Problems with the Rating system

[JaggedAppliance]

The rating system has a couple of serious problems. The first problem is the rating of new players. Because of how the displayed rating is calculated, you are very likely get a negative rating when you start playing FAF. No one wants to have a negative rating, it's surely a bad experience for a new player. My suggestion would be to hide a players rating completely both ingame and out for the first X number of games, until it is vaguely accurate.

The second problem also relates to new players. New ladder players are still matched with people around 1300/1400. They should have a wide range of players they can be matched with for their first game(s) so that they can quickly and easily start playing FAF. Players with low ladder ratings generally should have a pretty wide rating range that they can be matched against. Right now their first game has to be against a 1300/1400 and this is really bad. It makes it difficult to get the first game which really needs to be the easiest to get, and when they get it they get wrecked. The next game will be against a 1000/1100 and they will get crushed again. Whatever fix was implemented did not work at all. I have checked several players' ladder history in the vault to confirm this.

Finally, here are the global leaderboards: https://www.faforever.com/competitive/l ... rds/global
The top 3 players are Suzuji, Giebmasse and Sid. In no way are these the top 3 players of FAF. They probably should not even be top 10. Suzuji and Gieb have inflated ratings from playing in "all welcome" games where they are often far far better than everyone else in the game. For Sid I dunno, maybe he was playing with himself again. I don't know how to fix this problem but global rating is a joke. I guess team matchmaker can solve this when it arrives.

Hopefully some people with a better understanding of the rating system can suggest solutions, my knowledge is limited.

[JoonasTo]

The new player matchmaking in ladder is also a problem for 1300/1400 rated players. I grinded some ladder actively for a week some months back and one third(literally I counted the replays) of my matches were against new players. That's not cool. Those matches are a waste of time for me.

For some people I can have the energy to be fair and say "hi, welcome, don't worry you'll get people like this for a while, yada, yada, yada" and do some stupid shit like Ahwassa crash on top or only labs or whatever. But after a couple guys I can't be bothered anymore and I just do the fastest cheese I can think of or just quit, rating be damned.

So now when I see that "someone of your rating is searching ladder" I know there's a huge chance I'll just get a new guy and won't bother with it. So at least I am demotivated from playing ladder because of this. While I might not be hugely actively there anyway(like one game a week), if there are others like me, this adds up.

How do we solve this? We make the matchmaker take uncertainty into account or force a different matching for new players, both have been discussed before. I heard rumours some people even coded the latter, it just never got implemented?

As to what comes to gaining too much points, ala sid, viba, traveler, there's this in trueskill:
"If the winner had the much bigger mean skill relative to the total uncertainty (thus (μwinner–μloser) > ε) then a win cannot buy the winner extra mean skill points or remove any uncertainty." Where ε is the draw margin. So if Giebmasse(2k+) were to 1v1 BobTheNoob(500) he shouldn't gain a single point when he wins. Absolutely nothing should change if our parameters are correct.

This doesn't work for team games like All Welcome Seton's Clutch where the teams are auto-balanced and new players are involved because the teams should be balanced on paper. There's something fuzzy going on with new players and the auto-balance options going on. Something odd with the uncertainty not taken into account or something. I'm sure Viba himself has more experience with this.

[ax0lotl]

For me the same problem on ladder. I play less ladder because I do not want to crush and demotivate new players so often.
Normally I give the player a few tips and tell them to watch the first minutes of the replay to learn from what I did. But recently I had one on Setons. On that map the new player cannot even learn from the replay, he/she just will feel that it's hopeless.

[Evildrew]

So for Ladder a solution could be:

Determine the map pool for players of lower rating and/or lower number of games to be smaller focusing on smaller maps with fewer mexes like winter duel.
As the skill level and/or number of games increases, increase the pool available to that player.

This has the benefit that those complaining about not having enough maps and the bigger maps who usually tend to be more veteran level players are happy and those who are new get an easier entry into the game for the first say 30 games.
This could also lead to separating player groups to avoid the 1300 being matched with the new 0 rated player if entirely different map pools are chosen for newbies than for those with 100 games.
Another way to separate them is to have 2 versions of a map, one being winter dual noob, the other winter dual others...
There is also the side effect of smurfs being hampered in their effort to create a high rating in a short amount of time by beating the 1300 player in ladder if he has to play his way through many noob layers. Maybe he wont enjoy it or find it unrewarding and not do it.

Global rating problem is mainly caused by the way game quality is calculated. It assumes that a 2000 rated player is equivalent to two 1000 rated players, in the sense that is supposes that a 2000 rated player's mexes upgrade twice as fast as those of a 1000 and all else is equal. That is not the case I have verified. It also leads newer players with higher deviation in their rating to be seen more favorable than what they are, kind of like taking the upper limit of the spectrum than the lower.

In my opinion the way game quality is calculated, i.e. adding up scores on 2 sides and then saying how balanced it appears is the problem because the rating you gain from wins is determined by the % of game quality.

Example:

Team1:
Daddy (3000)
Mummy (1000)
Tiny Tim (1000)
Tickleberry (1000)

Team 2:
Big Daddy (1500)
Fat Momma (1500)
Obese Oliver (1500)
Stupid Sally (1500)

Here the game quality should be 100% because team 1 has 6000 rating and team 2 has 6000 rating.

