Elim - Changes & New Season Coming!

[ForgottenGhost]

That's known as ELO hell (roughly speaking ... it's slightly different in our case). There's not much that can be done about it, except maybe having 100% confidence reached at a higher number of games, or having 100% confidence calculated based on the median of the most active 20 or so players. (Only difficulty there is that confidence is calculated on a logarithmic rather than linear scale currently. Could go back to linear, though it's quite janky for low # of games played.) That would possibly reward activity over skill. It's hard to find the perfect balance. We are also looking at ratings decay for inactive players for next season. And I still need to add the one week cutoff, where you just aren't on the ladder if you're inactive for one week.

I'm not against the linear scale idea, but I wasn't necessarily suggesting it need be COMPLETELY activity based either. If you're a great player, I don't see why you should have to prove you are over and over again constantly. Also, my issue isn't necessarily that it's too skill based, it's that it's specifically too skill based for the games that you build to the 100% confidence rating, and then not truly counting the games played afterwards.

In terms of the Elim "season" there's already almost no reason to play if you're already at your 100% confidence the way it is now. For example, if Zidane never plays another Elim match, he will likely win this season completely unchallenged for Javelin, except maybe by the person ranked #2.
On the flip side a player like me who is ranked lower, has a 0% chance of even breaking into the top 10, even if i'm extremely active, and the "winningest" player of all time.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but those needles aren't moving.


If that's the way it was meant to be designed, feel free to ignore this message. But then the Elim season might as well only be a couple weeks long rather than 2-3 months.
Otherwise, I think there needs to be slightly more incentive to keep playing for the entire season, and I already see the numbers heavily dwindling.

[qan]

Re: bug, yeah, mild RSI/carpal tunnel acting up (do your stretches, kids), haven't been coding or typing as much to give the wrist a rest. I checked it out before and it didn't immediately pop out. But, found the cause I believe, should be fixed after next reboot.

1) That's known as ELO hell (roughly speaking ... it's slightly different in our case). There's not much that can be done about it, except maybe having 100% confidence reached at a higher number of games, or having 100% confidence calculated based on the median of the most active 20 or so players. (Only difficulty there is that confidence is calculated on a logarithmic rather than linear scale currently. Could go back to linear, though it's quite janky for low # of games played.) That would possibly reward activity over skill. It's hard to find the perfect balance. We are also looking at ratings decay for inactive players for next season. And I still need to add the one week cutoff, where you just aren't on the ladder if you're inactive for one week.

2) Unfortunately even going 10-0 1v1 against a low-rated player will lose you rating if you are a well-rated player. This is inherent in almost any formula that folds the skill of the enemy into it. We could look at basing the rating less on the skill of the players involved. That does make it more open to being gamed, though. Other games deal with this by matchmaking, so that Steadman just wouldn't get matched against players who are so far beneath his skill. But we don't have that luxury. One plan to offset this is to make streaks exponential in terms of reward. Haven't played enough with the numbers though. Bottom line is we'd really need to get away from average enemy rating to fix this, which opens up the problem of quite easily gaming/feeding ratings during the slow times.

There's a link to the editable ratings spreadsheet in !rh if you want to play with numbers a bit.

[ForgottenGhost]

Update: the bug I mentioned above (regarding lagout eliminations) still has not been rectified 2 weeks later.

Also, my two cents on the ratings:

1). Once you hit 100% confidence it seems nearly impossible to move through the rankings, it slows to a complete crawl, and by then you aren't truly rewarded for being active, or even winning. For example you could win 3 games in a row against 7 people, and you might only move up 1 rating per round despite being ranked #40 or something. When the people in front of you have 700 more rating, it feels quite pointless.

2). I've seen some of the higher ranked players like Steadman WIN elim games, and then LOSE rating points, which seems a bit broken.

[ForgottenGhost]

found a bit of a bug:

if someone specs (or lags out) 3 seconds into a game, the bot seems to treat that like a legit elimination, and therefore nobody else can join because someone changed their mind about playing before a single kill/death occurred

[Dierienow]

I think it's a good idea too. I'm sure there is a reason why it can't be done though, even if that reason is as simple as the fact that there is only 1 developer and they've given everything to this project already. Would be great to see though, and is one of my SS2 dream features. The ship skins that is.

[Rab]

Yeah that's fun. Hunt the shiny jav !!

[Wirah]

I wonder if you can buy different ship skins in elim using pub-bux. 3 dif skins for jav/ 3 for warbird. I had this idea for TWD but maybe since they added spacebux in elim, they could try it out?

Buy ship 3 (Blue jav): Cost 100k spacebux + 40 jav elim games played
Buy ship 4 (cool design jav): Cost 250k spacebux + 80 jav elim games played.
Buy ship 5 (USA jav): Cost 400k spacebux + 120 jav elim games played


Same for the warbird- but with ships 6-8.

This idea would mean spacebux will be worth collecting/ people with the usa skin ships might impress other players. Could make elim more popular.

