Please show rating changes in replay vault

I think global rating is flawed to the point of being almost useless. I am not convinced the league system will greatly improve matters.

Global games still dispaly rating changes. I can't think of a good reason to know the exact rating changes of matchmaker games.

Other than the subjective "it's fun" or "it's interesting", I know that people use it to report (and the moderation team to investigate) rating manipulation. Easy to look at someone's match history and see which games they lost 300 points in.

@blackyps said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

Global games still dispaly rating changes. I can't think of a good reason to know the exact rating changes of matchmaker games.

It's more about knowing their exact rating rather than the exact rating change. And, it's fun and interesting

You can see the rating in the player's profile

...but not at the time of the replay. come on bro

I've never understood this push to hide the current rating system.

League system is going to be identically inaccurate compared to the current rating system, except now it's even more vague and just hides things that I think a lot of the community finds interesting. We are, generally speaking, nerds who like numbers and details, hence we're here playing a 17 year old RTS.

If you want to move away from the exact rating and towards the league system then it makes sense to do that gradually. Still, as someone who has enjoyed the exact rating system for 6 years, I will obviously dislike it. However that doesnt mean it couldn't be good for the game. The fact that most popular games hide exact rating and use a league system probably means its the right choice. Still, its completely valid to personally dislike changes in that direction. That said, I do wonder whether FAF has enough active players to warrant having leagues for 4 different matchmakers.

@stormlantern said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

The fact that most popular games hide exact rating and use a league system probably means its the right choice. Still, its completely valid to personally dislike changes in that direction. That said, I do wonder whether FAF has enough active players to warrant having leagues for 4 different matchmakers.

Those games have more people between silver 4 and silver 3 than FAF has players. I agree with what you're saying, though I don't see how the league system has any benefit for FAF, but want to point out the truly massive gap in scale between FAF and any of these large and popular games that use a league system now.

Those games, starting with Riot and LoL years ago and then spreading to most other major competitive games, implemented an abstraction on the underlying rank to get people to play more. What would happen is if you hit 1600/platinum and then lost a game dropping to 1590 then you immediately also lost plat. Or would just be considered a 1500 or whatever. With the abstraction though you can now hit 1600 and plat, then lose several games, but still stay plat. Now people are less scared to keep playing at this point since they're not a single loss from losing their shinny new rank.

I have no confidence whatsoever this is impacting anything on FAF in any meaningful way, which means I also seriously doubt this is a real justification for the league system for FAF.

Maybe people like the idea of being plat more than 1600? I suppose that's possible, but it feels like a stretch to say that's going to actually have any noticeable change.

Going back to my first comment about scale, there's a glaring issue with purely having a league system. We don't have enough people to have leagues that are as meaningful as rating is currently, and rating is already questionable outside of 1v1s (even then). I don't see how this does anything other than exacerbate the issue. Even games like SC2, as far as I know, include the MMR along with the league rating for this exact issue.

We already have leagues, and we also already have ELO showing directly. I'd be all for having both showing as it currently is (was?), but getting rid of the ELO/MMR ranking in FAF or even just hiding it away more isn't the move.

Anyway, this became longer than intended but I've had strong opinions on this for a long time now.

Players: We need to make FAF more accessible for newer players.

Developers do something about it.

Players: :surprise_pikachu_face: :pitchforks:

@stormlantern said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

If you want to move away from the exact rating and towards the league system then it makes sense to do that gradually.

Even if it is, it doesn’t help it. It doesn’t change anything how game works except hiding details for player who are checking particular replay for a concrete info about it. Why does hitting “download more replay info” provides me with every “team morons” record in the chat, but not with rating points? That’s just absurd.

To clarify: I mean showing the numbers at least after pressing the button “download more information”. It would be gradual enough.

@stormlantern said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

The fact that most popular games hide exact rating and use a league system probably means its the right choice

I don’t see it’s as case at all. My guess is having “3rd platinum, 2nd gold” just more convenient for their user base instead of negotiating of what’s the difference between 3300 3600 MMR or something. Especially considering they are more casual and not as numbers-based as far.

And what about more numbers-nerdish games, btw? SC2 moved away from ranks for a few years already and uses ELO instead. Meaning there are no rank points at all. So other games experience can be argued both ways really.

I can see how FAF is a more "nerdy" game with numbers. And that could tilt preference more towards using exact number based ranking. I'm not defending the league system. Frankly Im not sure if it will be healthy for FAF in the long run. And I definitely dont prefer it either. Atleast not yet anyways. I'm just pointing out that people confuse their personal preference with what is good for the game. This because they want to find some more noble argument for their preference than "I don't like X and I want you to fix it for me".

@brutus5000 said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

Players: We need to make FAF more accessible for newer players.

Developers do something about it.

Players: :surprise_pikachu_face: :pitchforks:

How does this contribute to accessibility?

