We'd hope. The one unknowable factor is that I'm designating the teams and how that lack of self-determination will affect people's reactions. Maybe it won't. Perhaps it will. I need to be ready in the worst case scenario.
Might I ask why?
It seems to me that teamwork would be one of the most important aspects at the top end. So that forcing people into teams, rather than letting them team with the people they know they can work with the best in a pvp environment, could be detrimental.
People left to their own means will just group up with who they like and who they're familiar. Or they'll not find anyone to group with at all.
First, by approaching it from a top down level, I can group people together based on the synergies of their classes and what classes work well together.
Second, I prevent the games from becoming a popularity contest. This is important since the majority of my guild are people who rerolled or transfered over from other servers. The people native to the server would of course know more people and be more likely to get into an Arena-5 man while those who don't know anyone would be more likely to be left out.
Third, by me choosing for members instead of letting members choose for themselves, I'll have more room to make changes in case a team template doesn't turn out to be as good in action as it was on paper. I won't be tearing people from their friends. Instead I'll be reassigning them from one team to another.
What I have going for me is that I'm recruiting PvPers. Such a process would be more difficult for a PvE guild since you're likely to get a greater amount of uneveness in PvP skill.
Ignie Ferroque translates from latin to "with fire & with sword." It is a stock phrase used to describe the results of a destructive raid into an enemy's territory, whose sole purpose is to generate fear, terror, and destruction.
The simplest solution would be for a team not to receive any points until they've played N weeks under the system.
That doesn't affect the BG-wide point inflation scenario, though. If most of the middling teams in the BG get a few free wins against a 1600 team every week, their rating is artificially high; the teams a tier above them are likewise inflated, and so on. Trickle-up ratings inflation. Every week, reform the loser teams to regain the 1600 rating and repeat. The amount of impact that could have on the entire BG probably depends on just how many arena 5s there are.
The simplest solution would be for a team not to receive any points until they've played N weeks under the system.
That doesn't affect the BG-wide point inflation scenario, though. If most of the middling teams in the BG get a few free wins against a 1600 team every week, their rating is artificially high; the teams a tier above them are likewise inflated, and so on. Trickle-up ratings inflation. Every week, reform the loser teams to regain the 1600 rating and repeat. The amount of impact that could have on the entire BG probably depends on just how many arena 5s there are.
The other option would be to do the same thing many guilds do when someone leaves a zero-sum system - rebalance. If a negative team leaves to get back to neutral, *everyone* gets penalized slightly. If a positive team leaves, everyone gets a bonus. It depends on how big a problem Blizzard sees this as being.
Another option yet is to simply introduce a cooldown on how often you can form an arena team, one which is set for every member of the team at time of formation.
Melador> Incidentally, these last few pages are why people hate lawyers.
Viator> I really don't want to go all Kalman here.
Bury> Just imagine what the world would be like if you used your powers for good.
The other option would be to do the same thing many guilds do when someone leaves a zero-sum system - rebalance. If a negative team leaves to get back to neutral, *everyone* gets penalized slightly. If a positive team leaves, everyone gets a bonus. It depends on how big a problem Blizzard sees this as being.
Another option yet is to simply introduce a cooldown on how often you can form an arena team, one which is set for every member of the team at time of formation.
They'd have a riot on their hands if they implemented a system where points were automatically deducted in such a way that it was out of their control. Look at how much people are up in arms about the honor point reduction for future earnings. Now if they actually had it, and they were taken away, people would be upset.
Your second idea has a lot of merit though. It'd be interesting to see if they have such a timer implemented already. I'll take a closer look the next time I log on.
Ignie Ferroque translates from latin to "with fire & with sword." It is a stock phrase used to describe the results of a destructive raid into an enemy's territory, whose sole purpose is to generate fear, terror, and destruction.
Actually, an even easier idea, one that's even less limiting to player options.
Have the rating associated to the player as well as the team. If your team dissolves, you're still stuck with your team's final rating. If you form a new team, your team's initial rating is set as the average of all of its members initial ratings.
Melador> Incidentally, these last few pages are why people hate lawyers.
