Elim Season 9

[qan]

First, congratulations to last season's winners. It was a hard-fought season that signified yet another rebirth of Elim. Placing top 3 represents a substantial accomplishment.


Season 8 Winners

Warbird

1st - LaSenza
2nd - Ogron
3rd - RaCka*
*(My sincere apologies to RaCka. I had incorrectly listed FatRolls as the 3rd place winner for S8. FatRolls won 3rd in S7.)

Javelin

1st - Cirno
2nd - Tiny
3rd - Aprix



Elim Season 9 Details

Season: Feb 16th through the end of April 15th (EST).

Changes:

• The 7 day inactivity timer has been removed. Any rating you make in the season will hold for the full season.
• Rating formula tweaked slightly in an attempt to further reward skillful performances:
  • Increased % bonus to rating given for each KO from 3% to 5%. (e.g., 4 KOs = 20% bonus to rating.)
  • Increased win bonus from 2% to 3% per player active at the start of the round to further reward the difficult accomplishment of winning a large elim, and to incentivize play in large games. (If elim starts with 10 players, you receive a 30% bonus to rating for winning. If it starts with 20 and you win, you receive a 60% bonus.)
  • Increased streak bonus from 3% to 4% per kill in streak over 2. (A streak of 3 earns 4%, a streak of 4 earns 8%, 5 is 12%, and so on.)
  • Ratings details found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

Rewards

Rewards have been increased for this season and all subsequent seasons to reflect the increasingly competitive nature of Elim:

1st Place: $2,500,000
2nd Place: $1,500,000
3rd Place: $1,000,000

The top 3 in each division will also be awarded a medal, and will have their name immortalized on the Elim map.



Elim World Championship

Your performance in this season and the following 3 seasons will all factor into Elim World Championship, to be played later this year.

Full details can be found here: https://forums.trenchwars.com/forum/...d-championship

[Jessup]

Could we see how killrace figures into ladder placement verses regular elim rounds to 5 or 10 deaths. I suspect something is lopsided when it comes to rating changes when killrace to 20 is taking place and it should be looked at.

Congrats Lasenza! Congrats Cirno!

[Ricko]

killrace should be removed - I've heard that playing in a killrace increases your 'confidence' rating but is not counted towards your elim stats directly, meaning if you play enough killraces intentionally, when you do play a normal elim round your rating will be 'boosted' more than others due to the inflated confidence obtained via killrace rounds.

It's not illegal, but very lame and manipulating the stats essentially.

[Jessup]

ya ogron for sure did this.. lol .. guy hardly even played last elim and was 2nd.. looked at his stats and saw a crap load of killraces. def seemed like an exploit.

[Grasps]

REMOVE KILLRACES!!!! That shit is retarded and doesn't belong in elim at all. The fact it gives you a boost in "confidence" ratings is laughable. I was wondering why some of the top elim players kept voting for a killrace, makes sense now because it's essentially a ratings exploit. Hilarious. It needs to go, not just for being a form of exploit but for the fact the quality in which it asks players to play is lowered substantially ie. forgo using skill to kill, simply suicide rush/vulch/stray.

Can we please seperate jav from wb in elim? Give jav's their own elim please. I hate it when I am just warming up in wb to have the arena stolen by people who want to jav. Am sure they feel the same way when it happens to them going to wb.

Lastly, FIX THE FUCKING WARBIRD MAP! What is up with people adding multiple boxes on top of boxes, on top of boxes? We have what 3? 4? It's ugly, it removes the ability to use your radar and ultimately is fucking unnecessary! I can understand 2 arena's for elim. 1 normal sized map akin to that of twdd arena's and extra large map for when we have 20+ players. THAT's IT. We don't need a tiny map, people know to meed in mid if they have to. Ask anyone though, they will agree that warbirds map in elim is dogshit.

Thanks though for all the work that was put in place for elim however. It's been a blast for the most part and I really appreciate you all who revitalized it for our enjoyment. Keep up the good work! You guys rock!

-ixa

[Jessup]

By the way.. while we are at it. Can we make an award for most elim wins?? I think an award for the player with most elim wins should definitely get a prize too. After all .. elimination is about winning and being the last to survive.. right?

[qan]

Kill race no longer gives confidence. Could look at removing it though. People don't come for the kill race.

Most wins would be cool to award. Would be more ironman style that way, not awarding necessarily best play, but having those kinds of awards anyone can shoot for is not a bad thing, really. And would encourage activity.


Also, somewhat controversial, but I'd like to consider the option of not allowing name changes for top 3 on the scoreboard. In TWDT etc, everyone knows who you are, and that you're on an alias. In Elim, if you're on an alias people don't necessarily know that, and it's a tactical advantage to be seen as a random. If your name inspires fear in people so much that they radically change their playstyle against you, then in order to have your non-aliased name recognized, you should need to play on it.

