Thoughts On: Smurfing, Family Sharing, Hours Played, Cheating, Balance, and Accepting the Game
NousWanderer
Join Date: 2010-05-07 Member: 71646Members
Join Date: 2010-05-07 Member: 71646Members
Dear NS2 Community, and new players in particular,
TL,DR: Smurfing is a self-limiting problem. There are good reasons to make alternate accounts. Hours played matter less than you think precisely because alternate accounts matter less than you think (after the introduction of adagrad in particular). Cheating is rare and there are ways of documenting it when it does happen. Try to get good before getting bitchy.
-N
- A smurf is player who utilizes a new account so as to present the false appearance of newbishness. A smurf wants to be underestimated both socially and mathematically. An example would be an ex-pro player creating a new account with the sole and express purpose of dominating less skilled competition while receiving beneficial hive skill placements in shuffles. While this can be a problem, NS2 developers have already taken steps to mitigate the negative effects of smurfing. In simple terms, your hive skill is based exclusively off of your winrate, and the introduction of adagrad means that the amount of time the game takes to calculate your "true" hive skill is significantly reduced. As such, smurfing is a self-limiting problem: if the smurf is actively producing wins for the teams they play on, their rapidly adjusted score will quickly place them in non-smurf territory, therefore limiting the extent to which any smurf can capitalize on a fresh account before being forced to create yet another one. If the "smurf" isn't producing wins for the team, then this is a non-issue to begin with. See where I'm going with this?
- The smurf described in the example above is fundamentally indistinguishable from a legitimately skilled player utilizing a fresh account for legitimate reasons, whatever those reasons might be (like having lost an original account or whatever other reason someone might come up with when invoking the principle of charity to interpret the actions of others). This fact alone should give you pause before flipping out. And since their hive skill will be recalculated pretty quickly, this is - again - a self-limiting problem. Have faith in adagrad because this game isn't going to see a better shuffle scheme anytime soon.
- There are other, more common and perfectly legitimate reasons to create new accounts (either by repurchasing NS2 or using family sharing). These include: privacy (e.g., well-known players not wanting to deal with noisy recognition, or streamers who want new accounts totally unrelated to their existing ones), practicing lifeforms one never plays (e.g., gorge, lerk, fade), or learning to comm in an active environment (because veteran players cannot join rookie servers to practice commanding anyway). Why might someone use a new account to practice their uncommonly played lifeforms/roles? Because a high hive skill account is expected to carry once shuffled. It isn't uncommon for 4k+ players to be stuck on teams with standard deviations of over 1.2k to 1.5k. This means that the gap between the "skilled" and "unskilled" players on those teams is huge. In these cases it's correct to say that it's disproportionately up to those high hive skill players to secure their team's win. In these circumstances, going gorge, playing a completely unfamiliar lifeform, or learning to command may well be the equivalent of condemning the team to a loss. It's not abnormal to want to avoid that scenario for multiple reasons including but not limited to: not screwing over others, and not generating the ire of people who don't want to have their own hive scores gimped by your decisions. As such, some players have created accounts specifically to practice (and to get a sense of their hive skill when it's exclusively determined by these role decisions). Hive skill will do the work in these situations. It would be nice if the game offered other alternatives, but they don't exist as of yet.
- Hours played mean little to nothing when assessing an account. An account's hive skill to "realized skill" ratio (i.e., the account's numerical skill rating relative to the player's actual contributions to games) is the only ratio that matters when determining who is and isn't a smurf. Once an account breaks 2k skill, it's really silly to consider it a smurf account. And when an account has 4k+ skill? Don't even get me started. At that point it's not even in the realm of reason to consider the account a smurf account.
