So wouldn't it be a good idea if something like this is implemented it would be accompanied by a balancing tool that uses these numbers to balance teams?
"I have been playing this game for a year now, 350 hours on Steam, yet only 20 rounds on Hive with 100 - something skill, level 1. Fail. "
I feel for you - I have 254 games listed on Hive, but 1000 hours on Steam, so that means each game took 4 hours. I don't quite remember it being like that.
There are no skill weights... This small detail largely invalidates the entire system. You will get the same skill boost for beating Archea as you would for stomping a team of rookies.
Aside from that, having such a largely publicized and "in your face" representation of a numerical skill number to everyone who launches the game, to me, has the following impacts:
1. Reinforces to a large part of the player pool how low their skill rating might be.
2. Encourages the 'farming' of skill points- to think this will not be a direct result of further publicizing the skill rating would be incredibly naive.
3. Puts players on pedestals and often encourages a negative attitude of superiority- I.e. " my skill rating is higher than yours, therefore I am right and you are wrong."
4. Discourages team play and positively rewards selfish play. I.e. "I'm not even going to try this action that might help win the game because it requires me to sacrifice some of my skill rating for this round"
All of these I have personally seen occur on a daily basis in other games with public ranking systems ( of which were much less a abusable than the current mechanics of Hive). Publicly advertising this to the entire player base every time one launches the game has so many negative impacts... If the goal was to encourage players to improve, I think there would be far better and less negatively impacting ways to go about that. I think this type of system is particularly cruel to newer players or lower skill players. And I think it will be moreso damaging to this community because it is a relatively small one.
The extent of the public interfacing of Hive I would like to see is a simple avg server skill rating in relation to your own in the server browser..nothing further.
So wouldn't it be a good idea if something like this is implemented it would be accompanied by a balancing tool that uses these numbers to balance teams?
Shine already can do this yet it's not recommended to be used because of different issues we have with the current hive skill itself (as mentioned in this thread and many before).
Overall i think its time for uwe to make a clear informative blog post about the Hive, there are so many false informations around here. And those rumour spread because ppl have no source to rely to.
To give a start, i'll just list some facts about hive to clear things up:
1. By default all servers with 1+ mods enabled are not sending any datas to hive
2. There are mods like "[Shine] Ns2Stats" enabling Hive back again.
2.1 [Shine] NS2Stats allow you to easily opt out of any stats logging (either add a bot or just unload the plugin)
3. Servers get whitelisted by uwe if there are enought round datas (~50) and will then show up at hive website.
4. LVL represent how experiment a player is as it is based on the sum of scores.
5. Skill is the avg Skill rating reached in all rounds played . The exact current formula for the skill rating is unknown but it's based on w/l + k/d/a + score
6. If you find a server used by players to manipulate hive stats report it, it will then get off the whitelist.
After each round playerstats will be send to hive if player played more than 5 min of a round.
Exact datas are printed into the server log and look like this:
Keep in mention that the Skill formula changed quiet often in the last month and therefore is not final.
Also just deal with it, there are always players better than yourself, see the skill as help to find even enemies.
About this "hide the rank system": No i have to disagree totally, a hidden system is not trustworthy for the users. The only way to do this is for the player understandable and open for everyone to citizise.
So wouldn't it be a good idea if something like this is implemented it would be accompanied by a balancing tool that uses these numbers to balance teams?
It absolutely would be great if we could balance teams in this way, but for all the reasons rantology so succinctly put in her post above, it needs to be a behind-the-scenes metric which players have no means of deciphering.
I get what UWE is trying to do here and I applaud it, but I must speak out my concerns about the methods by which they are trying to achieve that goal at the moment.
Come on roo.. . That designation is already useless and everyone knows it. Besides this system is barely applicable due to most servers running an admin mod.
The right way to do this is to make a proper ELO, and make it ignore mods / apply to every server unless they intentionally disable it
I have been playing this game for a year now, 350 hours on Steam, yet only 20 rounds on Hive with 100 - something skill, level 1. Fail.
only servers without mods or whitelisted servers are shown on hive. so server running NS2Stats who are not whitelisted won't show up on hive
To this, has anybody else noticed that not all UWE official servers transmit stats? If you look at whitelisted servers, you can see a couple gaps in officials. Anybody have any insight on why this may be? It's irrelevant at this point, but in the future if I am trying to up my skill to play w/ higher skilled players, then I would be disappointed to have good rounds on an official or a server I thought would be relaying info, then come to find my last 2 - 3 hours of play have been unrecognized. Also, I wish there were more metrics goin on than just kdr/being on winning team, and I would like to see commander win/loss ratios recorded too. ns2stats does this.
While I do worry about stomping, that crap already happens. Hopefully with something like this in place, farmers would be placed on both teams and not just one.
