Remove rating from (default) scoreboard

Jip, I kind of support your idea for 1v1 ladder. But when playing 2v2 and 4v4 matchmaker with unknown players it is very relevant to planning — that first minute while you're waiting for your factory to build and trying to guess who will/should do what. Giving lower-rated players just a little bit of advice about where to focus their play as the game starts can significantly improve team performance.

@jip said in Remove rating from (default) scoreboard:

instead of thinking that I'm a master mind who can now take up @Evan_ during his matchmaking experiment lifestyle, I figured that instead of me doing something good it was Explosive that just made a difficult-to-come-back-from mistake. Both are true, but I felt the latter and because of that I did not enjoy the victory.

Lol if you can beat Explosive you can beat me (for now).

Players will still be able get the rating information of the people in their game—they will just alt+tab out of the game to look up the player in the faf client. This is just making getting information harder so I am against this change.

Well there are 3 options.

Showing the player rating in game lobby and ingame:

  1. People get distracted by constantly seeing player ratings.
  2. People use this rating to manage the game.
    1 = BAD
    2 = GOOD

Hiding the player rating in game:

  1. People delight in their ignorance
  2. People can't judge players without the ranking number
    1 = GOOD
    2 = BAD

Hiding the player rating in game
AND
Show people how to use pen and paper and how to write the rating on a piece of paper.

  1. People delight in their ignorance again
  2. People use a piece of paper with ratings to manage the game.
    1 = GOOD
    2 = GOOD

ok, now seriously;
After you understand that for some people it's really distracting to see the player rating
then you'll probably agree that hiding the rating is the lesser evil

(and yes, making a note makes the game harder, I'll admit)

This is not good idea for me.why make your life difficult and remember players' ratings before the game?the ratings are there to assess on a regular basis who is playing more difficult or easier.

@neptun said in Remove rating from (default) scoreboard:

This is not good idea for me.why make your life difficult and remember players' ratings before the game?

You should do this to be considerate of players who have problems with the rating.

As a compromise, maybe just make it a toggle so that the people who don't want to see the ratings can personally not see the ratings, but the people who want to see the ratings will be able to?

@archsimkat said in Remove rating from (default) scoreboard:

As a compromise, maybe just make it a toggle so that the people who don't want to see the ratings can personally not see the ratings, but the people who want to see the ratings will be able to?

That solves example (1), but not example (2) of my original post. And considering that every bases their strategy on their opponents rating instead of what they are actually doing, I'd also argue that it would give an unfair advantage to those that do see the rating.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

This makes party queueing even stronger since now I know the weak links on my team to cover for.

BTW I find it way more stressful to play worse players because then I have to proactively beat them and win elsewhere on the map. If I play someone better than me, I just need to monkey mimic what they do and it’s good for my team.

I also entirely disagree that this promote any healthy environment in game:

  1. As arch said, I can just alt tab and find the rating of the dude playing terrible on my team
  2. If I have 0 information about player skill level, I have zero ability to curate instructions or coordination. I either assume the person cannot do anything or they can do something and either situation is going to lead to more negativity than the current system half the time.

I only read the original post from Jip, but it seems to me the problem mostly has to do with your own mindset, rather than the visibility of ratings. When I play a guy with higher rating than me I feel relaxed, because I have little to loose and alot to win. Also knowing the rating of the opponent is beneficial for tactics. You would create a situation where people will have to learn by heart the ratings of others. Lastly I believe a part of why people enjoy playing these type of multiplayer games is because there is a rating system that u can fight over. Take away the visibility of the rating and u take away some motivation to play for these people.

It might work for 1v1 ladder, but would be really bad for teamgames, since it gives a big advantage to people who recognise the enemy team names and know how strong they are.

E.g. you might deliberately choose not to kill the low ranked player on their team, and also know that you'll need to support your ally if they're against a much higher ranked opponent.

So you either need to remove names as well as ranks for teamgames (which causes separate issues) so there is no way to tell who the strong players are on the enemy team (other than by what they do in game), or you need to leave ratings in for anything other than 1v1s

Good idea!
with my low rating, I "feel" like I am sniped early in multiplayers custom games.
But it's maybe just a feeling...

It should come down to these simple facts:

  1. Is this information a competitive advantage - yes
  2. Can I get this information through other means (alt tabbing or pulling up aeolus or Discord on my 2nd monitor to search up ratings, using Supreme Scoreboard) - yes

These two facts mean that people will be looking up this information at game start to maximize their advantages, and by forcing people to go around the game and alt tab while their factory is building to go farm some aeolus excel sheets is not an enjoyable experience. So either people need to make it impossible for anybody to access information about player ratings through the API or the client in general or it should just be kept the way it is.

The only other option is to go the GW path of just randomizing names alongside not showing rating, but this seems terrible as a user experience thing when you're a new player trying to find a community on the game but every game is against some random RNG seed that you have no history with.

