTEM_FAILURE(1) GodKngXerxesNoob(1500/2000). Sure may be they are not as good at team games as they ladder rating says, but they are better than their global rating say and when you play 1v1 or 2v2 you are likely to trust the ladder one.

2. expanding the range from which to get their first opponent from 1200-1400 to 1000-1600 fe. (please note that im strongly arguing against my own interests here since i am 1500 and these games just suck)

Be top 100 ladder, but still rage from getting 0s? No, thanks, that would only hurt ladder in the rating area where we don't have a lot of players already. Personally i thought getting 1500+ in ladder is the number 1 goal in order to not get new players against you and not waste time on them. Sure the rating range should be expanded, but not 1000-16000, but rather 500-1100 where we the majority of our player base and most ladder games happen.

Regarding the second point, I fail to understand why loosing your first games would take a hit at your motivation. It didnt affect me back then. Who on earth joins FAF as a new player, queues up for the first game and thinks: 'Oh yea, I have a decent change of winning!?' Of course you gonnna loose! Its the same in any other gaming community which has a rating system. Do you actually believe lowering the starting rating would fix this? A new player; a truely new player and not some 'old GPG pro' horseshit wont see the difference and quality in playstyle between a 1000,1200 and 1400 rated player. The only reason i can think of that would make lowering the starting rating useful, is that it would take fewer games to get to you real rating and a low enough deviation, thereby reducing the number of losses you have to endure. But I dont know enough about the rating system to know if this is actually true.

Ladder says "the player of your skill is looking for game". So if you are going to ladder for first time, you'd likely to expect somebody who is new to this game either. Leaderboards show 5400 players in ladder rated 0+. Yet from all that amount only 470 of them are 1.1k+. Ladder should not bother these players with newbs and match those with remaining 4930.

When i came to FAF i thought i'd be placed against noobs first and get some easy rating since i watched TA4life channel and knew a lot of things about the game. Was a surprise to see 1500 even though 1500 wasn't a lot at that moment since we had much bigger ladder player base in 2013.

[uteten]

Be top 100 ladder, but still rage from getting 0s? No, thanks, that would only hurt ladder in the rating area where we don't have a lot of players already. Personally i thought getting 1500+ in ladder is the number 1 goal in order to not get new players against you and not waste time on them. Sure the rating range should be expanded, but not 1000-16000, but rather 500-1100 where we the majority of our player base and most ladder games happen.

1. Top100 ladder starts at 1613 rating (June 26th;15:13 CEST)
2. It was fe, an example
3. If you have never played ladder before, you get, as i said!, matched up with players between 1200 and 1400 so I have no idea where you got this 1500+ thing from
4. Why should 1200-1400s 'waste their time' as you call it with zeroes, but 1400-1600s shouldnt? I have checked your replay history, and you cntrlk-ed multiple times when you were matched up vs zeros. Very mod-like behaviour indeed; setting up a good example for the community to follow!

Ladder says "the player of your skill is looking for game". So if you are going to ladder for first time, you'd likely to expect somebody who is new to this game either. Leaderboards show 5400 players in ladder rated 0+. Yet from all that amount only 470 of them are 1.1k+. Ladder should not bother these players with newbs and match those with remaining 4930.

When i came to FAF i thought i'd be placed against noobs first and get some easy rating since i watched TA4life channel and knew a lot of things about the game. Was a surprise to see 1500 even though 1500 wasn't a lot at that moment since we had much bigger ladder player base in 2013.

Afaik, you dont get this notification if you have never played ladder before;pls correct me if i am wrong on that.

[Apofenas]

There you go. Not sure if you get notification if you never played ladder, but at least this description says that new player will not be matched against player who'll stomp him in every area in a matter of 4-10 minutes depending on map. I used to do that, i used to play lab only, sparkey rush, scout spam ect to get any fun from such games. I can do that, than i can complain in chat, than report issue to forum. Or i can not repeat this circle once again since nobody gives a fck about it for years and save that time and nerves for me and for that new player.

[keyser]

Easy stacking that nobody notices. If you have 2 players with similiar rating you just go to their replays. You put the one with ladder in your team and the one with gap in enemy team. Balance number stays same, but you get superior player. Funny thing that this logic applies even to some 2k players...

One knows how to make units, play everything, do his own scouting, air, power and take map control; other may start t2 mex before 2d factory, flood your chat for e, poke air player everytime scout passes his base and whine about his team when he dies. Will you need 2d guess to know who is who?

Currently ladder players end up hardly underrated. Just going to throw a couple names i heard this week: Blinchik(1600/1800); frodon (1100/1500); SYSTEM_FAILURE(1) GodKngXerxesNoob(1500/2000). Sure may be they are not as good at team games as they ladder rating says, but they are better than their global rating say and when you play 1v1 or 2v2 you are likely to trust the ladder one.

you should already know by now that teamgame and ladder are 2 different things.
Even if wasn't a bad teamgame player, i never been as good as i was in ladder.
they are complementary to some point, but then someone that play teamgame a lot vs someone that play ladder a lot, will be most likely doing better at teamgame.
if they are under-rated right now, it's because they play a lot of ladder, and no teamgame, and that he has also a low teamgame rating. But this is just a transitory period of few games, at some point the global rating will get set up at the real teamgame level of the player.
now what you are asking for is having people playing ladder, getting an high global rating without playing any teamgame map. This end up being a major issue for balancing because they are only good into skill for ladder, but lack the skill required in teamgame. They are usually shit at handling eco over 200/300 mass/s. They lack of coordination with allies. They may only trust themself, and don't give a shit about their allies. They may lack of understanding when to stop the spam, because doing spam is usually an automatism, ending up being behind at eco.

There was a logic, why we introduced this change back in the days. pls don't make this game a cancer even more.



Also if i remember correctly, there is a message telling player that start ladder, that they will be put against random opponent to evaluate their skill, and that it could be completely unbalanced.

[Apofenas]

you should already know by now that teamgame and ladder are 2 different things.
Even if wasn't a bad teamgame player, i never been as good as i was in ladder.
they are complementary to some point, but then someone that play teamgame a lot vs someone that play ladder a lot, will be most likely doing better at teamgame.
if they are under-rated right now, it's because they play a lot of ladder, and no teamgame, and that he has also a low teamgame rating. But this is just a transitory period of few games, at some point the global rating will get set up at the real teamgame level of the player.
now what you are asking for is having people playing ladder, getting an high global rating without playing any teamgame map. This end up being a major issue for balancing because they are only good into skill for ladder, but lack the skill required in teamgame. They are usually shit at handling eco over 200/300 mass/s. They lack of coordination with allies. They may only trust themself, and don't give a shit about their allies. They may lack of understanding when to stop the spam, because doing spam is usually an automatism, ending up being behind at eco.

There was a logic, why we introduced this change back in the days. pls don't make this game a cancer even more.

Same thing applies to ppl who play custom 1v1 in global, same thing applies to crater players outside crater, seton players outside seton ect. We don't have spearated ratings for seton, for crater ect. BUT we separate ppl that are actually capable to play great variety of maps by themselves without any help.

There was a reason ladder was separated from global in past. It was done by ZeP and he mentioned main reason being ability to drop rating quickly through ladder. This was done by Just_a_game for example. Now tell me does this fix an issue? We banned 3 players last week who managed to drop more than 1k rating - that's the answer for you about how that change works.

Another point was to prevent ppl from being "overrated". You will get even more overrated if you play custom 1v1s. Clear example: SB_NEXUS, KvaGa, Malantrius - all farmed 1800 on Winter duel at some point. Did unrated ladder prevent them from being overrated?