I have been playing this game for a year now, 350 hours on Steam, yet only 20 rounds on Hive with 100 - something skill, level 1. Fail.
only servers without mods or whitelisted servers are shown on hive. so server running NS2Stats who are not whitelisted won't show up on hive
Also Hive was created not too long ago, like Reinforced patch or little earlier. They started the level / hours count from that moment on.
Skill is kinda bad represention imo. I e.g. play with like +-20 fps no joke. So mainly Gorge and without doubt Battle and Support Gorges play a great role leading to victory. Then my kill ratio isn't quiet so high but the assists rocket up...
Even worse for comms.
GhoulofGSG9Join Date: 2013-03-31Member: 184566Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Supporter, WC 2013 - Supporter, Pistachionauts
edited December 2013
@2cought: Maybe those official server don't have 50 round yet, idk. Some rounds are not at hive just because of connection timeouts.
But about rookiestombing [shine] ns2stats brings a powerfull tool(aka elorestriction plugin) to block better skilled from a rookieserver, with more servers using ns2stats the elos will become more accurated and the restriction works better.
About this "hide the rank system": No i have to disagree totally, a hidden system is not trustworthy for the users. The only way to do this is for the player understandable and open for everyone to citizise.
Obviously you could still check rank skill and methods for attaining and whatever from some hive website if you wanted - just not show them ingame. So no problem with trust.
Gotta say, while I agree there's a bunch of bad effects with public skill rating, it would be fun to see ranks fluctuating. A skill number is boring as hell tho, so maybe something like Corporal, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain for marines, and for aliens Drone, Stalker, Marauder, Hive mind, ...face eater. Stuff like that.
It's obviously meant to go with matchmaking, that makes sense and is laudable. Just hide the skill score and don't make it visible on the website either and it will resolve all the issues!
Matchmaking has the potential to be a fantastic bonus for ns2 public play, let's get it right.
I hopped into the last 10mins or so of a match last night and was using xenocide here and there during pushes. the match ends and i'd dropped almost 100 Skill points (thanks Xeno!). There is more to skill than maintaining a high K/D ratio...something I thought UWE realized when they added scoring in for all the little things you do (building,damaging,reparing ect).
Any 'skill' system that penalizes you for not stacking is severely broken. I may as well stack against rookies and put sentries all over the place making sure to leave the CC at least a minute (comm no-res timer) before the game ends, so the kills from those sentries get recorded. That's assuming we let the game end at some point. we could sit there farming 'skill' indefinitely.
Ridiculous system. Get it off my menu! I don't want to see this sh.. stuff.
Come on roo.. . That designation is already useless and everyone knows it. Besides this system is barely applicable due to most servers running an admin mod.
The right way to do this is to make a proper ELO, and make it ignore mods / apply to every server unless they intentionally disable it
NS2Stats elo is better I'd guess; though problem is that not enough servers use it, and it takes quite a bit of time to get a "true" elo rating. I.e bad players start of with 1500, and goodly one as well, so it does take quite some time to adjust accordingly, but it will eventually.
But with elorestriction you can keep high elos off rookie servers; I do that for my rookie server.
I personally love having a visible skill ranking. It doesn't need to be pushed heavily for other players, and it isn't (in order to see the "skill" of other people on a server you would have to manually look them up individually), but being able to see where I sit and then work towards advancing my position is one of the things that has kept me coming back to certain games in the past. I agree that the system needs to be well thought out, but the fact that it exists and is visible is not itself a bad thing.
ScatterJoin Date: 2012-09-02Member: 157341Members, Squad Five Blue
Visible skill and levels makes me not only want to be a better ns2 player, but also a better human being.
Implementing achievements would also give me better feedback as to how I am progressing, providing tangible milestones for specific areas in which I have increased my skill.
Visible skill and levels makes me not only want to be a better ns2 player, but also a better human being.
Implementing achievements would also give me better feedback as to how I am progressing, providing tangible milestones for specific areas in which I have increased my skill.
I've pretty much quit this game at the moment because I'm a pub player and I play in Australia.
I will say this about the new skill thing: First, I think it's a great move towards making NS2 enjoyable for me again (at least). Second, explanation of what the numbers mean needs to be there.
I really like that it's visible on the main menu. Hopefully it will be weighted in the future so destroying noobs gives you essentially no points and destroying someone significantly better than you gives you lots of points. I'm sure the system will be exploited, and that doesn't bother me one bit. Anything is better than what we have. When match making is in things will probably get even better for non competetive players like me. NS2 doesn't work with drop in drop out players.
I think quantifying skill is always gonna be a problematic issue. There are so many aspects to winning a game. Basic indicators such as K/D ratio and score/minute do not really suffice imo. The most simple skill indicator that accounts for both players and commanders will always be the winrate in general. Even in the randomness of pub games, better players will win more often than lesser ones in the long run. But, as mentioned plenty, the system needs to account for the opponents level to be meaningful.