@ftxcommando said in Remove rating from (default) scoreboard:

It should come down to these simple facts:

  1. Is this information a competitive advantage - yes
  2. Can I get this information through other means (alt tabbing or pulling up aeolus or Discord on my 2nd monitor to search up ratings, using Supreme Scoreboard) - yes

These two facts mean that people will be looking up this information at game start to maximize their advantages, and by forcing people to go around the game and alt tab while their factory is building to go farm some aeolus excel sheets is not an enjoyable experience. So either people need to make it impossible for anybody to access information about player ratings through the API or the client in general or it should just be kept the way it is.

The only other option is to go the GW path of just randomizing names alongside not showing rating, but this seems terrible as a user experience thing when you're a new player trying to find a community on the game but every game is against some random RNG seed that you have no history with.

I would say that it does not create competitive advantage we have no prof of it that it does we can only say for sure that that it makes game more aggressive and more hostile towards players who dont preform according to the rating.

As for you second point yes you can dig up the information but unless you are tryhard would you even do it? Would you even want to go trough that laborious task? Especially now that "Mirror balance" is more often used as the way to balance out the games.

Also we need to consider who are we trying to help, who does not care and who affects the most.
Right now what i see is very vocal minority but it takes a while to find a ladder match, players are getting harassed over high expectations, infighting between teammates over who should listen who and people whining when they get low rated player on their team.

I do believe some solution is needed and i choose to believe it is the correct one.

Analyze, Adapt, Overcome...

@hinthunter said in Remove rating from (default) scoreboard:

I would say that it does not create competitive advantage we have no prof of it that it does we can only say for sure that that it makes game more aggressive and more hostile towards players who dont preform according to the rating.

I know my air is 400 rating lower than enemy air, I now know a late t2 all in push is likely a mass donation and not worth my time because of this. If enemy team does not take the time to look up this advantage, they can not adjust tactics based on the strength of positions. You can already see this in high level teamgames especially sentons where an incredibly weak air slot will result in some sort of cheese to disrupt enemy air or some sort of long term macro play where torpageddon will not be enough to win a pond. Or you just have your rock also decide to go make t3 air.

As for you second point yes you can dig up the information but unless you are tryhard would you even do it? Would you even want to go trough that laborious task? Especially now that "Mirror balance" is more often used as the way to balance out the games.

Yeah? It's information that helps me. That's like saying "would you dig up the information to hydro rush, only if you're a dirty tryhard that's a lot of work to do and the default land fac 2 pgen 2 mex BO is still ok on hydro rush maps." Also most high level lobbies do not use mirror balance because it isn't fun and specifically removes the metagame aspect of having to adapt strategies based on slot strengths and weaknesses.

Also we need to consider who are we trying to help, who does not care and who affects the most.

That's what I did.

Right now what i see is very vocal minority but it takes a while to find a ladder match, players are getting harassed over high expectations, infighting between teammates over who should listen who and people whining when they get low rated player on their team.

There is no evidence that this decreases toxicity. This requires me to not adjust my gameplay based on expectations that rating gives me information about. Instead I now need to adjust my gameplay around the fact my air is making his 1st t2 pgen at minute 9 when I'm halfway to transitioning to my all in push and now I'm boned for the rest of the game. Does this sound like the beginning of a healthy community interaction for you?

I do believe some solution is needed and i choose to believe it is the correct one.

Great.

@hinthunter said in Remove rating from (default) scoreboard:

Right now what i see is very vocal minority

trust me guys, the non vocal majority is on my side, definitely

@jip said in Remove rating from (default) scoreboard:

This is the only real issue because our player base is relatively small. Other issues such as 'who to snipe' is, in my opinion, approaching the game wrong: don't snipe, just take out the base instead and then snipe. At that point there is no base to give.

Fullshare and its consequences have been a disaster for the FAF playerbase

put the xbox units in the game pls u_u

@jip What do you think is easier? Looking at a single number that gives you a good approximation of how good a player is or looking at their base at min 4, 8, 12, etc., and use that information to extrapolate whether they are likely to lose their lane and require assistance?
I don't think hiding the rating is gonna solve much either. If you knew from the start your air player is probably going to lose air then you can adapt in advance and do something about it. If you look at min 11 and see he hasn't finished a T3 air HQ yet while his opponent is finishing a strat that's gonna kill your whole base it's a bit too late for that. And you can't possibly expect players to take the time to look around the bases of their teammates during the game to access how good they are doing. Players are not capable of that most of the time. I believe that if you don't manage expectations ergo. Show rating then you might end with more toxicity towards the players that lose their lanes.

All matchmakers should have the opponents' names and ratings hidden, but not teammates. Custom games should have everyone's names and ratings visible.

The root cause for toxicity around rating is toxic players, not that we show the rating. Hiding the rating will only fight the symptom. The toxic players will just continue raging at you, now for being a shit player in general instead of accusing you of being boosted. Is that better? Not really.
Maybe a ui mod to hide the rating could be a solution. At least for the problem with your own motivation in ladder this would be nice. I don't think we can realistically remove rating from the score board for everyone as SSB is so common and we can only change the default score board.