Viator> I really don't want to go all Kalman here.
Bury> Just imagine what the world would be like if you used your powers for good.
Actually, an even easier idea, one that's even less limiting to player options.
Have the rating associated to the player as well as the team. If your team dissolves, you're still stuck with your team's final rating. If you form a new team, your team's initial rating is set as the average of all of its members initial ratings.
That would break other stuff, like the 10-man limit.
Scenario:
A month into the league, two top teams see half their 10-man rosters go on vacation, reducing their flexibility and sometimes not even letting them get 10 games in per week. They both disband, form a new merged team, and now have a new team with more flexibility and higher attendance, without losing rating. At a later point, the old members come back, and they split back up into two teams, where the rating earned in the meantime will be divided evenly among the 20 members.
Alternately, a team could abuse temporary imbalances (Like Arcane Power getting overpowered due to some new, poorly designed trinkets) to make their squad mage heavy until it gets fixed, then revert to a balanced team. (Not so much to gain here unless the mages have decent rating already)
Or finally, guilds could gear up weak characters by simply bringing them into a high-ranking team. The team takes a bit of a hit, but the weak character earns a high rating instantly, allowing him to gear up in an unnaturally quick fashion.
If that team never wins, they'll drop in ranking, and you won't be able to move up (significantly) by beating them.
Collusion isn't impossible to benefit from, but the effort:reward ratio is such that it's simply not worthwhile.
You never drop in rating for very long, as long as you play other teams to return to your true strength. Throwing a match actually has no long term cost, since you will eventually return to your long-run equilibrium. Of course, nether does winning have any long-term benefit, but the thing is you can choose whether to continue to play. It's true that reward would decline if you tried to do it too much, but you could do it a reasonable amount at the end of each week and keep one team a few hundred points consistently above its true strength for points purposes.
I gave an example of two equal teams, but it would be much more practical with a stronger team throwing games to a weaker team: Start, A; 2700, B: 2800. Throw 5-6 games until A:2800 B:2700. A stops, B plays randomly until A: 2800 B:2800. Throw 6-7 games until A: 2900 B: 2700. A stops, B plays randomly until A: 2900 B:2800. That's 200 free points at the top of the scale from only about 12 arranged games (taking 1.5 minutes each) and the two teams are never more than 100 points apart, so arranging pairing should be pretty easy at such a low density part of the ratings distribution. Of course, the throwing team has to play extra to return to its old strength, but let's assume that they enjoy playing for its own sake. These matches just don't take that long, so nothing's that onerous, anyway. 200 points for 18 minutes of work is not horrible effort:reward.
(BTW, at the end, A can throw games to B, so that free 200 points is divided between them and they both gain - it's not necessarily altruistic)
There may be further logistical problems, but really I was just trying to refute the philosophical point that somebody made that there is "ethically nothing wrong" with throwing matches in any zero-sum system, since loss is equal to gain. As long as ANY net gain is possible, which it clearly is, such a generalization is obviously false, and you have to rationalize something else to subsume your guilt about cheating.
If I understand the system correctly, ... (I temporarily deleted the rest of this post, since I didn't actually understand the system)
EDIT:
My original notion was wrong.
The above will actually be possible if team B plays a ton of matches per week, and repeated matches against the same team yield normal results. Since all matches you play apparently affect your rating, but you need 10 matches to get arena points at the end of the week, A could play B for 10 games, then B could play until they get back to their proper rating.
It's not so much that rating will decay as that you don't benefit from rating if you don't play 10 matches per week.
My point is that this is all within a week and you play at least 10 matches - making up 200 points in 7 days is not hard at all with 2-3 minute games with 16 point gain for a win. For example, Tuesday, you throw the first matches. Then the second team plays randomly until Friday morning, and gets back to strength. and you throw the second matches. The second team then gets until the Tuesday reset to get back to it's old strength.
Anyway, too many posts on this. Final Point: Throw game = bad
Sorry, I deleted the content above before you replied, once I realized I was wrong.