And by "this" I mean removing seeing rating change, not the planned league replacement

Also, If my memory serves me right. Wasn't the plan to just remove the "in-game" ratings. Not the outside of games too?
Like the whole idea was that people get intimidated seeing enemy rating in-game. Not outside of it. So removing the information outside of the games seems like a pretty steep jump.

Cuz' let's be honest. If you are already looking up your replays then you couldn't give a shite about being intimidated by the rating.

So I guess in-game rating being hidden behind badge is okay, but removing this information from outside the game seems like a step backwards.

@stormlantern Btw I agree with your post and I didn't mean to imply my wall of text was directed at you, your comment just made me think about it.

Also, how does switching to a league system improves accessibility? How is seeing a rating number go up or down hard to interpret? Yes there are questions about why it went up/down as much as it did, but those questions plague every rating system I've ever seen when users care about their rating, including the league systems of every popular game that has one. I do not like the mentality of "users are too dumb to understand so we're going to remove useful information".

@deribus said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

@brutus5000 said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

Players: We need to make FAF more accessible for newer players.

Developers do something about it.

Players: :surprise_pikachu_face: :pitchforks:

How does this contribute to accessibility?

And by "this" I mean removing seeing rating change, not the planned league replacement

The majority of players don't understand how the rating works (on different levels).
Starting from the example in this thread that somebody thinks it's an ELO rating, to actual issues where people correlate ration changes in the replay view with who lost our won, also causing dozens of useless "bug reports", over team members going crazy over a lost game and insulting the team member that might cause the loss just because the lost since imaginary value.

The actual value would have been trying to setup fair matches. But here again people shit on it if there's a too big rating gap and now they might lose points even though the system already takes that into account.

So removing the rating values also removes a lot of wrong incentivation.

This is not new and was discussed years ago when the matchmaker was in development. Many people took part in the discussions around the league system. I do not remember anybody demanding to have it in parallel with the rating system.

I actually do like the league system. It's fun. Having the ranks is nice, and we can get fun icons to go along with them. It's a bit more straight forward to do things like seasons and seasonal rewards. Years ago when this was first coming up I generally thought it was a good idea, but I also was assuming that these would be along side of the current true skill rating system since it's behind the scenes anyway.

@brutus5000 said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

The majority of players don't understand how the rating works (on different levels).
Starting from the example in this thread that somebody thinks it's an ELO rating, to actual issues where people correlate ration changes in the replay view with who lost our won, also causing dozens of useless "bug reports", over team members going crazy over a lost game and insulting the team member that might cause the loss just because the lost since imaginary value.
The actual value would have been trying to setup fair matches. But here again people shit on it if there's a too big rating gap and now they might lose points even though the system already takes that into account.
So removing the rating values also removes a lot of wrong incentivation.

Won't this happen regardless unless it's a rating system that's purely +1 for a win and -1 for a loss with no respect to the starting skills of the players? Honest question, I still see these types of questions happening with LoL and its system, and I don't even play ranked LoL or follow it but it's still common enough I end up seeing these kinds of questions.

@exselsior said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

Those games have more people between silver 4 and silver 3 than FAF has players. I agree with what you're saying, though I don't see how the league system has any benefit for FAF, but want to point out the truly massive gap in scale between FAF and any of these large and popular games that use a league system now.

Why is the scale of the game relevant? You correctly described one of the benefits of the league system, but I don't see how the amount of people in each division is important for this to function?

Some of the other benefits of the league system are:

• negative trueskill rating in the first games of bad/unlucky players is not visible, preventing possible demotivation
• an official placement phase makes players tolerate unbalanced games in the beginning more
• the ability to offer people a "rank reset" by first giving them some placement games again when they return after a longer period of inactivity, where they are not faced with expectations to perform
• hiding the variation in the points you get for different game
• related: hiding the point changes on draws. Both regularly lead to complaints because people think the system is being unfair. By abstracting this and giving +1/-1 for each win/loss and 0 points on a draw we can prevent these frustrations.
  All of these benefits basically require that the league system is shown instead of the rating. If we still show both we lose a lot of these benefits.
  Now, it's not perfect because custom games still use rating and ideally we would unrank all global games, but FAF has such an ingrained culture of players playing only specific maps in custom games that this would be too much of an upset. We have found no alternative yet that would allow these players to balance their lobbies, so global rating stayed even though it should ideally go away.

If we follow the route of "we are all number nerds here and want to see all the internal details" (I disagree with this premise btw), then we should display rating as what it really is, a probability measure.
So it would be much more adequate to say that a player rating is 1000-1500 (minimum: mean minus three times deviation, maximum: mean plus three times deviation) instead of saying a player rating is 1000.
Somehow I doubt that is a change that people really want to see.

Losses are discouraging. Seeing yourself lose 300-400 “points” because you lost and then as a number enjoyer looking to see that other people seem to gain or lose 5-10 points later on makes it seem like your early losses just fucked you up forever.