In Starcraft 2 I remember having a seperate rating for each party. Is this something that could be implemented in FAF?
It is more fun to have a common rating to work on, and more importantly it would allow higher and lower rated players to play together without destroying or inflating their individual rating.
How would that work exactly? If you play with 20 different friends you have 20 different ratings? All in the same leaderboard? Could you explain a bit more?
Yes, basically or potentially even more, since for each unique team composition there is a seperate rating. So you can have a rating with friend 1, another with friend 2, and a third with both of them. But I suppose this only needs to be saved if a party is deliberatelly created, not from any custom game with friends. So most people probably won't end up with 20 different ratings, more like one or two.
Ah I see. Well to be frank I don't think it would work well in combination with the system that is already in place. Also, I think it wouldn't work well with a game like FAF that has a modest player base. And the leaderboards are quite complex and fragmented already.
@StormLantern I feared that might be the case, but maybe there is an easier solution for the inflation problem? I'll share some more details of my own experience:
I (around 1200) played ladder with a new player, skill level around 0 rating lets say. Because of having no previous games, ranking increased quicker than mine for each game we won, until we hit a point where we started losing more and more, bringing my rating down faster than theirs. In the end I think my teammate rached 7-800 and was crushed when not being carried, making it basically impossible to play alone.
I guess it's not exactly adviced to play with such large gap in skill level, but this might reveal a problem that exists for any party with a rating disparity even if it's less noticable usually. I don't know much about how the rating system works but I could have a look at it and give some more concrete suggestions. If you think I'm onto something and wouldn't rather dig into it yourself.
Sure, you can dive into that. I don't have a source on how the trueskill mechanism works though. Maybe someone else can point you to that. Regardless, I doubt that the issues you raise warrant any major changes to the system. It's such a niche case in which it hampers player enjoyment. To make the leaderboards more complex to cover that, doesn't seem proportionate to me.