Now, could the effect of this be limited by, as suggested previously in this thread, limiting the number of battles per week between two teams to for example 3? The remaining 7 games should correct the inflated rating. Would this create other problems?
Another thing to consider is that it's not zero-sum. If a team dips below the initial rating, where is their incentive to not reform under a new name? Or consider the teams that founder mid-season. I understand that the chess rating system reduces the weight of games played by new players (for the sake of their opponent as well; a loss to a skilled player new to the system could severely impact his opponent's rating). Does Blizz have a similar system in place? Or could one force Battlegroup-wide ratings inflation by forming and reforming as many 0-10 teams as possible?
Just brainstorming.
It is interesting to note that ELO systems *do* suffer from inflation. The chess ranking system is a good example - it's not really possible to compare modern master rank players with past master rank players just by comparing rating.
One thing I was really pleased to see in Blizzard's design was a regular point reset. The idea of 'seasons' serves many purposes, but one of the most important is to eliminate point inflation.
I have some experience with this. I played a game called Q3F, basically Team Fortress for Quake 3, if any of you know what that is. My clan had one 9v9 team and two 5v5 teams. The 5v5 teams did not share players, as that was against the league rules. Honestly, the first team was the A-team and the second team was the B-team. However, the B-team still managed to be one of the top 3 teams in the 5v5 league the majority of the time. On at least 3 occasions we had title matches between team 1 and team 2. It was probably some of our most competitive matches we ever had. Yes, occasionally it caused some short term bad blood as people's competitive sides got the best of them, but when it came down to it, both teams played their best, and neither would have ever considered throwing a match under any circumstances, and overall I think it was good for the clan.
An interesting side note, is that often times we'd practice for 9v9 by having Offense vs. Defense games. We'd often think our strategy sucked because our offense was dominating our defense. We'd stick with the strategy anyway, and when we played other teams, our defense would shut them out. My point being, knowing your opponent's playstyle extremely well has a massive effect on your ability to play against them. You have a good idea of what they're going to do in certain situations, which tricks they're more likely to fall for, you know how to counter their moves, things like that. In fact, if I really wanted to build a team that would win every season, I'd want to have times set aside in the week to try and match up skirmishes against people in my guild I knew were good for practice. That way they could point out errors you're making, things you could do better to counter certain abilities, stuff like that. So when it came time to do the ranked matches, you'd be more prepared no matter what the other team threw at you.
Actually, an even easier idea, one that's even less limiting to player options.
Have the rating associated to the player as well as the team. If your team dissolves, you're still stuck with your team's final rating. If you form a new team, your team's initial rating is set as the average of all of its members initial ratings.
That would break other stuff, like the 10-man limit.
How so?
Scenario:
A month into the league, two top teams see half their 10-man rosters go on vacation, reducing their flexibility and sometimes not even letting them get 10 games in per week. They both disband, form a new merged team, and now have a new team with more flexibility and higher attendance, without losing rating. At a later point, the old members come back, and they split back up into two teams, where the rating earned in the meantime will be divided evenly among the 20 members.
However, since you don't earn points for your rating, you earn points for your rating while playing, if the team's overall rating is too high, it would equalize out fairly quickly. Yeah, the vacationers might benefit for a week or two, but the non-vacationers would be penalized, and in both cases the teams would only get an "incorrect" reward for a couple weeks before the requirement of active play equalizes their rating to where it should be.
Alternately, a team could abuse temporary imbalances (Like Arcane Power getting overpowered due to some new, poorly designed trinkets) to make their squad mage heavy until it gets fixed, then revert to a balanced team. (Not so much to gain here unless the mages have decent rating already)
Presumably you can drop and add members from a team under the system, so what's stopping some team from doing that right now? In fact, under a player-inherited ranking system, exploiting temporary FOTM trends is less beneficial.
Or finally, guilds could gear up weak characters by simply bringing them into a high-ranking team. The team takes a bit of a hit, but the weak character earns a high rating instantly, allowing him to gear up in an unnaturally quick fashion.
Again: What's stopping them from doing that now? Bring a new char into a high rank team and he'll earn the team's rating in points anyway, as long as he plays his 30%.
