all these thoughtful posts, disagreeing with each other.
it's like you forget that Hive is just about playtime-win/loss, there's nothing useful about it & all this when the game doesn't even have matchmaking.
actually pathetic.
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
edited February 2016
If the system is so useless, why have all the div1 players high hive scores then?
If it would be useless, you would have 1300 score div1 field players.
Never saw one.
If the system is so useless, why have all the div1 players high hive scores then?
If it would be useless, you would have 1300 score div1 field players.
Never saw one.
yeah exactly, specially since pubstomping is extremely difficult these days, after all this game requires a lot of teamwork in pubs.
KAPPA
KAPPA
KAPPA
edit: and you totally misunderstood my meaning of useless, the whole system is based off of playtime & win/loss, nothing to do with points, k/d, assists, building, accuracy, welding etc. And the best part of it all, is it's used to balance public matches, like what the shit rofl, the humor.
If the system is so useless, why have all the div1 players high hive scores then?
If it would be useless, you would have 1300 score div1 field players. Never saw one.
Because everytime you see a 3000+ you have his counter part(s) that lost ELO at some point. But...
Imagine a player from the competitive scene with 1.5K that is quite above that in reality. Imagine that competitive player also playing on public servers as a routine and wins with super aggressive fade against a team that should beat him according to ELO but will fail ultimately. Farming some ELO becomes easy. Guaranteed recover. Yum!
If the guy goes on a public server with a 1.5K ELO (but stronger in reality) he has a great potential to ruin the game as he's clearly above anyone else on the server (given he joins alone).
This whole thing could look as a pyramidal financial system when i come to think about it...
If the system is so useless, why have all the div1 players high hive scores then?
If it would be useless, you would have 1300 score div1 field players.
Never saw one.
Only few times I've seen people with 2700+ in pub games is when the server wasn't whitelisted.
WyzcrakPot Pie AficionadoJoin Date: 2002-12-04Member: 10447Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
"Shuffling" and "manually trying to balance teams" can co-exist.
TGNS regulars commonly call out peers by name and ask them to switch teams to improve the balance the computer has created. But these efforts augment the computer's best effort, as opposed to replacing it entirely. And of course this manual effort is most satisfactory when players are knowledgeable about each other (pretty manageable with community).
I think hiding hive skill should be an option that a player can enable/disable as you so wish, that way everyone is happy. If mendasp was still around he would have already added it to NS2+ for you, but unfortunately that isn't really an option anymore......
Personally I don't really care all that much about my hive skill as far as my elo number.
However, it prevents me from ever having an enjoyable game where I command or go gorge, as I always end up crippling my team as I need to justify my 3k+ elo and I am no where near good enough as a gorge, lerk, or commander to make up for. As such, my team always loses if I decide to.......
That's the only part I really dislike (other than the actual balancing algorithm not properly distributing skill, though that's not a problem with the metric per se.....)
You really should be able to hide hive skill and even deactivate it.
Sure you can tell someone not to care about it, but when the number is literally shoved into your face every time you open the game you end up caring, even if it's just a bit. Next thing you know you're not enjoying the game as much as you should be because every game you play affects that number.
The worse part is hive skill is literally useless for players. If we had some kind of official ranked ladder system, then yes it would be great to have, but ns2 is far far away from having this. The only thing hiveskill is really used for is shuffling teams, and this could still be done if it was hidden.
Maybe I'm looking at it all backwards. I should intentionally lower my hive skill so I can get balanced in with higher skilled players! Yea! Sounds fun.
But seriously, I was playing one day and got shuffled on a marine team against two alien players with hive scores over 2700. I was hovering around 2360 at the time. I could tell immediately that "I" would get my *** handed to me before the game even started. My team had no where near the skill to thwart the onslaught when those two went Fade. No one could chip damage (aim) and no one understood the concept of "pinch", let alone have any map awareness. Again, I knew the game wouldn't work out for me. I played it anyway and lost like 45pts. Now, I wouldn't say I'm a ELO snob of sorts, but it is disheartening to just give away those points. It sort of makes you feel like you've not only lost the game in a bad way, but "Hold on, we're not done yet", let's drain you of those shinny ELO points from your fantastic one game loss. You know, those points that took you like 10 games to earn. Which makes you then recall the way your team played, or remember the one guy who could possibly help you pull off a win but left the game. Oh, and let's not forget those servers which let you switch mid-game when things aren't going well. I've never done that, but I've seen it happen. So there's my rant.