Now, what if player level was just something that only increases with playtime. It would act as a little "progression system" (levelling up huzzah!) that thus indicates the overall playtime for any given player. Then, one could devise an algorithm to determine the skill level of any given player by looking at winrate, but weighed against say the difference in average player levels between both teams for each game played.
So, if you stack, accidentally or otherwise, with a bunch of experienced (high playtime = high level) players and stomp a team full of newbies, your actual skill level would not increase as much (maybe not increase at all if the avg level difference exceeds a certain threshold), and the newbies skill level would not decrease as much. And the only way to really improve your skill rating would be by beating teams of similar level.
This way, stacking would be discouraged to some extent, and the player level + skill values would have more of a meaning than they do now.
Also, it would be nice if somehow the NS2 playtime records from steam could be uploaded to the hive, as to more accurately describe the player levels to begin with.
So a half decent skill system and bunch it with a system that calculates how much skill you should earn based on the total skill of each team? That what u meant to say? Sorry I'm hyper concise.
There's no need to bring playtime into the equation Neoken. Skill varies too much between players of similar playtime for it to matter. Winrate simply weighted by the average skill of the teams is all you really need.
If we would implement matchmaking based on a true Elo system the long termeffect would be all players ending up with a (almost) neutral Elo (50%win 50%loss). Pretty funny right?
If we would implement matchmaking based on a true Elo system the long termeffect would be all players ending up with a (almost) neutral Elo (50%win 50%loss). Pretty funny right?
I don't think that will be the effect at all. The elo stabilizes when a player hits the 50/50 win rate which will be at a significantly higher-than-neutral rating for skilled players.
Yesterday someone asked me how to increase his level to have the marine skin I had (reinforced program).
I had to explain to him that skins don't have anything to do with the level, and that its meaningless without matchmaking.
After a lengthy chat, I went to the menu and removed all the shadow skins.
I don't think showing the actual skill number is a good idea, it will bring undesirable behavior into the game.....
Comments
I feel for you - I have 254 games listed on Hive, but 1000 hours on Steam, so that means each game took 4 hours. I don't quite remember it being like that.
Aside from that, having such a largely publicized and "in your face" representation of a numerical skill number to everyone who launches the game, to me, has the following impacts:
1. Reinforces to a large part of the player pool how low their skill rating might be.
2. Encourages the 'farming' of skill points- to think this will not be a direct result of further publicizing the skill rating would be incredibly naive.
3. Puts players on pedestals and often encourages a negative attitude of superiority- I.e. " my skill rating is higher than yours, therefore I am right and you are wrong."
4. Discourages team play and positively rewards selfish play. I.e. "I'm not even going to try this action that might help win the game because it requires me to sacrifice some of my skill rating for this round"
All of these I have personally seen occur on a daily basis in other games with public ranking systems ( of which were much less a abusable than the current mechanics of Hive). Publicly advertising this to the entire player base every time one launches the game has so many negative impacts... If the goal was to encourage players to improve, I think there would be far better and less negatively impacting ways to go about that. I think this type of system is particularly cruel to newer players or lower skill players. And I think it will be moreso damaging to this community because it is a relatively small one.
The extent of the public interfacing of Hive I would like to see is a simple avg server skill rating in relation to your own in the server browser..nothing further.
Shine already can do this yet it's not recommended to be used because of different issues we have with the current hive skill itself (as mentioned in this thread and many before).
Overall i think its time for uwe to make a clear informative blog post about the Hive, there are so many false informations around here. And those rumour spread because ppl have no source to rely to.
To give a start, i'll just list some facts about hive to clear things up:
1. By default all servers with 1+ mods enabled are not sending any datas to hive
2. There are mods like "[Shine] Ns2Stats" enabling Hive back again.
2.1 [Shine] NS2Stats allow you to easily opt out of any stats logging (either add a bot or just unload the plugin)
3. Servers get whitelisted by uwe if there are enought round datas (~50) and will then show up at hive website.
4. LVL represent how experiment a player is as it is based on the sum of scores.
5. Skill is the avg Skill rating reached in all rounds played . The exact current formula for the skill rating is unknown but it's based on w/l + k/d/a + score
6. If you find a server used by players to manipulate hive stats report it, it will then get off the whitelist.
After each round playerstats will be send to hive if player played more than 5 min of a round.
Exact datas are printed into the server log and look like this:
Keep in mention that the Skill formula changed quiet often in the last month and therefore is not final.
Also just deal with it, there are always players better than yourself, see the skill as help to find even enemies.