- If someone with multiple accounts has one account with a higher hive skill than their "main" account, the non-main account is definitely not smurfing; by definition that account cannot be said to be smurfing, because the opposite is happening in practice: the game is saddling that account with the responsibility of winning to a greater degree than it would with the same user's main account. Relativistically, the non-main account in this scenario is less of a smurf than the main account is because the non-main (higher hive skill) account is expected to do more work. By contrast, a player who is actively smurfing isn't expected to make a significant contribution to the team (because they have a low hive skill), but does anyway (which is the part people take issue with). So these are diametrically opposed scenarios and should be understood as such.
- There aren't many cheaters in this game. If you suspect someone is cheating, spectate them and gather proof. Due to how spectating a player provides you with something of an abstraction of what the player is actually seeing clientside, this still isn't a perfect process, but it's better than nothing. Please remember that your hive skill is fundamentally relativistic; it measures your likelihood of winning relative to the competition you're playing against. If you're always playing against the same competition, all your hive skill represents is your likelihood of winning against that specific group of players. If you've achieved 2-3k hive skill within the confines of your preferred server, great, but you aren't necessarily going to gain an inch on someone who has achieved the same score by playing against the game's very best competition. I understand that you might feel like you understand the game really, really well because you've been playing for three thousand hours or whatever, but actual skill growth requires positive change relative to previous ability, and this kind of change must be preceded by the belief that improvement is both possible and necessary. If you think you're a perfect player then you clearly don't think that improvement is possible or necessary. If you've already accepted this ludicrous notion that you have nothing left to learn, you're almost definitely wrong. Trust me: your shitty walker fade is proof positive that you have plenty to learn. Rather than issuing kneejerk accusations against the high skill players who are expected to carry the teams they're on, stop and consider that you might be the problem if you're dying repeatedly and ineffectively. Egregious examples of hacking/cheating are available on YouTube if you need a basis for comparison, but do not underestimate just how good the best players in NS2 are. I'm not sure if this pattern of constantly whining and assuming the worst of others is the consequence of a new generation of gamers who've grown up expecting to make a massive contribution with a single keypress or merely the result of generic assholes who've internalized a misguided notion of their own superiority because they've sunk enough hours into the game, but NS2 has different mechanics than the more democratic AAA titles released today. In essence the game reflects the "high skill floor, higher skill ceiling" dynamic that characterized the twitchy arcade shooters of yore. The only valid response to failure is to try harder as opposed to shifting the blame.
- Don't blame good players for playing with you: there aren't many other options. Not everyone has the time or willingness to wait for gathers to collect, and many players simply select servers that ping well or have open slots. I hate to say "get good", but: get good. No, it isn't your fault that it's difficult to get good. That's just the way it is. Hopefully we'll someday see better tools to help you adjust to the game's demands/meta, or a much larger player base to establish better skill brackets with. Until that happens, adapt.
TL,DR: Smurfing is a self-limiting problem. There are good reasons to make alternate accounts. Hours played matter less than you think precisely because alternate accounts matter less than you think (after the introduction of adagrad in particular). Cheating is rare and there are ways of documenting it when it does happen. Try to get good before getting bitchy.
-N
Comments
I admit, there are many times I want to just go gorge, but I know I'll be handicapping my own team by doing so. There's also many times I'm forced into commanding because nobody else will, and I know that my team is at a major disadvantage because of this.
I don't think deception is the solution here... I don't know what a good solution would be, and I'm open to suggestions.
The best I can come up with is remove ready-room joining, and replace it with a menu that allows players to state if they want to play on the ground or as the commander, THEN shuffle teams according to those choices... but then of course people could exploit this by having a lesser skilled player jump in the comm chair, and of course it does nothing to eliminate the "I want to gorge" problem... so I'm open to suggestions.
Yeah, it's still going to take a number of games to reflect true ability, but I guess the vexing notion of "true ability" is central to what we're discussing to begin with: what does true skill even mean when the game features play mechanics as diverse as 1) comming, 2) marine field, and 3) alien lifeforms to begin with? A single hive rating is only reflective of that diversity if a given player regularly and routinely practices all of the options. This is unrealistic in practice because of how hive skill actually functions. Once a skilled player finds themselves down the road to a true reflection of their hive skill, the barrier to exploration increases. This is most obvious in the case of comming, but it applies to the other examples we've discussed as well (e.g., gorge, fade, etc.). The mathematical purity of ELO is that everything is abstracted to winrate, and although this has its strengths it also has significant weaknesses, some of which I've enumerated (principally #3 in the post above).