BTW, there are premier/Div 1 players with an ELO lower than me. I know it's "just a number", but it's a number that anyone would like to see higher than average...yes?
BTW NS2 forum people...stop editing my posts! If I want to say ******...let me say it. It's a word in the English dictionary. Perhaps I should write:
dim, dull, dumbbell, dumdum, dummy, imbecile, pinhead, simple, slow, stupid, subnormal, touched, underachieving. or yo-yo. Maybe those are less offensive.
I think hiding hive skill should be an option that a player can enable/disable as you so wish, that way everyone is happy. If mendasp was still around he would have already added it to NS2+ for you, but unfortunately that isn't really an option anymore......
Just an FYI, that "Average Skill" line on the top of the scoreboard is an NS2+ server-side option. Most admins have it displayed in an effort to point out how imbalanced teams are about to be by the only metric available. Being able to hide or show your own hive score in your hive profile is another matter.
I've largely avoided these skill topics because everything has been said, people are just butthurt about it so they keep perpetuating the same ideas.
The bottom line is summed up as follows:
Skill is really hard to quantify in NS2. ELO is lacking, this was hollered and cried about when Hive was first implemented. Over time, as it was supposed to, the rankings have evened out to approximately where they should be (with exceptions yes). ELO also encourages less than ideal playstyle where literally the only thing that matters is who gets the victory. More comprehensive solutions might include basing it on PPM, Per-side Skill levels, commander independant skill levels, etc...
Without a dev coming in and telling us exactly if or what the plans are for Hive2.0 and if they include a skill adjustment (like the one from Moultano whereby skill thresholds for the 1K rookies would even out), we simply don't have anything to do.
Shuffling exists to solve a problem that people are either too forgetful or too uncaring to remember we had. People stack teams. It just happens. It happened before Hive, it happens still. People want to Play with their friends, their friends play well, so you end up with a good couple players on one team = stack = cry. The only way to objectively 'solve' stacking is to make balances obligatory, no switching, no f4ing. This sucks, people cry.
So from a server op point of view, it's an impossible problem, but people cry less about stacking when shuffles happen. Communities like TGNS have been fostered and pruned to the point where they work because regulars are well behaved enough to not stack up on one side, and people will call it out if they do (most often). This is really hard to get to work though and takes time and effort and a solid community of players who want to play and are willing to balance teams themselves (captains mode was this to the extreme).
All in all, yeah skill's not ideal, but it's better than nothing. Hiding it might solve some of the problems, but it really would just sweep them under a rug. And there's pretty much nothing else to say without someone on the dev team coming in and telling us if there are plans, and what they are (or is there some reason why we as the community shouldn't know?).
ELO also encourages less than ideal playstyle where literally the only thing that matters is who gets the victory. More comprehensive solutions might include basing it on PPM, Per-side Skill levels, commander independant skill levels, etc...
So Elo only encourages playstyles that work towards winning the game. How, by any definition anyone could ever come up with, could this be any closer to ideal? What other goal do you have in the game than to win?
If you join mid game you won't gain or lose much. The beginning of the game counts exponentially more than the end of the game for determining how much the game should effect your score.
Not that I have an alternative to suggest, but often someone latejoins and the team wins moreso because of that player than anyone else - that player gets fewer points.
Is there any way to get around that other than "well everything should balance out and even if it doesn't, they're outliers". It's something that I imagine is more likely to affect people who frequently change servers.
