Posted 25 July 2014 - 10:10 AM

Cimarb, on 25 July 2014 - 08:09 AM, said:

The XP/cbill reward system already "ranks" us on an individual basis. While it needs improvement, such as much more granular spotting and capping rewards, it does a pretty good job of showing your contribution to the match. I think a "leadership" award based upon the number of mechs remaining on your team would be great too, but regardless...

The difference is, we are rewarded based on arbitrary criteria. That criteria can be (and is, incidentally) terrible for actually determining player skill and as such is worthless for matchmaking, and that's ok, because someone skewed or oddball reward amounts really are not a major concern: Devs can simply tune the economy based on average earnings per match, and go with that, even if they are "unbalanced".On the other hand, using those rewards to determine player skill is fraught with peril, because those rewards do not reflect how much you contributed to winning the match. Period. They're rewarding actions that are generally positive, but they are also highly exploitable (either way) and.

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Elo is supposed to take all of those items into account, since they all contribute to a win or loss, but it does not do that very well. You can average ANYTHING and it will eventually be averaged. Along the same lines, do you want to only get an XP/cbill reward if your Elo goes up? Of course not, because that would be a horrible system! You want to be rewarded for your individual achievements, whether your team succeeded or not, but the bonus for your team winning is icing on that cake too. So it should be for rating players, IMO.

See, you keep looking at Elo in these conversations as a reward (if it increases), or a punishment (if it drops). This is flat out incorrect. Elo is not a rating of your individual skill, it's a matchmaking parameter that strives to build teams of players who overall contribute a comparable amount to team victory.Obviously then, I wouldn't want to be rewarded based on Elo change, because that would result in my not getting match rewards simply because the opposing team was better than me. Conversely, I don't want my Elo rating to go up, matching me against more skilled players, simply because I got extra assists but didn't contribute more to team victory, because that would result in poor play being "rewarded" by facing against even stronger opponents.High match results. You don't win in MWO by being a good shot, or by doing lots of damage. You win first and foremost by cooperation and teamwork. This is always true; always. I see losing teams with the most damage done overall all the time. Elo is incorporating this as best it can to bring matches where the teams ideally have a 50:50 chance of victory. That's all it cares about. And, as Karl has said, it's actually pretty good at this overall.So, here's the thing.We'd all love to see a system that works better than Elo. I don't think anyone in this thread is particularly amazed by how well Elo works.But, in the end, it's not good enough to say "I want to see matchmaking based of stats". We have stats, and nobody knows how to interpret them to actually measure player skill. You're just wishlisting there, and it's totally useless. My challenge to you: Design a system, with specific numbers, that actually ranks players. Start simple, give me an example. How would YOU rank damage vs. assists vs. kills vs. spotting vs. narc/tag? Can you do this in such a way as to not rank a very skill player low (I'm very precise, and kill or disable mechs with minimal damage done) or rank a low skilled player high (I spray and pray, do a fairly large amount of damage to many mechs but don't actually do any damage that's useful to my team)?Because the issue is quite simply that what you feel that PGI should be able to do is extraordinarily hard and maybe even practically impossible - it certainly hasn't been done successfully yet.This is comparable to saying "Hey, chemotherapy and radiation treatment are a terrible way to deal with cancer, sometimes even causing more harm than good. Doctors should just come up with a cure instead."