About this "hide the rank system": No i have to disagree totally, a hidden system is not trustworthy for the users. The only way to do this is for the player understandable and open for everyone to citizise.
It absolutely would be great if we could balance teams in this way, but for all the reasons rantology so succinctly put in her post above, it needs to be a behind-the-scenes metric which players have no means of deciphering.
I get what UWE is trying to do here and I applaud it, but I must speak out my concerns about the methods by which they are trying to achieve that goal at the moment.
The right way to do this is to make a proper ELO, and make it ignore mods / apply to every server unless they intentionally disable it
To this, has anybody else noticed that not all UWE official servers transmit stats? If you look at whitelisted servers, you can see a couple gaps in officials. Anybody have any insight on why this may be? It's irrelevant at this point, but in the future if I am trying to up my skill to play w/ higher skilled players, then I would be disappointed to have good rounds on an official or a server I thought would be relaying info, then come to find my last 2 - 3 hours of play have been unrecognized. Also, I wish there were more metrics goin on than just kdr/being on winning team, and I would like to see commander win/loss ratios recorded too. ns2stats does this.
While I do worry about stomping, that crap already happens. Hopefully with something like this in place, farmers would be placed on both teams and not just one.
Skill is kinda bad represention imo. I e.g. play with like +-20 fps no joke. So mainly Gorge and without doubt Battle and Support Gorges play a great role leading to victory. Then my kill ratio isn't quiet so high but the assists rocket up...
Even worse for comms.
But about rookiestombing [shine] ns2stats brings a powerfull tool(aka elorestriction plugin) to block better skilled from a rookieserver, with more servers using ns2stats the elos will become more accurated and the restriction works better.
Nobody had a problem with better players existing, come on.
Obviously you could still check rank skill and methods for attaining and whatever from some hive website if you wanted - just not show them ingame. So no problem with trust.
Gotta say, while I agree there's a bunch of bad effects with public skill rating, it would be fun to see ranks fluctuating. A skill number is boring as hell tho, so maybe something like Corporal, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain for marines, and for aliens Drone, Stalker, Marauder, Hive mind, ...face eater. Stuff like that.
That way skill goes up at a proper rate.
Matchmaking has the potential to be a fantastic bonus for ns2 public play, let's get it right.
Any 'skill' system that penalizes you for not stacking is severely broken. I may as well stack against rookies and put sentries all over the place making sure to leave the CC at least a minute (comm no-res timer) before the game ends, so the kills from those sentries get recorded. That's assuming we let the game end at some point. we could sit there farming 'skill' indefinitely.
Ridiculous system. Get it off my menu! I don't want to see this sh.. stuff.
NS2Stats elo is better I'd guess; though problem is that not enough servers use it, and it takes quite a bit of time to get a "true" elo rating. I.e bad players start of with 1500, and goodly one as well, so it does take quite some time to adjust accordingly, but it will eventually.
But with elorestriction you can keep high elos off rookie servers; I do that for my rookie server.
Implementing achievements would also give me better feedback as to how I am progressing, providing tangible milestones for specific areas in which I have increased my skill.
I will say this about the new skill thing: First, I think it's a great move towards making NS2 enjoyable for me again (at least). Second, explanation of what the numbers mean needs to be there.
I really like that it's visible on the main menu. Hopefully it will be weighted in the future so destroying noobs gives you essentially no points and destroying someone significantly better than you gives you lots of points. I'm sure the system will be exploited, and that doesn't bother me one bit. Anything is better than what we have. When match making is in things will probably get even better for non competetive players like me. NS2 doesn't work with drop in drop out players.
Now, what if player level was just something that only increases with playtime. It would act as a little "progression system" (levelling up huzzah!) that thus indicates the overall playtime for any given player. Then, one could devise an algorithm to determine the skill level of any given player by looking at winrate, but weighed against say the difference in average player levels between both teams for each game played.
So, if you stack, accidentally or otherwise, with a bunch of experienced (high playtime = high level) players and stomp a team full of newbies, your actual skill level would not increase as much (maybe not increase at all if the avg level difference exceeds a certain threshold), and the newbies skill level would not decrease as much. And the only way to really improve your skill rating would be by beating teams of similar level.
This way, stacking would be discouraged to some extent, and the player level + skill values would have more of a meaning than they do now.
Also, it would be nice if somehow the NS2 playtime records from steam could be uploaded to the hive, as to more accurately describe the player levels to begin with.
I don't think that will be the effect at all. The elo stabilizes when a player hits the 50/50 win rate which will be at a significantly higher-than-neutral rating for skilled players.
I had to explain to him that skins don't have anything to do with the level, and that its meaningless without matchmaking.
After a lengthy chat, I went to the menu and removed all the shadow skins.
I don't think showing the actual skill number is a good idea, it will bring undesirable behavior into the game.....