Associating ratings to characters seems an easy solution to preventing teams from resetting when they suck, and to generally mitigate against problems in a system where the base entity (the team) is not fixed long-term.
Melador> Incidentally, these last few pages are why people hate lawyers.
Viator> I really don't want to go all Kalman here.
Bury> Just imagine what the world would be like if you used your powers for good.
I have some experience with this. I played a game called Q3F, basically Team Fortress for Quake 3, if any of you know what that is. My clan had one 9v9 team and two 5v5 teams. The 5v5 teams did not share players, as that was against the league rules. Honestly, the first team was the A-team and the second team was the B-team. However, the B-team still managed to be one of the top 3 teams in the 5v5 league the majority of the time. On at least 3 occasions we had title matches between team 1 and team 2. It was probably some of our most competitive matches we ever had. Yes, occasionally it caused some short term bad blood as people's competitive sides got the best of them, but when it came down to it, both teams played their best, and neither would have ever considered throwing a match under any circumstances, and overall I think it was good for the clan.
This was pretty much my thesis in writing my original response. I think you gain more from healthy intra-guild competition among your teams than you could gain by trying to fix or throw matches for other benefits. Why try to play God when you can let natural selection give you more data and do your job for you, as it were?
'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.
However, since you don't earn points for your rating, you earn points for your rating while playing, if the team's overall rating is too high, it would equalize out fairly quickly. Yeah, the vacationers might benefit for a week or two, but the non-vacationers would be penalized, and in both cases the teams would only get an "incorrect" reward for a couple weeks before the requirement of active play equalizes their rating to where it should be.
The rating gain I mention will only apply if the team is below it's long-term "balanced" rating, where we assume that continued play will increase their rating. This will quite likely be the case for most good teams in the first part of the season, as the field gradually moves from being 500 teams at 1600 rating (or whatever the starting rating is), to being spread over a larger spectrum.
Even after the team settles into their long term balanced rating however, the above trick will mitigate the effect of the scenario where someone goes on vacation, since the teams that now only have 5 active players in the squad may be unable to play their 10 games per week, or are forced to do so with reduced flexibility due to the small squad. Temporarily merging solves this problem.
Presumably you can drop and add members from a team under the system, so what's stopping some team from doing that right now? In fact, under a player-inherited ranking system, exploiting temporary FOTM trends is less beneficial.
[...]
Again: What's stopping them from doing that now? Bring a new char into a high rank team and he'll earn the team's rating in points anyway, as long as he plays his 30%.
It is my understanding that you can't drop or add players to a team mid-season, to avoid rating boosting and FOTM abuse. Making rating player based on a split (and subsequent reform) will make that possible.
If you can't drop or add players to a team mid-season, then why the hell would you allow teams to be dissolved or formed? That's just silly.
Melador> Incidentally, these last few pages are why people hate lawyers.
Viator> I really don't want to go all Kalman here.
Bury> Just imagine what the world would be like if you used your powers for good.
It is interesting to note that ELO systems *do* suffer from inflation. The chess ranking system is a good example - it's not really possible to compare modern master rank players with past master rank players just by comparing rating.
One thing I was really pleased to see in Blizzard's design was a regular point reset. The idea of 'seasons' serves many purposes, but one of the most important is to eliminate point inflation.
Actually, that's not true at all. ELO systems naturally suffer from ratings DEFLATION. People's true skill tends to improve over their career, since chess is a game of skill and years of practice and study will probably help and almost certainly not hurt. Say, on average, they enter at 1400 and retire at 1800 (people start at their true strength, rather than a fixed rating, due to a provisional rating system for the first 20-50 games). This would mean that every player sucks an average of 400 points out of the system, leading to lower average ratings over time.
Chess systems actually artiificially add inflationary measures to combat this, which is why you see that slight overall inflation in the chess rating system, since they don't particularly balance, and it is better to err on the side of inflation (since players as a whole are getting stronger due to advances in opening theory and the like).
To actually relate to WOW: Of course, the difference is that you can't reenter the system in chess. In the arenas, inflation would be a possibility.