[ogron]

Also, somewhat controversial, but I'd like to consider the option of not allowing name changes for top 3 on the scoreboard. In TWDT etc, everyone knows who you are, and that you're on an alias. In Elim, if you're on an alias people don't necessarily know that, and it's a tactical advantage to be seen as a random. If your name inspires fear in people so much that they radically change their playstyle against you, then in order to have your non-aliased name recognized, you should need to play on it.

Again, for the 100th time, making decisions without playing the game leads to poor outcomes in general. You can't substitute experience for intelligence. It just doesn't work.

If you talked to top elim players, you'd hear things like this:

Ease> Prob need to play on an alias to get #1, too many people hunting
zidane> this the type of belim game where i'd drop 30 if Steadman didn't spend the whole round hunting me
Ogron> I lost about 8 free kills that round because Best is hunting me

Not only that, but lots of people just start running from you. Other top elim players get on aliases and try to dent your rating without hurting theirs.

You want to ban people from ranking on aliases, but allow people on aliases to hunt them.

You're also assuming other people are trying to rank. There's plenty of scrubs who know they're not good enough to hit Top 5, but good enough to just hunt and chase and damage other people's ratings.

Elim is completely asymmetrical for a lot of players. It's schaudenfreude personified.

Being on your main name only works if everyone else is on their main name, and everyone has the goal of trying to get the best rating possible. Those conditions aren't true.

You either have to pivot completely in one direction or the other -- no half measures.

1) Ban all aliases, you can only play on your main name that is TWD registered and approved by mods, have mods in elim all day watching the games and spec players just hunting to ruin people's recs and ban them from elim, to ensure everyone's goals are symmetrical, i.e., everyone is always trying to get the best elim rating period, and not trying to ruin other player's recs.

This would be the ideal scenario in a perfect world. Not sure it's realistic.

2) Allow players to alias and get rating without being TWD registered. It's fucking obvious as hell when Ease disappears from Thunder's roster and Wolven Creed reappears on it and starts dominating elim. You need actual cover to rank to #1 unencumbered generally (although there are exceptions like Lasenza who only plays on Sundays in huge games, which affords him some decent cover through sheer numbers). I tried switching to an alias to play a game without people hunting me and Robo Ref said my rating wouldn't count. I'd have to de-register my name, then play on an alias. You'd see on the website I left x squad, and some random unknown alias joined it. Not hard to put 2 and 2 together.

Then crack down on mods giving out aliases. Elim aliases leak faster than a sinking ship.

---

If you're going to make changes, it has to be one or the other. Either become super strict and moderate elim 24 hours a day and ensure compliance and use only main names, or free us to alias without it being super obvious who it is, and stop leaking mods from outing you to people who are seeking to hunt you and damage your rating.

It didn't matter that much Season 8, but you're starting to see a lot of 1000 base ratings in Season 9 in warbird, and someone hunting you when you're trying to hit #1 or something... it's incredibly damaging when you need to hit 18-10 every game to maintain your rating. They don't even need to kill you, just chase you around with max energy, and the time cost early in the round when kills on bad players are plentiful is huge. You dodge a bullet, go in for the kill, and there's some lunatic on your rear shifting in to vulch you and you have to pass on the kill and fire a defensive shot.

I went like 6-2 versus Steadman hunting me an entire round, and finished 17-10, but it didn't matter. It was a game I would have dropped 22 in easily if he hadn't been hunting me. You can't win.

So, if you want to improve the experience, I think one of those two paths would be preferable. I'm fine with only allowing main aliases, I know player tendencies and taking on aliasers is frustrating because you don't know if it's a bad player or a good one waiting to spring a trap on you. The best aliasers trying to ruin your rec don't even hunt you. They act like a scrub in your first encounter, don't hunt you, but then randomly turn it on and kill you with a surprisingly competent move. Turban has done this to me before. He's like a Venus Fly Trap.

It's impossible to account for these things if you're not playing elim and trying to rank.

But if those conditions aren't going to be met, hamstringing top players by forcing them onto their main names, but allowing others to alias and hunt just makes it worse. Do one or the other. Free us to alias and protect our covers, or force everyone onto their mains and stop the Steadmans of the world from tanking people's records by hunting them to ruin their recs.

[Rab]

I play elim around 4pm-7pm UK time because the only things active are pub and elim.
I never care about elim ranking, I'm just playing it for something to do.

