I don’t know why but the difference between a 2500+ player and anyone below that is so obvious. The number of mistakes being made and how bad a player it becomes so easy to see. I probably had one of the most tilting matches to date.
As you can see the balancing between the players is ok as the game expects me to be able to contest the 2 VG players and one player who has come back after a while.
I played CP BF top which I guess is a pretty off-meta pick but I go 22/8/10 and if I were to honor someone it would be the Flicker. And that sounds kind of sad, doesn’t it? Another melee hero being honored instead of the other people who are ranged and supposed to hypercarry? The mid CP Vox had the option to choose Lyra or Varya, but chooses Vox and goes 2/10/15. Then you have the bot lane Gwen who isn’t able to apply any pressure at all despite being a player on a team in the summer open. LIKE . Goes 9/6/10 but if I have 20 kills then she should have 30 because I am the top laner and she is the bot laner. And the jungler was so bad I won’t even mention the hero the person was playing.
The best part is: we weren’t losing. In fact we could have ended the game after getting an ACE but since all the lower tier players don’t know how to win games they went from BC while me and the Gwen went for the exposed vain crystal. Gwen doesn’t buy defense items so she gets blown up by Tony A and since I don’t have my Ult and really bad objective clear, Tony Ult literally throws me across the base into the enemy fountain. I can’t tell if the person did the perfect Ult or the game is rigging the match because I’ve been having a good win to lose ratio in soloq.
Now it’s kind of stupid how these players are POA and SA. Sometimes there are actual things to learn from losing matches but playing this game is becoming more of a chore rather than something fun. Having to carry AFKs, people who can’t play, and people who can’t play. The best part is I lose 8 ELO which is the equivalent to winning two matches as a penta q or 2 matches as soloq :^). I go after IraqiZorro’s penta q and lose because I’m playing Joule top who was supposed to be a fun pick but her B bugs out even though I land it. Best part is that Baron loses lane pre 6 minutes and Varya keeps going afk.
I’m moving this out of the Salt Mine, because I think the topic of “Elo” (and in case anyone cares, it’s “Elo” not “ELO” or “elo” – it’s a guy’s name) is well worth discussing.
The problem is that the skill rating that VG computes is based solely on wins and losses. [Aside: They claim not to be using Microsoft’s TrueSkill algorithm, but comments from some of the devs over the 18 months I was heavily involved in dealing with match data led me to believe that if they weren’t actually using TrueSkill itself, they were using something very much like it.] The matchmaker algorithm has from time to time tried to take other things into account when doing its thing, but when it comes down to it, the matchmaker is starting from a rating that may be a very incomplete assessment of skill.
Earlier this year, Microsoft published a white paper describing a new iteration of their TrueSkill algorithm, cleverly called TrueSkill 2. It’s WELL worth reading the white paper if you’re at all interested in this sort of thing, because TS2 seeks to address the shortcomings of ratings systems based solely on wins and losses.
Unfortunately, TS2 hasn’t been implemented in any publicly available libraries yet, so its application to Vainglory is likely to remain theoretical. Still, we can make the ideas behind TS2 a jumping-off point for a discussion about how to improve the player rating system in Vainglory …
You guys are among the smartest folks in Vainglory-land. Let’s hear your thoughts!
I’m no longer convinced that everyone in any match is human. Too consistently I see different players make the same exact gameplay mistakes with the same play style over and over. They do things that humans with a pulse and the slightest clue about video games just wouldn’t do. If the descrepency in behavior is obvious in multiple bands of skill levels, to me it just adds to the fact that we might be playing with programmed players.
That True skill algorithm is a very interesting read and it looks to be a very simple and effective method.
The problem with mobile games is you have no idea who is playing the game. I’ve played many players who have admitted to being boosted by friends.
This has got my mind thinking about Apple’s face ID security sign in, where your face is your password. Maybe this is the future of making sure the each player isn’t cheating by having their own face as the password.
After we can be assured that each player is indeed who they say they are, then the True skill algorithm can finally make accurate match ups.
Yep, boosting accounts – either by a letting more skilled player “level you up” or by teaming up with higher level players and allowing them to carry you to higher tiers – is a problem in every competitive game.
I like the idea of some sort of biometric validation that a player is who they say they are – although you’d never get every player to accept that idea right out of the gate, marking players as “Verified” or “Authenticated” (on leaderboards, for example) would push players in that direction.
I also suspect that SEMC have been expanding their use of bots. Many games do that – AoV explicitly states that they will do so if a player AFKs during a match, for example – but the difference is that Vainglory’s bot programming is abysmal in comparison to most games.
If matches with bots in them are being used in figuring a player’s MMR/Elo/whatever, that’s a real problem.
Not sure about being used for figuring MMR/Elo/Whatever, but if some are programmed to run say “lvl4.exe” () another program is “lvl5.exe” and onward and so on, I wouldn’t be very surprised if skills band clumps of pseudo players would be very noticeable between different tiers.
TBH A good chunk of the VG playerbase that were actually good have quit. I’d say 40% ish? With the lull in high level VG content, people aren’t getting to that higher level of skill to replace these players, but they are getting into VGB or even VGS because of the system wanting a spread of players among the ranks. I’d love for high level VG content to exist but like, nobody cares. VG’s balancing is so incredibly FUN AND ENJOYABLE that nobody even wants to analyse it and explain it because it would be so depressing to casual players that it would push them away.
. Goes 9/6/10 but if I have 20 kills then she should have 30 because I am the top laner and she is the bot laner. And the jungler was so bad I won’t even mention the hero the person was playing.
) another program is “lvl5.exe” and onward and so on, I wouldn’t be very surprised if skills band clumps of pseudo players would be very noticeable between different tiers.