Two Smurfing-Related Ideas
NousWanderer
Join Date: 2010-05-07 Member: 71646Members
Join Date: 2010-05-07 Member: 71646Members
As I wrote in this thread, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for players to make alt accounts due to the way the current hiveskill system conflates a variety of fundamentally different roles in an attempt to calculate a per-player win probability.
I don't want to have a debate about whether or not alt accounts should be allowed, whether the people using them are moral, etc. I've already made the case that there are legitimate uses of alt accounts. That said, any uninitialized account is going to start at 0 and there will be a lag between their start and the calculation of their "true" skill value. This presents an issue. It's a self-correcting one, but that correction process takes time.
Two suggestions were made in that thread that would have a positive impact on this. I'm listing them here. I do not know if either is feasible:
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)
I don't want to have a debate about whether or not alt accounts should be allowed, whether the people using them are moral, etc. I've already made the case that there are legitimate uses of alt accounts. That said, any uninitialized account is going to start at 0 and there will be a lag between their start and the calculation of their "true" skill value. This presents an issue. It's a self-correcting one, but that correction process takes time.
Two suggestions were made in that thread that would have a positive impact on this. I'm listing them here. I do not know if either is feasible:
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.
- Let's say that your main account has 3.5k skill. You create a new commanding-only account for practice. This account begins at 3.5k skill as opposed to 0.
- After initialization, the account skill values will naturally diverge depending on how each account is used. For example, if one account is used exclusively for commanding but another account is used as a primary, the skills will update to reflect true ability after games are played. We have adagrad, so the process won't take unreasonably long.
- This disincentivizes smurfing and requires the purchase of a new copy of NS2 if someone wants to initialize at 0.
- Potential Caveats: Ensure that accounts created in this fashion won't show up on any future Hive Skill Stats site unless certain conditions are met (e.g., a specific number of hours played, or a specific number of games played). Because you know at least a very narrow, trollish subset of the high skill folks would do this just to try to spam the leaderboards with duplicate skill ratings.
2. Consider Adam. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6980.pdf)
- Moultano describes it as follows: "This is essentially adagrad + momentum, so if you win a bunch of games in a row, your update keeps going up." In other words, it's like a snappier adagrad that would possibly reflect true hive scores even more quickly than adagrad alone does. But there's a downside that would have to be addressed:
- Potential Caveats: "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."
Comments
...unless we hide hive skill because it doesn't need to be visible.
Hiding hive skill is up to the individual server owner. There's no way you could hide it completely or the servers would have no way to balance teams.
The only way hive skill could be completely 100% foolproof hidden is if Hive itself received a list of steam ids from the server of the players awaiting balance, and then sent back the balanced team compositions, thus never exposing the actual hive numbers to the server at all.
I completely disagree with that
If that is true, maybe all other multiplayer games should also hide their ranking. Go tell LOL and other games players that now they are no longer bronze/silver/gold/etc... because some individuals could get offended to see that they are not the best of the world in that particular game
And in all those games people advance in ranking only due to winrate. And in all those games people complain and insult their developers about balancing and matchmaking. They cry that the other players at their ranking are stupid and the system is unfair to them... I haven't seen a single game without it. And that happens because that is human nature. Most people can't accept when they are failing at something and they need to blame it to someone else, being that needed excuse their teammates, the balance or the developers.
Hive skill being visible is not about status. Or at least it is not only about status. It is kind of a line of command in pubs. It is about whose calls in your team should you listen to when you don't know anyone in the server and specially when you are new to the game. I have encountered many below 300 hive skill players making terrible calls that people listen to just because they are very vocal. Me personally I shut up and listen when a better player overrules my call. That is easy when I know the player, otherwise I need to see their hiveskill
About the topic of two different hive skills, I have always been a big supporter of it. It could be really awesome. But lets be real, you don't have a different ranking for each role in the other multiplayer games. And your skill differs in there as much as it does with the different factions in ns2. It sucks when you play your worst role/faction... but that's how it works everywhere
TL;DR: hive skill needs to be visible. All other games have the same problems as ns2. And rookie commanders need to appear as GREEN when they command a WHITE server
That would be pretty cool... Would that be a lot of work to do?