I think some of you are missing the point regarding making elo visible/invisible. Calego made a good point earlier. ELO takes away a lot of the old creativity people used to have in pubs back in the day since 'winning' is the only goal now. People want to protect their elo score BECAUSE ITS VISIBLE in some form or fashion. I remember back in beta/launch where hydra rushing bases was something people loved to do. If it failed, their team would most likely lose but it was fun. We used to get early GLs just to mess around. Now anything that deviates away from standard vanilla play is bad since it makes it much harder to win.
Having an option locally to hide it wont actually do anything. People will still care. People will still go out to HIVE to check their score... etc.
A more comprehensive algorithm might be a better option as well. Have a field player weighed average score while keeping the commander separate or something like that. *shrug*
ELO also encourages less than ideal playstyle where literally the only thing that matters is who gets the victory. More comprehensive solutions might include basing it on PPM, Per-side Skill levels, commander independant skill levels, etc...
So Elo only encourages playstyles that work towards winning the game. How, by any definition anyone could ever come up with, could this be any closer to ideal? What other goal do you have in the game than to win?
Two things,
First, I maintain that "Winning" and "obtaining victory" are slightly different. One team that can be winning throughout the entire round (aka, the superior team) might lose to a rush. "But Calego, if they're the superior team, why'd they lose to a rush?" Could have been one person's fault, could have been the team's fault, either way the fact remains that when it comes to the basic objectives of the game, the 'winning' team was superior to the 'losing' team in every way. Presumably they secured more map control, resources, team points, team kills, etc. Meanwhile the decidedly inferior team obtained Victory by a quick and effective last ditch effort. As such, their entire team's ranking goes up, even though they were most definitely 'worse' collectively as a team.
Rewarding Victory is less ideal than rewarding 'winning' (or call it something like 'objective play') because having many victories doesn't make a player 'good'. A skill system where it visibly encourages players to play the game will only ever make players play better.
A [terrible] example of this is SW: Battlefront (yeah the moneygrubbing EA pos). End of each round, it tallys up your objective score, kills, etc, and increases your "xp" based on that. If you won, great, it gives you a bonus. But what matters is whether you did what you were supposed to as a troop. They take the idea a little too far in that their system encourages winning very little and combat very much since the victory bonus is measly at best. But the idea is fundamentally different than if they had simply said they would judge each player based on whether the entire team wins or loses.
Secondly, obtaining victory is rarely a fair representation of an individual player in NS2. This was jabbered about a lot and probably still is, but NS2 is a highly team-oriented game. This is a little wierd for me to wrap into words, but basically this: since the player in their singular form didn't win, their "skill" isn't accurately portrayed by a "win/loss" based system. Given enough wins and losses on enough players the system will figure out where each player falls by trying different combinations of player, but I get the feeling this works best with smaller teams of more equally ranked players (a la Rocket League). In NS2 (as discussed elsewhere), more often than not you'll end up with green players on the same teams as 2K+ players. It sounds like a very roundabout way to figure out how "good" someone is at ns2.
Joshhhy found some message about fun in my post that I didn't explicitly put there, but definitely also brings up another point. If you just play to obtain victory, eventually you're either locked into a singular tech path, or every game boils down to an early rush.
I think everyone agrees that it could be further improved, but the most important thing about win/loss is that its a metric that needs the least adjustment for context. Having more metrics would be useful, but I'm firmly in the win/loss basis camp.
Like many, many others before you, you fail to realise that what the skill rating measures is your individual contribution to your team's probability of winning in the aggregate. So you can still lose games due to your team making the mistakes, but if you truly have something that improves your team's probability of winning, it will show in your skill rating in the long run. You can always point to individual matches where a lucky rush ended the game "unjustly", but these individual games do not matter (and even here I argue that there's nothing wrong with that, rushes are a natural part of the game that can easily be prevented by even one player, and if the entire team fails to do so, they are worse players than those who could have prevented it and deserve an Elo decrease, and the opposing team who had the audacity to pull it off deserve an increase). Had a horrible stroke of unlucky games and your Elo score went down 200 points? It does not matter.