What happens when there are 10 people from the same guild, one with an alt team and one with a main team - going 5v5. They all log on late at night to ensure they get eachother in the same Arena. After they have fought their required games, they switch from alt-> main and main -> alt
Can you fight the same team an unlimited amount of times each week?
Or is there something I'm missing here...
From my experience in the last few years of PVPing, the people that arrange fixed matches aren't the best players in the first place, so I kinda doubt that this will be an issue at the top. The best PVP players I know are also very competitive.
yeah, the top PvP teams will be just like top PvE teams. The challenge and accomplishment of being on top becomes more important than the loot and trying to play the system. Aside from straight-up exploiting, I doubt you'll see much trickery going on up top. Possibly in the middle, though.
A: Collusion, while possible, will require a lot more time than would ever be worth it to have a meaningful impact.
B: The most competitive people are normally also the best, and will be unlikely to collude.
And
C: Arena rewards change (be updated) each season, or each couple of seasons at least. There will therefore be no point to trading one season win for another for guild equality sake.
A: Collusion, while possible, will require a lot more time than would ever be worth it to have a meaningful impact.
B: The most competitive people are normally also the best, and will be unlikely to collude.
And
C: Arena rewards change (be updated) each season, or each couple of seasons at least. There will therefore be no point to trading one season win for another for guild equality sake.
A. We don't know if collusion will be viable or not. It all depends on how the matchmaking works. If two highly-ranked teams can guarantee that they'll play each other 10 times in a row, because they're the only teams in their point brackets online, they can easily collude with each other to avoid playing any real teams that week. There are ways to prevent that, but I don't know if any of those are implemented.
B. I'm kind of amused by this point. People have often abused mechanics in PvE instances (cascading, respawning Vael/Nef by resetting instances) that have been questionable. Unless collusion is specifically a bannable offense or impossible to do, people will look to do it.
C. There will always be a point for two teams to collude if they know each other. Most of the time they won't. But if they can reliably set up a collusion scheme, there will be a group set up to do so.
--------
As far as teams splitting up and reforming when they get a bad rating, I believe there's a gold cost to a charter. It should be enough to stop casual ranking inflation, but not to stop any serious group if they had a bad first day. I don't know if it would be enough to stop people from abusing the ability to reform easily.
A: Collusion, while possible, will require a lot more time than would ever be worth it to have a meaningful impact.
B: The most competitive people are normally also the best, and will be unlikely to collude.
And
C: Arena rewards change (be updated) each season, or each couple of seasons at least. There will therefore be no point to trading one season win for another for guild equality sake.
A. We don't know if collusion will be viable or not. It all depends on how the matchmaking works. If two highly-ranked teams can guarantee that they'll play each other 10 times in a row, because they're the only teams in their point brackets online, they can easily collude with each other to avoid playing any real teams that week. There are ways to prevent that, but I don't know if any of those are implemented.
B. I'm kind of amused by this point. People have often abused mechanics in PvE instances (cascading, respawning Vael/Nef by resetting instances) that have been questionable. Unless collusion is specifically a bannable offense or impossible to do, people will look to do it.
C. There will always be a point for two teams to collude if they know each other. Most of the time they won't. But if they can reliably set up a collusion scheme, there will be a group set up to do so.
--------
As far as teams splitting up and reforming when they get a bad rating, I believe there's a gold cost to a charter. It should be enough to stop casual ranking inflation, but not to stop any serious group if they had a bad first day. I don't know if it would be enough to stop people from abusing the ability to reform easily.
A: True. But that seems to be the only way that collusion could have a large impact.
B: No doubt some people will do whatever they can do to be #1. What I meant was that unless there are ways to collude successful then #2 is going to be in competition with #1, not partnership, and will thus do whatever they can to beat them.
C: All this is speculation based on whether or not it will be possible to systematically collude. I guess we'll wait and see.
D: 40g per team charter is the current cost on Live I believe. Peanuts for a team at level 70.
12/16/06, 3:17 AM
in EJBSG 17 (soundtrack)
Similar Threads
