Elim Season 9

[Falconeer]

The 3 accounts with the lowest aim% have crazy high win percentages in Caos, Caos (again), and Jessup:



Aim% doesn't actually measure your aim (Caos has good aim), it measures how you play. They're hiding and straying and consistently on low deaths at the end.

Their win percentages are high because they play like giant pussies. The actual best players of the round are like 20-8 and 18-9 at the end, and they're 9-5 or 7-4. They shouldn't be getting a ratings bonus for hiding and straying all game.

Jessup isn't good enough for this to matter, his ratings aren't good, but Caos is actually a decent WB and he shows that being pathologically obsessed with staying 1.5 screens away from everyone with decent aim and willing to bore everyone around you to death and getting 3 free shots at anyone who wants to fire at you on-screen is effective.

Last night I was like 19-5 and maito_chi hid all game and was 4-4, and he suicided me out and got a win with a 9-9 rec, while I don't get a bonus with a 24-10.

Obviously his rating won't be good, but he's denying other players ranking a win bonus.

If you're going to keep the win bonus, the 2nd and 3rd player should get some kind of bonus as well to account for hiders, and the win bonus should be affected by your amount of kills. If you hid all game at 2-2, and deny someone the win bonus and finish 5-9, you should get less than Racka winning with a 25-8.

I'm not sure how it works, but so long as you're not getting a negative rating for losing after performing very well it's good.

In dsb I could face a stacked team in practice that has 45-10, 34-20, 18-12 rec respectively, while my team would have 27-25, 17-44, 22-34.

With 27-25 during a 30 minute game that was entirely us locked out trying to break a choke point, I end up getting -8 rating for being MVP on my losing team and holding my own against a dominant team with epic 'giants' for players. It always made very little sense to me to base ratings on wins only. In reality I should have gotten +2 rating at least, or no rating hit. While the winning team walks away with +8 rating. Basically DSBs rating system is broken like hell.

Not sure if it's the same here. But if you're not taking a negative rating for losing, it basically means you wasted your time only.

[Jessup]

LOL at this logic by ogron saying to allow losers a winner bonus. Facepalm. GTFO with that nonsense.

You hide every game in the fringes on the map ogron. Robo ref is always saying ogron is a possible hider.

I'd love to see the percentage of possible hider comments that robo ref throws out during games towards players. Anyway to show that qan? Perhaps we could start there showing who the real hiders are in elim. Perhaps we can have robo ref comments for possible hiders start to detract from peoples bonus scores or something. I'd embrace this rule.

I do NOT hide. I play defensive and parry which is why my aim % is low. Aim percentage emphasis is being given too much weight. Purposely lobbed shots with low hit probability are a tactic used to get a player to overcommit on an attack or are used as a tactic to keep an enemy at bay. It is like a jab in boxing or a parry in fencing. It is a defensive style that is legitimate and aim % has little to do in showing the true skill of a player. It can not be equated with hiding. Not every shot taken should be considered equal nor does it have the same importance. Drawing players in with misses is an old tactic used by many of the best players.

Win bonuses for losers should be an obvious NO rofl

[ogron]

Also, I think if theres like 2-3 jav or wb elims in a row, it should automatically launch an elim game to 10 in the opposite ship.

Waiting around for 3 hours to get an elim game in your ship is frustrating.

It's bad for people who main the other ship, too, because if it's nothing but jav elims, the WBs will leave, decreasing the elim population (and free kills for them.)

You constantly have like 3-4-5 jav elims in a row for hours on end, with votes being close, and javs slightly outnumbering everyone. I even see javs take pity and try to throw the WBs votes sometimes.

I feel like that would benefit both Javs and WBs, because if you know your ship is going to come around after 2 straight elims in the other ship, it motivates you to stick around and play, and maintains a higher elim population in the arena.

The dominating ship would still get played 67% of the time.

[ogron]

The 3 accounts with the lowest aim% have crazy high win percentages in Caos, Caos (again), and Jessup:



Aim% doesn't actually measure your aim (Caos has good aim), it measures how you play. They're hiding and straying and consistently on low deaths at the end.

Their win percentages are high because they play like giant pussies. The actual best players of the round are like 20-8 and 18-9 at the end, and they're 9-5 or 7-4. They shouldn't be getting a ratings bonus for hiding and straying all game.

Jessup isn't good enough for this to matter, his ratings aren't good, but Caos is actually a decent WB and he shows that being pathologically obsessed with staying 1.5 screens away from everyone with decent aim and willing to bore everyone around you to death and getting 3 free shots at anyone who wants to fire at you on-screen is effective.

Last night I was like 19-5 and maito_chi hid all game and was 4-4, and he suicided me out and got a win with a 9-9 rec, while I don't get a bonus with a 24-10.

Obviously his rating won't be good, but he's denying other players ranking a win bonus.

If you're going to keep the win bonus, the 2nd and 3rd player should get some kind of bonus as well to account for hiders, and the win bonus should be affected by your amount of kills. If you hid all game at 2-2, and deny someone the win bonus and finish 5-9, you should get less than Racka winning with a 25-8.

[Rab]

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?

I know I've seen this PM, but it defo doesn't happen every time. And tbh I don't want it to.

PMs don't make a sound or flash the window for me (I might have changed a setting to that effect, can't remember) and I don't want PMs to make a sound or flash the window in general.

For example, here's the messages I typically see at the start of a round:

VOTE: 1-Warbird, 2-Javelin
    Whinegum> 1
This will be Warbird elim. VOTE: How many deaths? (5-10) (or 15-30 for a KillRace of 5-20)
Warbird ELIM to 7.
Enter to play. Arena will be locked in 10 seconds.
RULES: One player per freq and NO TEAMING! Die 7 times and you're out.
Get ready. Game will start in 10 seconds!
GO GO GO!!!
    Robo Ref> WBs to 7. PM !late to enter.

This tends to be the point where I notice a round has started, because the last message is yellow. All the other messages are green and just become a blur tbh, there's so much green in TW I don't even see it anymore.

I don't want you to make TW more like facebook (notification spam). When you're in the game there are sufficient messages. When you're tabbed out (with just the chat window visible) using !late is perfectly adequate. It just needs fixing so you don't get fucked by the death allocation.

Just change it to 2nd highest deaths and we're good. In the example above, the round has just begun and a few people will be using !late. There'll be most people on 0 deaths and some people on 1 death. The late person should be allocated Max-0 deaths, not Max-1.

The only scenario I can think of where this might be unwelcome is if there are only ever 2 players in the round, it might be preferrable to let the round end and start a fresh one than to prolong it. I wouldn't introduce a special case for this though, it's not worth it.

[Rab]

     Skilder> damn maN
     Skilder> quit dl
    destruct> LOL
     Skilder> u ate dat again
    destruct> im stealing free wifi
    destruct> shh
     Skilder> like 5 bomb eats this game

         Rab> !lag destruct
    Robo Ref> destruct: PING Cur: 200ms Ave: 230ms Low: 80ms Hi: 580ms PLOSS S2C: 0.2% C2S: 1.5% S2CWeapons: 0.0%
    Robo Ref> --------  SLOW S2C: 0.3% C2S: 0.0% SPIKE Med: 17.93 Count: 0

Why the fuck is the bot not speccing for this lag. Ridiculous.

[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?

[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.

[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]

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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.