The Elo score is not there to be stared at and farmed, it's there to settle to oscillate around that player's intrinsic skill rating value that represents what that player brings to the team to make that team win more games, be it aim, positioning, commanding, calling the shots or even just moral support. Rather than "skill", the Elo rating measures the player's "attributes that make him win games". To me, it's one and the same, but since a lot of nay-sayers seem to be fixated on things like kills and score even in situations where they do absolutely nothing to further the team into victory, then the distinction seems necessary.
A [terrible] example of this is SW: Battlefront (yeah the moneygrubbing EA pos). End of each round, it tallys up your objective score, kills, etc, and increases your "xp" based on that. If you won, great, it gives you a bonus. But what matters is whether you did what you were supposed to as a troop. They take the idea a little too far in that their system encourages winning very little and combat very much since the victory bonus is measly at best. But the idea is fundamentally different than if they had simply said they would judge each player based on whether the entire team wins or loses.
This has nothing to do with any kind of measure of skill. This is simply rewarding all players, even bad ones, for every action they take so that they feel special and keep playing. The NS2 skill system does not try to be anything like this, thank goodness.
Yes when I look at my or anybody's skill, I know that that player is just in that range. From my own experience, I've dropped 400 pts over the course of 2 days of pub playing during a sale/green wave. Accordingly, I see someone's skill number is ~300 - 400 lower than mine, they're in the same ballpark as me. If it's ~200 greater than me, I still would be lead to think that they are also in about the same ballpark as me since it only takes one day of crummy pub matches to drop those 200.
When the difference is greater than 500 one way or the other, that's when I feel it's safe to say they're on another tier.
However, I must contest about the 0s and 1000s not being a wrench in the works. Is this player at 500 starting from 0? Or is he at 500 starting from 1000, cuz imo that's a big difference.
Comments
it's like you forget that Hive is just about playtime-win/loss, there's nothing useful about it & all this when the game doesn't even have matchmaking.
actually pathetic.
If it would be useless, you would have 1300 score div1 field players.
Never saw one.
KAPPA
KAPPA
KAPPA
edit: and you totally misunderstood my meaning of useless, the whole system is based off of playtime & win/loss, nothing to do with points, k/d, assists, building, accuracy, welding etc. And the best part of it all, is it's used to balance public matches, like what the shit rofl, the humor.
Imagine a player from the competitive scene with 1.5K that is quite above that in reality. Imagine that competitive player also playing on public servers as a routine and wins with super aggressive fade against a team that should beat him according to ELO but will fail ultimately. Farming some ELO becomes easy. Guaranteed recover. Yum!
If the guy goes on a public server with a 1.5K ELO (but stronger in reality) he has a great potential to ruin the game as he's clearly above anyone else on the server (given he joins alone).
This whole thing could look as a pyramidal financial system when i come to think about it...
Edit: This post was directed at Lamb who deleted his post of rambling nonsense
Only few times I've seen people with 2700+ in pub games is when the server wasn't whitelisted.
I wanted those points.
TGNS regulars commonly call out peers by name and ask them to switch teams to improve the balance the computer has created. But these efforts augment the computer's best effort, as opposed to replacing it entirely. And of course this manual effort is most satisfactory when players are knowledgeable about each other (pretty manageable with community).
Personally I don't really care all that much about my hive skill as far as my elo number.
However, it prevents me from ever having an enjoyable game where I command or go gorge, as I always end up crippling my team as I need to justify my 3k+ elo and I am no where near good enough as a gorge, lerk, or commander to make up for. As such, my team always loses if I decide to.......
That's the only part I really dislike (other than the actual balancing algorithm not properly distributing skill, though that's not a problem with the metric per se.....)
Sure you can tell someone not to care about it, but when the number is literally shoved into your face every time you open the game you end up caring, even if it's just a bit. Next thing you know you're not enjoying the game as much as you should be because every game you play affects that number.
The worse part is hive skill is literally useless for players. If we had some kind of official ranked ladder system, then yes it would be great to have, but ns2 is far far away from having this. The only thing hiveskill is really used for is shuffling teams, and this could still be done if it was hidden.
