Antoninus wrote:
Having a rating optional button would be a good start. Perhaps another solution would be to only rate games that are random teamed. Pretty much the scourge of FAF right now are stacked teams and people dropping out of lobbies if their team isn't going to guarantee them a win. Make ranked games random so that, generally speaking, good players will win more often than not, rather than 100% of the time because they never play on non-elite teams.
TrueSkill already takes into account the relative strength of teams. From my own experience, even "well balanced" games result in 0-1 points if my team wins, and 3-5 points loss should it lose, and I've yet to see points earned for a truly "stacked" game (eg, 1k+ in favor of one team).
Therefore, if you're obsessed with points, stacking will have little positive effect. In fact, the quickest way to increase your score would be to play against stacked teams and WIN, because that would necessarily give you the possibility for the largest possible increase in score whilst minimizing risk to your points. But, alas, that would require actually possessing very high skill to achieve. :p
Random teams simply wouldn't work. Many times I've seen people refuse to start in a lobby if the teams aren't randomized, which is hilarious because more often than not, random makes things worse. Randomness is laziness and a way to abdicate responsibility / placate those crying "BALANCE!!!", disguised as a convenient silver bullet.
TrueSkill-automated teams is an interesting idea, but would fail to take into account players wanting to play with each other (which is usually the entire point of a teamgame to start with), and players wishing to play specific positions. Both could be overcome with varying degrees of success, but they would require nontrivial additions to the lobby to accommodate them.
Simply put, the best solution is to play with people you know. If randoms join, fine. If said randoms dislike the non-stackedness of their team, they're free to bring their own friends. If they can't or won't do so, no one is forcing them to play in that lobby.
If you join a game and don't like the teams, then no one is forcing you to play. Does that make games take longer to start? Sometimes, yes. But, did you really want to play with someone who is playing only for points in the first place?
I would like to see a "rating optional" button, but I have a feeling that it would be abused in much the same way... "My team isn't stacked enough? No rating for this game then!". Thus kind of defeating the purpose of global ratings in the first place.Statistics: Posted by uberge3k — 29 Dec 2011, 02:17
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