This isn't totally unique to NS2. There are some popular OW streamers who have sniper-specific accounts, for example, where they simply geek out on hanzo and widow as opposed to gimping their comp. teams. In the case of NS2, I suspect that the number of people who've made more than one account is vanishingly small to begin with, and the number of people who've made more than two is even smaller. What makes NS2 unique is that the community is so small that it's still more noticeable when it happens. It doesn't make a difference, though: you still have clueless people in the community accusing 3-4k+ accounts of smurfing. It's not even an internally consistent point of view. It's not what smurfing means. What's a bigger problem? The fact that someone skilled up a second account, or the fact that so many people in this community don't even know what good play looks like? I vote number two. In any event, there are plenty of cases where a second account has nothing to do with deception. I've been considering doing some streaming. If and when that happens, it's highly unlikely that I'll want to broadcast anything related to my principal steam identity. That said, I know how to play the game, so the consequences are obvious.
I can't think of any mathematical solutions that wouldn't be fairly complex or subject to manipulation. Many people have advocated for separate alien/marine scores, and others have advocated for separate alien/marine comm scores as well. These mechanisms would still be subject to manipulation, but I think there are strong arguments for both. I also think that you need to have some synergy between new players and veterans. Rookie servers are inadequate. I've outlined my preference for allowing veteran players to command in rookie servers. It's not a perfect solution, but it would at least provide a training platform with some degree of social responsivity (as compared to bots). There would be value there.
One of the best solutions would be to have a combat-esque game mode. That's nothing new. You've heard it before. I know there's some sort of legal issue given that development was handled by a third party. That said, I can't imagine that an approximation of the combat mod would be completely off-limits. Am I wrong about that? My guess is that the biggest barrier is the development time that would be required. A clear answer would be useful; maybe it's something that could be coded by the community and integrated thereafter (pending review and testing)? After all, combat was originally a mod. In any event, the game needs some mechanism by which players can practice the large range of lifeform/tech options outside of the confines of classic, where every decision matters that much more.
My principal goal in posting this is to get the community to chill out a bit. You have people who are merely above average relative to the old div1 players who get accused of hacking every time they play. You have people who have newer accounts that - despite their freshness - are around 4k+ skill who are being kicked because of their lack of playtime and for no other reason. Where's the logic there? Either the account is smurfing (or in the "smurfing phase" en route to their true hive score) or it isn't. For the reasons I mentioned, a 4k+ account isn't smurfing in any sense of the word.
So yeah, it's not the best situation, but I don't have any great ideas on how to fix it, either. What I'm advocating for is members of the community who take issue with this stuff to develop a more rounded perspective instead of defaulting to a state of endless bitching.
The only other solution that comes to mind is to introduce a handicap system... but that of course comes with plenty of baggage on its own. I've suggested it many times, and many times just barely escaped with my life.
Then you get games that never start because a server shuffled and no one wants to command on one team and the server op doesn't let you switch teams after a shuffle. So then the server dies.
At least for commanding you could have a separate way to join teams as commander directly, and take that into account when determining "team skill".
This is of course not 100% fool proof, because you can hop out and play on the field, but it would be better than nothing.
Reasonably accurate and functionally accurate are two different things. The kind of player described in the OP skyrocket up with a smurf account. I don't know who's smurf account this is, but I played with him, and it was a very clear smurf. After only 17 games over 4 hours he was up to 2333 hive skill, which was still too low for him. He stopped using the account. On a per account basis, it is self limiting. On the other hand, family sharing is not completely unlimited which means more sales for UWE.
The account I linked skill growth over time is in this spoiler. This is one smurf's skill growth, and is not representative of all smurf's skill growth. It does show how fast a smurf's skill value can grow though.