A lot of your comment responds to this one that I have quoted, which is simple disagreement. The interesting part is when you say bronze/silver/gold it almost sounds like you are making my case for me. People try to use the numeric values as a progression system and or as a competitive ranking. Hive can and does serve those functions, but it does it poorly. I often refer to LoL's MMR when people say NS2's hive sucks and should be KDR based, because LoL's system is not all that different. Rockstar games shows the skill information differently though, and I think that is much better.
I was never a LoL player so I could be absolutely wrong here, but bear with me. LoL does give and show players a similar number to hive skill called LSS(LoLSkillScore). I have never seen anyone who plays LoL talk about their LSS, I instead see people like yourself talk about the competitive rankings like bronze/silver/gold. I might not hear about it because I was never apart of that community. I would argue that since the layman average person talking about skill in league of legends uses the competitive ranks bronze/silver/gold when referring to skill, that LSS is not as important in the zeitgeist as competitive ranks.
NS2 only has hive skill. It doesn't have a progression system or a competitive ranking. UWE plans to add these (eventually/hopefully) but we don't have those right now. Hive skill or LSS is a number that that is hard to understand what it means, and what it does. Hive skill is noisy in that it moves around a lot, while a competitive rank would not.
Despite having a similar system and skill number (LSS), LoL appears to convey that information to us better. For example a LoL leaderboard puts the LSS as the last thing you read. NS2 and Hive have always put the skill value first and upfront. This was true on the old hive website, and it is true on the fan made website. Hive is put first because people don't have a competitive ranking to look at instead. This isn't @morrolan's fault. He is just giving the people what they want.
I have posted this a number of times before, but I made up some skill ranks one day just to see what they would look like. Click on the image to see it.
We could easily change that to LoL like ranks where every 3 ranks you have a new tier. For example Hive skill's of 0 - 800 would be Bronze, Hive skills 801-1200 would be silver, etc. Or whichever brackets worked better.
When it comes down to it though, still think the same as I did when I made that post I quoted.
When I wrote my post I had not seen your link or the other thread. My bad.
But anyways there isn't anything new in there. It is the same that has been discussed countless times.
It just annoys me (my bad again) the sentence "it doesn't need to be visible".
The only reason some people want to hide it is because it offends their pride. Not because it isn't useful.
Absolutely any other kind of useful ranking would offend them in the same way
I'm not expert in lol. As far as I know, LSS is not done by the developers of lol. It is the equivalent as if in our community someone looked at the list of played games and the winrate of every player with each individual lifeform to make a list of the best players for each lifeform
The official ranking though with bronze/silver/etc works pretty similar to hiveskill, the only significant difference being that in ns2 it is entirely numerical and in lol they have metal+division+league points (for example: Silver II 55LP)
You go up or down exclusively depending on winrate. Your skill is visible in your public profile. And it is the same but with a badge+2 numbers (yeah super easy to understand...)
Makes no sense to hide hiveskill ONLY because MAYBE at some point during the next few YEARS they will implement something diferent (caps used only for emphasis).
(And especially because the people that complains now, they will complain the same with any other ranking. Unless you make somthing as stupid and useless as our Leveling system)
If your problem is the number moving too much you can remove one or two significant figures when you show the numbers, converting a 1345 hiveskill to 1300 and a 2687 to 2700
About being "too complicated"... If you dare to tell me that understanding that 2524 is higher that 1768 I call that bullshit
In fricking lol it is really confusing to understand if you don't read it somewhere else. If you don't believe me tell me without looking:
- what is better Gold III or Gold V ?
- what is better Diamond or Platinum?
- what is better Master or Challenger?
- how many LPs you need to go from Silver II to the next division?
As a final note I want to add one last thing.
I highly appreciate the work of our beloved developers, modders and community contributors.
But I honestly feel bad for them wasting their talent and time creating a "progression system" for a game with these low numbers. At this point this is clearly a waste of their time.
We will never have enough players to be able to have matchmaking with people of our own rank unless you make a silly schedule on the forums for when everyone should play...
But then again, the only reason to develop ns2 is love. Player numbers will never raise and the cost of development it is certainly not justified for any other reason
You like figures, here is mine:
The "weird 13th month is because I like to see the january of the following year. Since January is always the month with the larger playerbase
My point being that we shouldn't be removing the tools that we have just because maybe they will implement a better system in the future... Among other things because they probably shouldn't waste time in this.