But seriously, I was playing one day and got shuffled on a marine team against two alien players with hive scores over 2700. I was hovering around 2360 at the time. I could tell immediately that "I" would get my *** handed to me before the game even started. My team had no where near the skill to thwart the onslaught when those two went Fade. No one could chip damage (aim) and no one understood the concept of "pinch", let alone have any map awareness. Again, I knew the game wouldn't work out for me. I played it anyway and lost like 45pts. Now, I wouldn't say I'm a ELO snob of sorts, but it is disheartening to just give away those points. It sort of makes you feel like you've not only lost the game in a bad way, but "Hold on, we're not done yet", let's drain you of those shinny ELO points from your fantastic one game loss. You know, those points that took you like 10 games to earn. Which makes you then recall the way your team played, or remember the one guy who could possibly help you pull off a win but left the game. Oh, and let's not forget those servers which let you switch mid-game when things aren't going well. I've never done that, but I've seen it happen. So there's my rant.
BTW, there are premier/Div 1 players with an ELO lower than me. I know it's "just a number", but it's a number that anyone would like to see higher than average...yes?
dim, dull, dumbbell, dumdum, dummy, imbecile, pinhead, simple, slow, stupid, subnormal, touched, underachieving. or yo-yo. Maybe those are less offensive.
Just an FYI, that "Average Skill" line on the top of the scoreboard is an NS2+ server-side option. Most admins have it displayed in an effort to point out how imbalanced teams are about to be by the only metric available. Being able to hide or show your own hive score in your hive profile is another matter.
I've largely avoided these skill topics because everything has been said, people are just butthurt about it so they keep perpetuating the same ideas.
The bottom line is summed up as follows:
Skill is really hard to quantify in NS2. ELO is lacking, this was hollered and cried about when Hive was first implemented. Over time, as it was supposed to, the rankings have evened out to approximately where they should be (with exceptions yes). ELO also encourages less than ideal playstyle where literally the only thing that matters is who gets the victory. More comprehensive solutions might include basing it on PPM, Per-side Skill levels, commander independant skill levels, etc...
Without a dev coming in and telling us exactly if or what the plans are for Hive2.0 and if they include a skill adjustment (like the one from Moultano whereby skill thresholds for the 1K rookies would even out), we simply don't have anything to do.
Shuffling exists to solve a problem that people are either too forgetful or too uncaring to remember we had. People stack teams. It just happens. It happened before Hive, it happens still. People want to Play with their friends, their friends play well, so you end up with a good couple players on one team = stack = cry. The only way to objectively 'solve' stacking is to make balances obligatory, no switching, no f4ing. This sucks, people cry.
So from a server op point of view, it's an impossible problem, but people cry less about stacking when shuffles happen. Communities like TGNS have been fostered and pruned to the point where they work because regulars are well behaved enough to not stack up on one side, and people will call it out if they do (most often). This is really hard to get to work though and takes time and effort and a solid community of players who want to play and are willing to balance teams themselves (captains mode was this to the extreme).
All in all, yeah skill's not ideal, but it's better than nothing. Hiding it might solve some of the problems, but it really would just sweep them under a rug. And there's pretty much nothing else to say without someone on the dev team coming in and telling us if there are plans, and what they are (or is there some reason why we as the community shouldn't know?).
So Elo only encourages playstyles that work towards winning the game. How, by any definition anyone could ever come up with, could this be any closer to ideal? What other goal do you have in the game than to win?
Not that I have an alternative to suggest, but often someone latejoins and the team wins moreso because of that player than anyone else - that player gets fewer points.
Is there any way to get around that other than "well everything should balance out and even if it doesn't, they're outliers". It's something that I imagine is more likely to affect people who frequently change servers.
Having an option locally to hide it wont actually do anything. People will still care. People will still go out to HIVE to check their score... etc.