On a related subject, here are a few graphs of rookie and veterans skill over time since hive 2 began recording until December 15, 2016. This is not showing anything about smurfs, but it is interesting to see hive in action. These players were semi-randomly selected. This is a small sample and not representative of every player's skill over time.
This would be ideal, but as you said, but it would require locking commanders into the chair/hive.
I want to state that while I do disagree, it would be awesome if we could play with friends. It is a tradeoff, and I personally prefer what we have now.
Yes, it's not 100% accurate, and it never will be. Good luck finding an algorithm that can be with the inherent variability involved with NS2. Also, @Nordic is essentially correct about the number of games required to achieve "reasonable accuracy". However, it begins roughly honing in on a player's Skill Range within the first ~30 games or so. And our tests and the community's own validation (largely thanks again to @Nordic ) have shown it to be very reasonable in its accuracy. While I did implement the Hive system, I did not create its underlying algorithm. That was @moultano, who deserves 100% of the credit for it. It's a very very clever algorithm that even takes Bots into account. And to the best of my knowledge is the first Skill System used in a video game that utilizes an adagrad gradient (which gets lots of cool points! :P).
Regarding Smurfs...
I have been extremely tempted to flatout prevent Family Sharing to function with NS2 (yes, it's possible). This would eliminate the bulk of the problem immediately. However...I'm very, very apprehensive to blatantly prevent legitimate users from being unable to use that snazzy feature of Steam. My personal _opinion_ is Valve should not have allowed this feature to work for any purely multiplayer games, under any circumstances. In addition, it shouldn't be usable by users that have any sort of VAC bans in their account history. At this point in time, concerning the immediate, the most viable option is for good community server administration / moderating. Unless there is a rampant flood (that can be proven) of Smurfing we won't be adding any totalitarian-style restrictions.
I don't know if you're aware of @HEllrunner2k 's idea, where he put a big red skull-and-bones icon above high-ranked players. While I'm against handicapping players in game mechanics, alerting less experienced players about the potential of being stomped is acceptable imo...
EDIT:
To elaborate a bit, knowing someone is much more skilled than you gives you the option to disengage and go for more fruitful targets, for eg RTs or other marines on the map, or just shout out to your teammates for help.
Like that idea. Good way for them to learn too.
It's also very common for the game to be shuffled, then suddenly one team is down 3-4+ players because people left. Why did they leave? Because they were shuffled to the team they did not want to play on.
On top of that shuffle isn't very accurate simply because it uses one score for both Marine and Alien. Since hive 2 was introduced my score fluctuates from 200 all the way up to 1600, and it all depends on which team I get shuffled to. When I get placed on Marine, my hive drops like a rock.. When I get to play Alien, it skyrockets. If I've been playing Alien a lot and my hive skill is around 1500 and I get shuffled to Marine, then the teams are unbalanced because it's expecting me to perform at a 1500 hive skill level, when I can only perform at a 200-500 hive skill level at best.
I don't understand why the hive score can't be split between Alien and Marine (bonus if there's a third score for commanding). Most people who play this game tend to be way better at one side over the other, and having shuffle accurately know a person's skill for each side could only serve to make it produce more evenly balanced games.
I also don't see why we can't have an option somewhere for preferred team, with three choices: Alien - Marine - Either.. Then shuffle could use that alongside hive to try to place people on the team they actually want to play. I can't even begin to guess how many times I've been forced to Marine, and when I say "damn marines again" someone on the other team goes "lucky, I wish I was on Marines" - Even just having the "switch" function from the Tactical Gamer server added to vanilla would be a vast improvement.