I hate it when people alias. I understand the issues for those players as Claus set out, but for me it feels really shit when I'm dunked by pilot324784. A big part of this game is recognising the other players and their playstyles, when they alias you lose that intel, it's an advantage for the aliaser, cheating, basically.

I want it to be TWD names only + a few hundred hours minimum usage requirement.

I also really want !late to be changed so it's the 2nd highest deaths not the 1st highest.
I'm always tabbed out at the end of the round because it's just the last 2 tryhards chasing each other around the map for ages.
So I almost always use !late to enter.
But if there's some newbie in the game with loads more deaths than everyone else, that means I get hardly any deaths.
So I end up out quickly and tabbed out again, rinse, repeat.
It's a shit experience.

[Jessup]

I have been teamed quite often.. almost a daily occurrence for me by a certain a slew of players who think its fun to gang up on me. I could make a list but at this point will not. Staff is doing nothing to stop multiple players teaming certain people. It is illegal. I am not the only one this happens too either. We need staff to start enforcing teaming by MULTIPLE people on one player while avoiding killing each other until the end. It has always been illegal so please start enforcing it.

[Jessup]

People don't come for the kill race.

Ogron did last season rofl.. guy totally exploited the system to reach number 2 ranking by doing a bunch of BS killraces.. I agree it should be removed.

Most wins would be cool to award. Would be more ironman style that way, not awarding necessarily best play, but having those kinds of awards anyone can shoot for is not a bad thing, really. And would encourage activity.

Yes! This imo is what elim is about. Winning it. Obviously we need to watch for people who refuse to fight who would try and ruin games and exploit this feature. But winning is the goal of this game.

We also need staff to moderate though and be more vigilant of people teaming or refusing to fight. And when I say refusing to fight .. I mean obviously running away with no intent of doing anything other than that. It is one thing to position ship to recharge before melee.. it is another to flat out run away and do laps around arena never shooting ect.. Any capable staffer can distinguish this.

[ogron]

I agree with Rab on using 2nd highest deaths for !late

Also some of these formula things are suspect as hell. Why do you get extra % bonus for ending streaks? It's so meaningless. Also win% bonus makes no sense, it just goes to Jessup who is hiding at 4-2 or Caos hiding at 7-3 when everyone is on 9, they don't do anything deserving of a bonus except play like giant pussies running and straying people who are fighting.

Should be based on your score, not how well you can hide/play like a pussy.

[Jessup]

Lol at ogron saying remove a win bonus. It takes skill to win an elim and no one should have an issue with keeping a win bonus. It should be rewarded. This is an arena called elimination that is set up for a winner. I guarantee the final you are hosting will have a winner. Winning should be highly praised. Tired of you trashing people while being in charge of things too dude. Both myself and Caos are great wbs. Caos is better than us both. We have so many other factors creating the ratings there is no good argument in an arena called elimination to not reward winners. This logic of yours you show here is as bad as your logic saying Thunder should 4 vs 5 in TWDTD. That worked out well didn't it.

[ogron]

Remove the win bonus, it's a horrible incentive for hiders and strayers who don't deserve it, inflating their rating and rank to where it doesn't belong.

Makes elim worse, and 20 people are stuck in spec watching people on 4 in a game to 10 duel each other for 30 minutes. It's awful.

[qan]

Phone posting, out of town and no laptop, so very brief. Not suggesting we disallow playing on aliases (though it could be looked at if many people prefer that approach). Just saying it doesn't seem reasonable to have the advantage of playing on an alias yet receive recognition on your main - regardless of the extra difficulties you'd encounter playing on your main. The reason being that otherwise, as Ease said, in order to compete you would essentially need to alias.

We could look at Elim only being playable by TWD-enabled accounts again, though. It's a simple switch. We might not have the manpower to check aliases but it would cut down on some of the trouble at least, particularly if we brought back a small wait time to re-reg.


Regarding win bonus, if the player in question is just straying and avoiding to win, and they turn a bad rec but pull the win, their rating will still be quite low. Play with the form a bit to see. Maybe this would be a viable strat in very high pop games, but it's also more difficult to run in a higher pop game to begin with. It doesn't seem there is an epidemic of terrible players winning Elim. And it has always, always meant something. Your 18-9 and a loss (with late entry) is absolutely not equal to 18-9 and a win. Rather than whether or not it should have a ratings impact, I think we should be looking at how much and in what way. There are surely better ways than how we do it now. (Always are.)


For 2nd to last deaths on late I feel like there are extreme cases we might be missing that would need to be handled specially. Will have to think about those possible problems more. It might be problem-free.

By the way, Rab, bot should PM you right as the last Elim ends of you played in the one before and are still in the arena. Is there a way to improve this? Sound, double PM?