A more comprehensive algorithm might be a better option as well. Have a field player weighed average score while keeping the commander separate or something like that. *shrug*
Two things,
First, I maintain that "Winning" and "obtaining victory" are slightly different. One team that can be winning throughout the entire round (aka, the superior team) might lose to a rush. "But Calego, if they're the superior team, why'd they lose to a rush?" Could have been one person's fault, could have been the team's fault, either way the fact remains that when it comes to the basic objectives of the game, the 'winning' team was superior to the 'losing' team in every way. Presumably they secured more map control, resources, team points, team kills, etc. Meanwhile the decidedly inferior team obtained Victory by a quick and effective last ditch effort. As such, their entire team's ranking goes up, even though they were most definitely 'worse' collectively as a team.
Rewarding Victory is less ideal than rewarding 'winning' (or call it something like 'objective play') because having many victories doesn't make a player 'good'. A skill system where it visibly encourages players to play the game will only ever make players play better.
A [terrible] example of this is SW: Battlefront (yeah the moneygrubbing EA pos). End of each round, it tallys up your objective score, kills, etc, and increases your "xp" based on that. If you won, great, it gives you a bonus. But what matters is whether you did what you were supposed to as a troop. They take the idea a little too far in that their system encourages winning very little and combat very much since the victory bonus is measly at best. But the idea is fundamentally different than if they had simply said they would judge each player based on whether the entire team wins or loses.
Secondly, obtaining victory is rarely a fair representation of an individual player in NS2. This was jabbered about a lot and probably still is, but NS2 is a highly team-oriented game. This is a little wierd for me to wrap into words, but basically this: since the player in their singular form didn't win, their "skill" isn't accurately portrayed by a "win/loss" based system. Given enough wins and losses on enough players the system will figure out where each player falls by trying different combinations of player, but I get the feeling this works best with smaller teams of more equally ranked players (a la Rocket League). In NS2 (as discussed elsewhere), more often than not you'll end up with green players on the same teams as 2K+ players. It sounds like a very roundabout way to figure out how "good" someone is at ns2.
Joshhhy found some message about fun in my post that I didn't explicitly put there, but definitely also brings up another point. If you just play to obtain victory, eventually you're either locked into a singular tech path, or every game boils down to an early rush.
Says the guy who doesn't allow concedes to end games.
Like many, many others before you, you fail to realise that what the skill rating measures is your individual contribution to your team's probability of winning in the aggregate. So you can still lose games due to your team making the mistakes, but if you truly have something that improves your team's probability of winning, it will show in your skill rating in the long run. You can always point to individual matches where a lucky rush ended the game "unjustly", but these individual games do not matter (and even here I argue that there's nothing wrong with that, rushes are a natural part of the game that can easily be prevented by even one player, and if the entire team fails to do so, they are worse players than those who could have prevented it and deserve an Elo decrease, and the opposing team who had the audacity to pull it off deserve an increase). Had a horrible stroke of unlucky games and your Elo score went down 200 points? It does not matter.
The Elo score is not there to be stared at and farmed, it's there to settle to oscillate around that player's intrinsic skill rating value that represents what that player brings to the team to make that team win more games, be it aim, positioning, commanding, calling the shots or even just moral support. Rather than "skill", the Elo rating measures the player's "attributes that make him win games". To me, it's one and the same, but since a lot of nay-sayers seem to be fixated on things like kills and score even in situations where they do absolutely nothing to further the team into victory, then the distinction seems necessary.
This has nothing to do with any kind of measure of skill. This is simply rewarding all players, even bad ones, for every action they take so that they feel special and keep playing. The NS2 skill system does not try to be anything like this, thank goodness.
Yes when I look at my or anybody's skill, I know that that player is just in that range. From my own experience, I've dropped 400 pts over the course of 2 days of pub playing during a sale/green wave. Accordingly, I see someone's skill number is ~300 - 400 lower than mine, they're in the same ballpark as me. If it's ~200 greater than me, I still would be lead to think that they are also in about the same ballpark as me since it only takes one day of crummy pub matches to drop those 200.
When the difference is greater than 500 one way or the other, that's when I feel it's safe to say they're on another tier.
However, I must contest about the 0s and 1000s not being a wrench in the works. Is this player at 500 starting from 0? Or is he at 500 starting from 1000, cuz imo that's a big difference.