Hello everyone,

what follows is a part of discussion between the developers about the skill MM. It has been redacted by the Insider and by me of course, names and such. It’s here only to illustrate the way the developers are thinking. It’s also very long, so… make sure you have patience.

Developer 1:

All right, new preliminary results… once again, how do we…. Measure…… skill???

Developer 2:

What players’ don’t get is that skill is a variable as well, let’s assume for a moment Mr. 63% wins gets into the ultra-unicorn league, well, now what? He goes and does his thing in the game, therefore, as all skills differ with different players, his particular skill is that so some of the players go around and push a certain area of the map and he takes his shots from a distance and scurries into a flank whenever a breach is open, but while then, “oh no, why is Mr. 63% camping? He must be a noob who purchased his account!”

Skill is also part of RNG, because it’s impossible to measure how any player will behave in different scenarios, there’s no set rules of “oh you are a certain tank so you must behave exactly as you’re told to”, and the tank who breaks the rule and grabs their side by surprise is now a “hated noob because he killed me”

If Players want to live by the knife’s end on harsh matches every day, all the time, most of them will be pleading for a rollback of the system, if they want difficult matches where coordination & cooperation is everything, there’s Clan Wars or Platoons.

Developer 3:

The current matchmaker encourages the use of strategy and learning abilities, we can’t help those, who lack either (and is way less than the average player thinks there are, about 7% of the estimated server population on the RU cluster has a below 47% while a staggering 77% has a ratio of acceptable terms between 48%-52%), but we can help them understand why driving on an open map with a heavy tank is a bad idea.

There are, in reality many variables to determine skill, and none of them can absolutely measure a players capability (thus that’s why we (you *redacted*) laugh at the XVMmod predictions and models, its faulty for light tanks damage but not assists, faulty for personal abilities for those who exclusively platoon, or shoot premium ordnance, not to mention if its implemented, those with higher skill according to XVMmod will have the harshest times because they will always be priority targets for 15 enemies).

Starting for the type of tank they drive, the equipment they currently have, elited or stock, or in-between, the ordnance, the gun characteristics and the variables on how other 14 players behave for him and how 15 enemies will behave against him, each with its own set of independent skills, different tanks and ordnance, some will shoot premium, some wont, some will even shoot HE, so:

Are we to punish those who have an apparent “augmentation” of skill (SS: stat padding) because they decide to spend on premium shells (“oh, he is skilled because he kills tanks”) oblivious to the fact he used premium shells, or likewise because he thought the situation needed to shoot a different ordnance than a regular shell. And top of it, the +/-25% shell penetration RNG

Developer 4:

Ohh but we know what some want, they want “to face enemies without despairing matches, like KV-1 Vs KV-1, metal storm! well of course!, but they forget that there are 14 other players under them, and for those on the bottom -IT WILL ALWAYS BE UNFAIR-, sure no complains when the said player suddenly gets at the TOP of its list and just tells the bottom pit “deal with it!”. And repeat over and over I a circle of never-ending whine?

This “equal pairing” is the equivalent of a +1/-1 Matchmaking and that is not going to happen, the primary tests on live servers several patches ago showed a staggering amounts of “fight your clone” matchmaking, and flushing the “unwanted artillery kids” into terrible matches with 7v7 artilleries and 3 or so unlucky tanks to fight for them.

We are not going to let that happen again. Some of the tanks would blatantly destroy its own peers if a 1-1 MM was introduced, leading to more nerfs, more whine, having a 2+- MM ensures players will always get a challenge that’s designed for the tanks they drive.

It’s not our fault if they expect a Comet bring down an IS-8 by shooting it at the front and then call it unfair because they can’t kill it, where a side shot (or 10) is enough to do the job, but yeah, “our fault that they can’t pull a miracle”

Developer 5:

Forums are unreliable to some degree, when do we have to wait for the poll turnabouts?

