Rating rework

[Hummelprinz]

Hi together,
for many players it is very confusing when they loose points while winning or win points while loosing. This happens sometimes because the shown rating is "Trueskill - 2x standard deviation".

For example if you've got 1000 trueskill, 10games and 100 deviation, your shown rating is 800. Let's say you win against an 2000 trueskillplayer. Then you have got 1100(idk)trueskill and 181 deviation afterwards, so your shown rating is 738. This feels very bad if the victory was deserved.

My guess is that this system is there to prevent people to abusing the system to change rating much faster. I've got some posible solutions to solve the confusion.
1. make clear how the rating works in the "learning" tab
2. or remove the standard deviation in favor for a maximum of points you can loose/win in a single match
3. or remove the standard deviation in favor for a minimum gamequality(80%) that is needed to loose/win points

greetings Hummelprinz

[FtXCommando]

You can't make trueskill clear to people that:

1) Don't comprehend English (at least I can't and have no idea what info exists for other languages)
2) Don't have some introductory understanding of statistics

If you have both of these, you can google " how trueskill works" and get:
https://trueskill.org/
https://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?ti ... kill_works
https://www.moserware.com/assets/comput ... eSkill.pdf
http://www.moserware.com/2010/03/comput ... skill.html

So this addresses 1. We can add a link to our wiki article about it, I guess.

Btw, shown rating is trueskill - 3*SD, not 2*SD.

Removing deviation just turns trueskill into ELO, which is fundamentally flawed for multi-person games. So 2 and 3 are absolutely off the table.

The solution is to hide trueskill in general from people because people for the most part don't understand it and won't put time into understanding it. That's why most games use something like leagues or divisions or brackets to divide players and either hide mmr in a blackbox or put it in some corner far away so that only dudes that really want to find it will find it.

[Hummelprinz]

Hidding the trueskill will not solve the frustration of players that "loose" points while winning. And most players won't google " how trueskill works" since they do not know that this is the problem. They'll google things like "Why do i loose points while winning in faf" or "forged alliance forever rating bug" but they will not find help there. A short info in the client would help many players. Or reduce the deviation in the formular to 2times so the case will never happen.

[keyser]

how do you know you have "lost points" when you can't see them ?

[Hummelprinz]

You do click the bell after the game. I was only said to hide the trueskill not the shown one. Also i would not recommend hiding the shown points alltogehter since some players have fun collecting them.

[FtXCommando]

Or reduce the deviation in the formular to 2times so the case will never happen.

You suggesting that as a legitimate solution makes me think you need to look at how trueskill works.

The short info on how trueskill works:
Your shown rating isn't your rating. It's the absolute most garbage possibility you can play. A rating that is now invisible (in the java client, think you can find your own in the player stats page?) called your trueskill rating is what the system actually uses to balance games and determine point output (alongside your sigma value) as that is the top of the bell curve in your potential skill distribution. That means that your rating gain doesn't actually correlate 1:1 with any increase in skill because the value it is changing is an estimation in the first place and using estimators to create new estimators is a statistical fallacy.

What will people garner from this explanation? Either nothing or they will say "WTF why is FAF using a rating system that doesn't show my real rating"

This is why showing people their trueskill value is bad.

[Hummelprinz]

I do know how it works. Most players simply do not understand why they can loose shown rating after an won game. A lot of players thinks that "Killing more acus give more points", "the rating sometimes summarize games" or my favorite one "It is a bug". Hiding trueskill would not fix that. Make an easy acces to get some information could fix it. Or changing the system that this doesn't happen would fix it aswell.

I can't count how many times i got asked why they lost points after a victory.

[Katharsas]

"Killing more acus give more points", "the rating sometimes summarize games" or my favorite one "It is a bug".

I really don't want to spoil your enthusiasm for berating user's stupidity but there were MULTIPLE bugs, some unfixed until very recently and there probably still are because its not trivial for the server to even know how a game ended (loss/defeat/victory) which means that even if Trueskill was perfectly bugfree does not mean that you actually get the correct rating after a game.

And ACU kills or rather deaths DID in fact play a role in interpreting the game result some weeks ago before that was fixed. So while its probably true that most users don't know how Trueskills works, some complaints likely have been valid.

[Hummelprinz]

Well then.