And because what we have, hiveskill, is esentially the SAME that every other game has
EDIT: I don't understand in what universe hiveskill is so dangerous and bad that must be hiden... and yet a badge indicating exactly the same (although with less significant figures) it is ok to show. The same people complaining now they will complain the same. Because they will complain that they are bronze after 2k hours played and never got to silver.
Let me be blunt here again: people only complain because they don't want to be told by the game that they are bad. They want to think that they are right with their bad calls and that the fault is always of their teamates
These are my problems with visible hive skill, but you have already read these at least twice now. I am stating these again to focus the discussion.
I do not doubt the prevalence of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People will always complain about something. All three of my reasons for wanting to hide hive skill revolve around people trying to use hive for something it is not. My desire is not to totally hide all skill information, but make its consumption not as negative. Maybe it is not so self-evident as to why I think the three points are negative. It is about the volatility of the hive skill value.
It is easy to understand that 2254 is greater than 1768, but people put far too much important on what the number means. "Oh no my skill value went down by 10." People don't understand that a players hive skill oscillates by design. In the picture below is a great example of that oscillation trending around a learned value. It is a people see the tree's but not the forest sort of thing.
Or the two links in my third point listed above where people become obsessed with the number. I am not naive enough that I think we can make people not care anymore. Hive skill is a volatile number. People try to use it as a competitive ranking, which is sort of fills that role. In my opinion the volatility of the hive skill makes it a poor competitive ranking. The volatility also makes it a poor progression system. I hear so many people complain about losing a small amount like 10 hive skill value, which it reality means almost nothing.
What I really want is to hide that volatility. You can do that by hiding hive skill or showing players skill information that is more stable. There are many ways you could do that. You could literally divide hive skill values by 100 and keep the decimals in the hive backend You could show LoL like ranks. There are so many ways to show players less volatile skill information. Why does LoL show bronze-diamond ranks rather than the number like NS2 does?
While I think showing the volatility is undesirable, the volatility is somewhat essential in the design of the system. People seem to think hive skill is akin to XP, and may not know or understand that it is a moving target based on statistics. We can't expect players to understand how hive skill works. Why should we show players the minutia if it creates undeserved distrust in the system?
I personally think it is of greater value to hide hive skill entirely than to share that volatility, but that is only my opinion even if unpopular.
Even though I am writing long posts on this subject, I do agree there are far better things UWE could be working on for NS2, or outside of NS2. UWE does have a competitive ranking planned, and some kind of separate progression system for rookies. They are near the very end of their long term road map for a reason. I am happy they are even working on NS2 at all. The whole reason I commented about hiding hive skill here is because it would solve the caveat mentioned in the OP.
My argument is that your points could be applied to absolutely any other game. And yet all of them show the number.
And if those points are really a problem for you, they will never be solved with any other imaginable system
And yes, having the highest hiveskill doesn't mean that you are the best player in the game (nor does it mean it in any other game), but it certainly means that you are one of the best players
Again, it doesn't. LoL show a number that decreases and increases after each game. It is called league points and mark your position inside your division. So don't say that LoL system works because they also add a badge. Quoting myself: The league points go from 0 to 100 in your division. And go up and down after each win/loss
So it is exactly the same, but they add a shiny badge
you have the same in LoL.
The volatility of the system is not about losing 10 points. Trying to protect people from a 10 points loss it is something you shouldn't do. In absolutely any other game you lose points after a lost game. And you should. Only the hard carry can feel bad about it. But he lost, and the systems needs to show it.
You don't need to patronize people by protecting them to see that they lost points after a lost game.
I do agree though in the volatility during the first games. That figure was really interesting. And that is the reason why any other game hides your skill for the first 10 ranked games. If that is a problem you have a simple solution that apply only to rookies and nobody else:
- You show any player with less than 50 or 100 rounds as green and you hide their skill
Problem solved
But don't hide everyone else's skill.
But that certainly will make people angrier. Because it will seem an erratic system that substracts you skill points even when you win a round that you hard carried and yet other people that lost doing nothing increased their elo.
For god sakes people still argue that skill should be related to k/d ratio... good luck explaining this new system to them lol
And if your solution again is "but we will hide the skill" my answer is "no, because the minimal advantage of a slightly better system doesn't make up for all the advantages of seeing people's individual skill level"
@BeigeAlert - That sounds promising but Im not technical enough to know if that will be a huge change or not.