Developer 6:

Until the 14th of November, and when the poll out for the 200,000 interviews is over we have to wait for the results, the highest answer who matches a criteria for all polls will be the one who’s put into investigation

Developer 3:

Sigh… Why are forums SO unreliable? :)

Developer 7:

Trolls, goblins, hobgoblins and even orcs, however if we ask in a more personal way via a poll they tend to get more polite and express their true nature without all the “internet troll” drama, not to mention that if the poll shows THAT IF ONLY a minority actually wanting this change and our models show that the bigger larger player pop is fine with this, we can bury this line of thoughts for a while.

Of course, some smart pants will think that unicorns will be at the top of their matching’s, and all the zombies will be rock bottom, not going to work like that :)

Players with overly inflated wins, as example, there are several IS-6 players with 92% win ratio on these tanks, mostly because they spend big on the game, shooting APCR 99% of the time, will suffer if we pair them on their “equal peers”, and we’re going to take the blame for listening to people that “doesn’t know what they want but want it anyways”

Developer 8:

Oh there are some nice solutions that could work, the match threshold doesn’t have to be harsh at all, it’s still going to be a +2/-2 MM, and we can “equalize” player matching’s by having a personal rating threshold (+/-2200), of course, we would need to test it first, and there’s a lot of points to think of:

*redacted*

-Platoons will be unaffected, if you platoon it’s because you have 2 more people backing you up personally, so you’ll be exponentially better, at least to some degree, so no rule should apply to them (they come as they go). So if a platoon of e-100s with terrible stats show up, it’s not because MM, it’s more like because they are bad and should learn better.

And likewise for high end players, all of them are going to suffer or stagnate on their ratios, and are going to blame us, aren’t they?

Developer 2:

Wait…. will people be able to tell the difference?

Developer 8:

Players with exceptionally good personal ratings (think of +9000) will still have to deal with players on the (lower ladders) and can’t have more than 3-5 of them per side, per match, waiting time is to be incremented by 15-25 seconds, and the longer the wait, the matching rule is void for a more “regular” match, but the matching system traffic is going to increase by a bunch, because it now has to take into account each and every single player’s rating.

I can’t see it working correctly for now until we stress test. Anyways:

-Players with exceptional low ratings will have to deal still with good players (around 5000 threshold) so they get a chance to learn from their mistakes

-Superb players will still deal with regular and good players, as their number increases, so does their threshold number, increments by 500, not sure what has to be the base formula yet but I’m thinking (see formula) this means they get to see less “bad kids” but more regulars, likewise, regulars will still see “bad kids” and good players, no ladder will be excluded, so a deer kid can see a “super player” sometimes, and if the super player complains, we know it’s just a big troll because once every 3-6 matches kid would appear in their radar, of course, if a super player complains against a regular, we know it’s a troll and deserves to be sit into the “special seats”, and not our fault if 3 bad players go into platooning with Tier X and get a match filled with super players.

As result, super players would be matched more regularly against regular-to great players, and less likely to the bad ones,

But it will still happen in a little less than regular basis, bad players gets to play with regular players more often and likewise towards good players.

However we MUST make sure to fine tune the threshold, because if we put the regular players threshold in pairing with the bad players, they are going to suffer, imagine you are a player with 50% rating and suddenly you get tons of games with SEAS and SEAS and OCEANS of bad players, they will suffer a “sandwich effect” thus this solution only partially solves towards good and super players (who are the actual ones asking for a change), and who happen to be a very short minority, but the basis is set. Do you agree?

(Everyone agrees, thus a consensus is reached)

(here, developer 4 adds: Sure the Comet scenario is feasible, but so does the fact that the Comet driver won’t complain when he actually rips a new one on the IS-8, Likewise a KV-1 against a Comet, but the roles are now reversed)

Developer 6:

How about if we tweak it so the personal rating formula is changed again? We have to find benefit the most towards regular and good players who gross out most servers, not just a few hardcores. This way we can expand the Variables required?

Developer 4:

That would be exceptional, and would send XVMmod into chaos and its terrible predictions “we win because XVMmod says we will,– Ooops, why did we lose? Conspiracy!”

