Please show rating changes in replay vault

Exselsior

@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.

Brutus5000

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

Developers do something about it.

Players: :surprise_pikachu_face: :pitchforks:

Sainse

@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.

StormLantern

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".

Deribus

@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

TheVVheelboy

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.

Exselsior

@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".

Brutus5000

@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.

Exselsior

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.

BlackYps

@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.

BlackYps

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.

FtXCommando

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.

waffelzNoob

Even at 13 years old when I came here with no statistical background I knew that the system was uncertain of my rating (because python client told me so + that my rating was being calibrated during the first 10 games) and I was able to take the emotional toll of having -500 global rating and laugh it off.
Are we accounting for 8 year olds with these arguments?

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

I do not remember anybody demanding to have it in parallel with the rating system.

That's a very questionable way of wording it. Was everyone informed the league system would eventually overtake the rating system? Of course they wouldn't demand having it in parallel if that's what they expected to begin with. I for one like the leagues, having an icon and "title" along with your rating is cool. Would I have advocated for leagues knowing ratings would be removed? No

Exselsior

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

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?

It's relevant for the same reason these other games have some other more specific rating that's used in more sparsely populated brackets. In SC2 they show the MMR, in League LP becomes more prominent once you hit masters (grand masters? not sure which) where there just aren't as many people and there are noticeable variations in skill within those brackets. I can look at the brackets on FAF right now and see over 100 trueskill different in just diamond 1, then another 100 point gap between D1 and masters. That's an arguably meaningful difference that disappears when just looking at the bracket. My understanding, which admittedly could be wrong, is that more sparsely populated league systems are more prone to this. At the very least, this is certainly true in higher brackets.

negative trueskill rating in the first games of bad/unlucky players is not visible, preventing possible demotivation

Maybe a hot take, but if you get demoralized that badly by losing your first few games of FAF then you're not the kind of person who's going to get into a game like supcom and catering to people with that mentality doesn't make a practical difference. See @TheWheelieNoob first paragraph, sums up my thoughts there.

an official placement phase makes players tolerate unbalanced games in the beginning more

Agreed, but we have this anyway now. Hiding the backend rating doesn't do much here imo.

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

Every time I hear this people mostly want easier games vs worse players when coming back from a break which means a trueskill reduction. Skill levels will be the same, now they're just going to be ~~in silver~~ edit: unranked playing vs diamond players or whatever. Seems like that feels worse, not better.

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.

This is a particularly nice change for draws, but it's not always going to be +-1 and people are still going to find ways to complain. They do in literally every other game I've ever seen with a league system.

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.

To much clutter and necessary stats background for that to be meaningful to show in a lot of places, but even then it's still kind of fun for me to see that in the game lobby. So yes, I do agree again here but this is just going to the opposite extreme. Showing the absolute rating without uncertainty is the middle position that we already have.

I want to again emphasis that I do like the league system and I think it's great for FAF. I appreciate the work done here. I just don't want to also start hiding away the trueskill rating.

FtXCommando

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

Even at 13 years old when I came here with no statistical background I knew that the system was uncertain of my rating (because python client told me so + that my rating was being calibrated during the first 10 games) and I was able to take the emotional toll of having -500 global rating and laugh it off.
Are we accounting for 8 year olds with these arguments?

Are you accounting for survivorship bias

Keep in mind like half the ladder games each month (back when I cared to look into this stuff anyway) are people that play 1-2 games and then stop. There are a variety of reasons. Losing just sucking in RTS is one of them. Making losing suck less is one aspect to encourage people to play longer until they can get a win. This is why a metric ass load of games with rating systems hide your rating during a “calibration” period.

Exselsior

I've tried to get three different personal friends to start playing FAF and none of them did past a few games here and there. Not a single one of them had an issue with negative rating. Obviously a small sample size, but I find it hard to believe that people are quitting due to bad rating at the start and that those same people would have stayed if they didn't realize just how bad their rating is.

FtXCommando

I have no idea what to tell you, literally one of the most common complaints is people talking about going negative rating

waffelzNoob

how can bros live with themselves knowing they got a weaker mental than 13 year old bully

phong

@endranii I don't think what you mentioned (intimidation ingame) is the whole idea. Right now, almost everywhere player nicknames are shown, ratings are also shown besides them. By far the most common custom lobby title is "number+". When people don't want to play with someone, they're more likely to say "kick the <rating>" than "kick <nickname>".

It's plainly obvious this number is pretty much the only thing people pay attention to when forming a first impression of someone. It's so important that some go as far as to game the rating system to get a bigger number. Surely I don't have to mention Goodhart's Law or spell out why this is not ideal.

Giving people badges showing their progress and making that the culturally valuable currency means the devs can promote healthier playing habits (like tmm) while also protecting the global rating from manipulation, once it's dethroned from it's current prominence.

I don't think ratings (or rating changes) need to be completely inaccessible or invisible to achieve this btw, at least not yet. Making the badges way more prominent might be enough, even while giving players the option of looking up rating if they absolutely must - but I do think it should be tedious enough to find it to discourage random people in custom lobbies from doing so for every person that joins.

Deribus

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

I have no idea what to tell you, literally one of the most common complaints is people talking about going negative rating

Gonna need a source on that one chief