Per Team Skills
moultano
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
This is a preliminary proposal for how to add per team skills to hive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IiV3AmD_nt7sqlagpTeVrk8D9XQxoTdBhM-I5CPbzck/edit?usp=drivesdk
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IiV3AmD_nt7sqlagpTeVrk8D9XQxoTdBhM-I5CPbzck/edit?usp=drivesdk
Comments
I disagree with this premise. Given random shuffle (which is the norm in most servers), a player's ELO score will be correct. Example: a primary marine player's ELO at 3000 goes through many shuffled games, and by losing many alien games the ELO will drop naturally, even if the shuffle algorithm was not aware of an inflated ELO in the first place.
There's two different notions of accuracy here: Low bias, and low variance. Low bias means that the prediction will on average be centered around the true value. Low variance means the prediction will be close to the true value. You are right that random team assignment makes the bias 0, but it doesn't make the variance 0. The variance never goes to 0, and this is one of many factors that add to it.
(Also, shuffle tries to keep players on their initial team, so even if shuffle is used every round, players may still play more often on their preferred team.)
I'll do my part by taking as many awesomes back from you as necessary if you lose.
QED x)
He means balanced given the hive system assuming average team skill is equal and team standard deviation of skill.
Although this hypothetical game is "balanced" it is not perfect. There is the assumption that different players are better or worse at different teams to varying degrees. Separate skill values, even with offsets, could improve the accuracy of the skill value by reducing variance.
Aliens also have historically had a higher chance of winning. Theoretically if someone played aliens only they could inflate their hive skill. This could also create some variance.
I think it depends on which player population. It would make sense that newer players will always be better at marines. Marine play is somewhat familiar compared to the entirely unfamiliar aliens. Rookies may be the largest population but I think they also have the lowest variance because of their inexperience. This hypothesis is further supported by rookies playing marines more often than aliens. I am assuming players will generally play the team they are better with.
Middle skilled players tend to be better at aliens. At least this is what I have observed while playing and in the data. Middle skilled players do play aliens more than marines which follows my assumption. Servers that have a high quantity of middle skilled games have very high alien win rates. Diamond gamers and TGNS are good examples of this.
High skill player tend to play marines significantly more than aliens. High skill games tend to have lower alien win rates. The variance may be quite high in these players but their alien skill level is rarely bad. It is that their marine skill is just that far above average.
I once tried to estimate the variance by creating separate skill values by muliplying their hive skill by the percent of time played by team. This experiment produced results like I have hypothesized here. I think that the percent variance will be similar to the variance in the percent time spent on each team.
What suprised you? Did you do an experiment?
Rereading it, I found two things amazing.
By coupling race skills you are assuming a good player is generally good at both teams. In other words you are assuming a certain offset magnitude which will be driven by the rate difference between adagrad rate and regular rate. It may need a coefficient to adjust it's gain.
Average and offset is just a mathematical representation. It's the same content as having two separate skills. Moultano cleverness is coupling the two skills by using different convergence rates on the two components of that representation.
I just want to know if the shuffle algorithm (last phrase of your quote does not make it clear) will look at the (average+offset) or just (average) when distributing players. I believe it should look at the (average+offset) otherwise the team imbalance will be the same or worse.
The plan for now is to use the average only. I believe this will still yield benefits. Once it is out there for a while, we (or modders) can experiment with other criteria. I'd really like to guarantee that a player won't be biased towards one team or another by shuffle, and it seems hard to guarantee that using the per team skills to shuffle.
If I'm a 1200 hivescore, how does it know that my 1200 is really a 200 on marine and a 1500 on alien?
Is there a way to explain it without the mathematical mumbo jumbo for the simple folk like me?
It is essentially taking your 200 and 1500 separate team skills and averaging them to make it more accurate. This reduces variance from your skill from going up or down a lot by being better at one team.
The problem with using actually separate skill values is what I have been telling you for years.
1) Separate skill values would converge slower.
2) Shuffle would force players to play on their better or worse team. If a player is generally better than average, a naive shuffle would tend to put them on their worse team. If a player is generally worse than average, a naive shuffle would tend to put them on their better team.
The cool thing is that even without actually using separate hive skill values is that we would actually have the data. It would prove or disprove that your marine skill is closer to 200 and your alien skill closer to 1500. It would allow server operators or UWE to enable separate skill value shuffling in the future. Some servers could choose to live with those problems I mentioned, and others could choose to not live with them.
So it is exactly what I thought then... Simply making the average more accurate.
Not sure why you even mentioned this? I didn't mention wanting seperate hive scores. (gave up on that dream) I'm asking how will this new algorithm (or whatever you want to call it) know that I'm awful at Marine and decent at Alien? (or rather if you'd prefer, how will it "learn" that information)
I ended by asking if there's a way to explain it without the mathematical mumbo jumbo, in the hopes that I might be able to understand better... If that's not possible then fine.
This is one of the reasons I'm very interested in what the data will reveal. If it doesn't show that my Marine skill is way way waaaaay below my Alien skill, then it will be concrete proof beyond any shadow of doubt that the system is flawed. I can actually contribute and help with wins on Alien, whereas I'm just completely and totally useless on Marine.
This is addressed in the google doc:
Yeaa it might be flawed OR, the truth might be that you are so lacking at both that you suffer from a Dunning-Krueger effect and you in reality don't contribute as much as you think as alien. Or you could be performing poorly subconsciously as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in order to prove your point. In short, I don't think it would be proof of anything at all.
I know you want separate hive skills. I do too. This is almost the same thing. It could potentially be used that way.
I just hope we get more balanced games and I get put on Alien more often.