However if you look at it in a player by player relative comparison way, Daddy is 100% better than Big Daddy, and the other 3 on team 2 are 50% better than those on team 1, i.e. team 2 has seemingly a 50% relative advantage.

Would a game not feel more balanced if Mummy was a 1500?

Team1:
Daddy (3000) 100%
Mummy (1500) 0%
Tiny Tim (1000) -50%
Tickleberry (1000) -50%

Team 2:
Big Daddy (1500)
Fat Momma (1500)
Obese Oliver (1500)
Stupid Sally (1500)

I have always found games much more imbalanced when the rating disparity between players on one team is greater like on team 1.
Given that there is the complaint that you can play with new people and get easy wins because the game quality falsely gives newer players higher ratings, this could also help to resolve this aspect since a 2000 rated player being 2000% better than a 100 would make the game quality low enough if not offset to make the game quality have no influence on their rating. I remember playing 40 ranked games with a guy who was a 0 long time ago and my rating didnt go up as a consequence of it. Maybe however it would be bad with an absolute 0 rated player since it would be an infinite comparison and 0's could never get off the ground...
I guess in this case having a starting score of 100 would then be more appropriate and be an absolute minimum.

[Myxir]

looks like a good context to mention an old (forgotten) idea

[speed2]

looks like a good context to mention an old (forgotten) idea

I have first 4 tutorials ready for almost a year, waiting to be integrated.

[Apofenas]

When I came FAF it took me 3 ladder games to get up to ~950 global rating. Ladder rating could affect global back then and it was far far easier to get your first games and calculate your rating via 1v1s.

I noticed it when i created my current account about 2-3 years ago when ladder got completely separated from global. It took me about 10 games to get to 1k and i had to play only all welcome seton/rohan games, shouting that i'm old GPG player so they let me in. THIS is how our community likes new players.

They are counted a a useless weight. Balance counts them as 1200-1500 player, but they are not. This is a main issue with Sid and Suzuji. I once joined their gap 6v6 game and saw them being on same team with a bunch of calculated 0s vs team with couple of 1ks and uncalculated 0s. Game balance was 80%. How is that even a thing?

When i first came top 10 of global rated players were ladder players. I remember ZLO was 2300, Voodoo, Mozart 2200+, ect. Why? Because global rating also represented your ability to play 1v1 too. What does it represent now? Ability to eco on Seton/Gap and play 1v2 against couple worse players?

[PhilipJFry]

Making a different pool for new players won't fix anything. It will just make it harder for them to actually get a game.

Easy solution for the newbies vs 1300/1400 rated players issue would be to change the way we match those users until a certain number of games or deviation or whatever is reached.

Global will always be a joke as long as the user can choose the teammates and map. There is no way around that i fear. We can either remove it entirely and replace it with a rating that you get from playing from automated team games or live with the fact that it is not very useful (unless you know the people you play with anyway).

Hiding negative rating in general is a good idea and will probably help those who just want to play for fun. Although there is always the danger of veterans making a new account and playing unrated games against those non competitive players just to stomp them. But that is something we'll never be able to completely avoid.

Making one rating for all won't fix anything here. If we were to remove one rating and let ladder influence custom we'd just see lots of ladder players who suck at team games donate rating when playing custom and vice versa.

Also: If people like you Apofenas make new accs then how do you expect hosts to treat new users? Why did you lie and tell them that you are an old gpg vet when you were in fact a faf player already? That kind of stuff is what hurts newbs the most if you ask me.

[Apofenas]

If people like you Apofenas make new accs then how do you expect hosts to treat new users? Why did you lie and tell them that you are an old gpg vet when you were in fact a faf player already? That kind of stuff is what hurts newbs the most if you ask me.

At that time i already got a lot of complains from many new players how hard it is to get a game in FAF. At some point i had to boost some new russian players with my own rating so they can actually get a game. So I decided to look at it on my own skin and i wasn't really pleased. I didn't have any trolling in mid.

Which is better:
1) get 1k global in 3 ladder games
2) get 1k in 10+ custom games on seton/gap/rushme being kicked from 50% of games you join

Which is the better experience for new commer?

Making one rating for all won't fix anything here. If we were to remove one rating and let ladder influence custom we'd just see lots of ladder players who suck at team games donate rating when playing custom and vice versa.

Ladder could affect global rating, but global rating didn't affect ladder. This was one-sided.

And i'm absolutely sure there is no real problem with it. If seton player joins wonder, he will be same over rated as if 1v1 player joins Wonder. Only difference is you always want to have 1v1 player over seton player assuming their ratings are even. This is similiar case, but we don't have separated seton rating, dont we? Why do we have ladder.

[PhilipJFry]

Making it one sided opens just a new avenue to abuse the system.
People who perform well in team games would simply play some ladder from time to time which would lower their global and thus allow them to get easier games in custom.

We have two rating systems cause a line was drawn. Moving it a little will not solve the problem we have today.

It's hard to get a game in FAF for new players cause they have to fear that some unknown 0/0 guy will just stomp them really hard. You making a new acc to "help" some friends doesn't help at all imo.