Like this idea. Flying a golden warbird/jav because you're #1 sounds pretty awesome too. Silver for top 5.

[Fork]

I wonder if you can buy different ship skins in elim using pub-bux. 3 dif skins for jav/ 3 for warbird. I had this idea for TWD but maybe since they added spacebux in elim, they could try it out?

Buy ship 3 (Blue jav): Cost 100k spacebux + 40 jav elim games played
Buy ship 4 (cool design jav): Cost 250k spacebux + 80 jav elim games played.
Buy ship 5 (USA jav): Cost 400k spacebux + 120 jav elim games played


Same for the warbird- but with ships 6-8.

This idea would mean spacebux will be worth collecting/ people with the usa skin ships might impress other players. Could make elim more popular.

[qan]

Do we have to use TWD names? It killed elim as you might expect. Rewarding people with $500 for a 20 minute win against RaCka, Jessup, Supra, and TW-Bot2 only put it in a weakened state.

No wait, Battle Royale mode with all 5 people left playing including TW-Bot2 and 1. Instead of the elim you're supposed to be fixing. And change the map back please at least to the old jav one maybe with updated tiles there is no room in this map.

If you ask I might tell you all my design ideas for a mode that is more tactical in nature and could even have a BR game type available. The idea would be to make a base for warbirds. I saw it mentioned and had that idea as well maybe we can share ideas here or elsewhere wherever works.

- SKYRIM 6

TWD-enabled names are no longer required to play, but they're still required to be able to ladder. A bug relating to that system (which was killing elim by not allowing games to continue) has been fixed. Also, people have been earning upwards of $50K for wins recently for wins in larger games. It's not anything incredible, I admit ... but we're just not going to give away $300K for a single elim when some players spend literally years to grind out a few million. The amount has increased substantially compared to what it was before, which was admittedly pitiful. And most importantly, it scales extremely rapidly based on the difficulty of winning.

As far as I'm aware this is the old jav map. Unless you mean the 2016 one. When it came out, many people were not so fond of it. But perhaps people had just gotten used to it? It's all a matter of perspective. The plan is to cycle out maps somewhat frequently. If you would like to help this effort, editing maps is easy enough that a child could do it -- and, indeed, many of our maps were made by creative teenagers, heh.

WB in base sounds interesting, certainly. If you have an idea, you should share it. Get discussion brewing.

[Dierienow]

Do we have to use TWD names? It killed elim as you might expect. Rewarding people with $500 for a 20 minute win against RaCka, Jessup, Supra, and TW-Bot2 only put it in a weakened state.

No wait, Battle Royale mode with all 5 people left playing including TW-Bot2 and 1. Instead of the elim you're supposed to be fixing. And change the map back please at least to the old jav one maybe with updated tiles there is no room in this map.

If you ask I might tell you all my design ideas for a mode that is more tactical in nature and could even have a BR game type available. The idea would be to make a base for warbirds. I saw it mentioned and had that idea as well maybe we can share ideas here or elsewhere wherever works.

- SKYRIM 6

[Mastersword]

I had thought of this too, and thought it sounded like a good idea, but have changed my mind.

The idea of BR is to keep the action going, so people at the end aren't super far apart and taking ages.
Players in SS generally don't refuse to fight because we police it ourselves by talking shit about the person doing it.
So I don't think players would choose BR mode over standard elim, therefore there's not really any point making it, other than being able to say "yo kids, ss has battle royale, we're still relevant".

This is thought of as a weekend mashup event, not so much to prevent the refusal to fight. If it picks up traction, I was thinking we can make a new arena and host this event independently as well

[Rab]

I had thought of this too, and thought it sounded like a good idea, but have changed my mind.

The idea of BR is to keep the action going, so people at the end aren't super far apart and taking ages.
Players in SS generally don't refuse to fight because we police it ourselves by talking shit about the person doing it.
So I don't think players would choose BR mode over standard elim, therefore there's not really any point making it, other than being able to say "yo kids, ss has battle royale, we're still relevant".

[Mastersword]

Battle Royale Idea

As a weekend event (or potentially being introduced more frequently), the idea of a Battle Royale styled game has been brought up. The main premise being that as players are eliminated, the map shrinks, similar to how fortnite games are played.

Potential Game Details

1 - Players begin with 1 life. As players are eliminated the map shrinks smaller. If you are caught outside the doors when the map shrinks, you will automatically be eliminated, OR, be warped into the live area (This would depend on your feedback). Last person standing wins.

AND / OR

2- Players vote on the number of lives, just like a regular elim match. As players are eliminated, or after x amount of time, the map will shrink smaller. Players caught outside of the doors will be penalized with additional death added on, as well as being warped into the action.


Any feedback with ideas, concerns, etc. would be appreciated. Would like to get a wave of testing in before the season starts on the 15th!!

[Mastersword]

Can you tell us what the formula is? Or do we have to try and reverse engineer it?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

Notice 2 tabs - 1 for rating and 1 for rewards

[Rab]

Can you tell us what the formula is? Or do we have to try and reverse engineer it?