As far as cheating goes, there are more than a few cheaters in NS2, but it's useless to try to prove it as you can have the most hilariously obvious video evidence posted to youtube, and people still just say "they're just a pro player, you can't rely on spectate anyway" Well if we can't rely on spectate, then it becomes virtually impossible to prove someone is cheating because any proof is written off with the excuse "spectate is wonky". (and If I'm wrong then please explain how to obtain video proof without spectating the suspected cheater)
Still think we should get a skill plot added to the round summary. This would show average team skill through the game so if there is a sudden imbalance when a 4K player leaves mid game it would "explain" the sudden turn around.(if my son wakes up from a nap early... it's time to alt-f4)
I was playing seige mod a few nights ago and got called a hacker(not the first time)... huge open map (domesiege) me with a JP/HMG him a lerk. "He never missed". All settings on low, 144hz, 1440p, 3000+ hours, of coarse I'm not going to miss a lerk.... he spectated me for several rounds, never giving up his claim that I hack.
In 3,000 hours of NS2 I can only think of a handful of times that a player has frustrated me so much that I thought he might be hacking. Only when aim and positioning didn't line up, if the shoot 30% but move poorly... again maybe 3-5 times in 3,000 hours.
I credit a lot of "unbelievable" things to the NS2 sound issues. I hear things all the time that I feel I probably shouldn't.
4 or 5 times i think, maybe less. when you die a little tooo fast, over and over.
(this is essentially adagrad + momentum, so if you win a bunch of games in a row, your update keeps going up.)
Only problem with adam is that the update blends the current value with the previous value, so your skill could go down even if you won the game, just because you lost the previous game, which I think people would hate.
There might be some way we could take inspiration from this but prevent that particular behavior, I'd have to think about it a bit.
How exactly does this stop the 3k+ skill player (i.e. loyal NS2 player) from needing to create a smurf because they want to command, gorge, not be forced to carry the team every game?
The skills would be uncoupled after that, so after losing a few games it would be free to drift down. This just prevents people creating new accounts to be initialized at 0. If you have a long-standing comm account, and a long-standing regular account, the skills would still be accurate for each after convergence.
I can fact check this. This page shows your hive skill value over time since January 2017. It does not fluctuate as much as you say. Before January 2017, you didn't play all that much. You started with a skill value of 1014 when Hive 2 began recording.
I have explained it to you before, many times, in different ways. I am sorry I am not a skilled enough communicator to help you understand.
That's not really a solvable problem.
Don't be too hard on yourself. If someone continues to argue against numbers, for example a notion that 77% means never and 23% means always, something else may be wrong. You've done your best.
Also, why haven't I seen this site?! Is this the new... thing??
Is that website supposed to be shared? I thought that the hive website was taken down so people don't obsess over their hive?
Anyway, while I'm sure you meant January 2017, wasn't hive 2 started before that? I remember I had some ridiculously low hive at one point after the swap was made. I couldn't go back to find how low it went.
Edit - How do you know which is his account anyway? Stalker.
Comm (locked in chair) yes. Gorge no. Some players can be devastating on gorges as well. Not to mention the players who lose all their pres and decide its time to go skulk.
I did mean January 2017, and Hive2 did begin recording a couple months before then. The graph of skill overtime starts in January, because that is when the website began recording. It works via the hive2 api, it is made by @morrolan. He mentioned it awhile ago. I personally have some data that goes back further than the website shows.
I can not imagine a herekles gorge on a rookie server. I am not saying he would, but someone of his skill. I am pretty sure that even my gorging would be devastating on a rookie only server, and I am not that great of a gorge. I am just not a rookie.
This is a great idea. Big +1
I was hosting the 1st rookie only server ages ago and was playing as skulk only while i gave the players some tips. While playing i was using only parasite and distracted the rines.
Well, this was enough to win as aliens pretty easy.
In an rookie only enviromnent even these ability locks you mentioned are not enough.
1. Initialize new hive IDs that come from family sharing to be the maximum hive score of any of the players under the primary steam account.
2. Consider Adam. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6980.pdf)
3. Allow veterans to command in rookie servers.
So if you play on 1 server only like forever and get 2000, its not the same as someone who has 2000 playing on many servers.
Not that I have a good idea yet to fix that.