@blodir said in How exactly do we expect low rated players to play the game?:
On a related note, I've been playing ladder in a different game recently where the matchmaking range is far too broad. I have 73 wins and 15 losses. It is not fun for me that the majority of my games are essentially meaningless stomps. I don't think it's fun for the opponents either.
It's been my assumption that, when a player queues for a game in FaF, the system begins by trying to find a player near their rating,
but as they queue for longer and longer, it 'expands' the range of ratings it's looking for.
Is this not the case?
It seems like the most elegant solution, where people will get games against equally-skilled players, but if they're really really desperate for a game, they can wait for longer and fight someone outside their skill level.
When I started out (not long ago!) I WANTED to fight stronger players, and would queue for ages in the hope that a strong player had also been queueing for a long time. I also understand people not wanting to play people far outside their rating, at which point cancelling then re-joining the queue seems like a fine solution, giving control to the users.
I guess another option is allowing a player to set a range for which players they are happy to queue against - although it could allow for rating manipulation if the player got too much control over it, so maybe increments of 100 would be more suitable?
@nex said in How exactly do we expect low rated players to play the game?:
so it takes a lot more games to accurately reflect a players skill when they play 8v8 than if they played 1v1.
This will always be the case. There's no impersonal (/automatic) system that can make a 4v4 'zero in' on a players real skill any less than 4 times slower than 1v1s.
That's just the nature of team games, in that players can 'lean' on allies in 3/4 of the games they play.
I played tons of a game called 'battlezone 2', whose community was miles smaller than FaF. In that game, everybody basically knew one another (you'd have maybe 20 total players online at peak times), and could balance teams based on knowledge of the players. When new players arrived, their skill would be very quickly assessed by players - but this doesn't really work with any 'automatic' (maths-based) systems that I'm aware of.
So basically, if your community is large enough to necessitate ratings as a 'skill currency', you're kinda forced to have skill take ages to sort out when playing large team games.
(A similar issue occurs with the very popular 'MOBA' games - players can play for months or years without every really getting an accurate skill, because of the randomness introduced by only controlling 10% of the players in a match, rather than 50% in a 1v1). This is a mostly the reason I prefer playing 1v1 games!