So, a +2/-2 MM, and a sort of mini ladder system that allows player pairing of similar but not 100% equal, and self-sustain as long as there’s enough server population, will players be able to tell de difference?

Developer 8:

I dont think so, ever so rarely MM has nasty coughs, and that depends on server traffic (0.6 matches every 100.0 per group assigned, and drops to 0.2 matches every 100.0 when server population is high), thanks to a wide variety of tiering playing at the same time. If we reduce MM threshold by 1, its going to increase by a milestone, and we got to avoid that.

Now, the “fun” part is to set up, since we can’t use a test server to try out since “everybody is shooting high end tanks”, we can set a small control group, but without modifying their matches, we track data of 3 sets 30,000 players as control group, all chosen ensuring at least 70% of them are at averages of 49-51% wins, 15% to be great players/superb ones and the rest to be below average, root out platoon matches and see how much actual “equal matches” they get during a round of 1000 matches average each, despite tank/ordnance used, i don’t think their status would be too volatile and will give us a constant, then we can break in the numbers as example:

How much equally-skilled matches they get during 16-20 matches, and truly see how many bad matches they get in average, and start tweaking from there.

By the way, you must really “like” XVMmod huh? *wink*

Developer 4:

Why 16-20 matches? PS: i don’t like XVMmod because I’m less than happy on how light tanks are measured on “skill equals damage dealt” equation

Developer 8:

the player on average plays 16-20 matches a day, roughly 2 to 3 hours per day, we can’t trust direct forum feed because they tend to be extremely biased and does not represent the grand majority of a playerbase, mostly its complains “why can’t i win?” type of threads, but with different names and situations, so if the polling turns that a change is required we will start with the control group, but not any sooner until Mid 2015 due to Engine Upgrade, and also we are in the process of light tank buffing and map rework which may affect the information results

Developer 9:

What are the expected turnabouts?

Developer 10:

I think the objective is to break down matches to have not a big dispairing of “personal skill”, as it stands, the current matching system gives 4.3 “average-against” out of every 10, and it would be nice to break it to less if we don’t destroy RNG factor, the best estimated would be 4.49 as long as player criteria and population is met, otherwise it won’t work, and the problem lies that every match is going to turn different for every player.

If players truly want to have their skills and efforts put into an arbitrary number to be judged, packaged, and measured despite our efforts not to go there, who are we to deny? some may just not know what they desire…

Interestingly enough, this change will affect mostly the great/superb players because they will start getting a knife-end match every now and then commonly, and thus their status will suffer, and more whine will come, while the regular and good player may get a long term benefit by farming (sucking dry) the super players’ stats, is this intended?

Developer 11:

Well, there’s nothing wrong with challenge, but the longer a player advances a ladder regardless of tier the harsher it becomes, wondering if tiers will be affected? i can see it happening to a certain scale

Developer 4:

That’s a thing, if someone thinks “oh he has tier X so he has to be good” then he has failed to realize the game is half RNG, half skill, and can’t win on a game where Skill isn’t everything that’s on the equation, has only fulfilling half of it.

A player with skill but no RNG consideration is a min/maxing robot and will HATE the game no matter what WE do, despite its good stats because his skill has negated to some degree RNG but never completely, He will always whine that something’s wrong, that “a game with RNG should not exist”.

Likewise a player with no skill (inadequate skill) and only relies on chances will get the same problem, but with even worse stats. SO if we ever remove RNG from the game it starts to become a dull motif, he is better off playing Battle City than to risk is chances of actually losing sometimes as RNG intended, noting that RNG actually means other players success, by both chance and skill.

Developer 7:

So how do we work the tiers? i don’t think its going to be a major tweak considering the current model has a large amount of player’s being OK with it

Developer 8:

Tiers should have little impact on game, any player regardless of skill is free to play any tank they want, there’s no set rule, if a super player goes to tier 2 and find himself in a sea of bad payers it’s not going to be our fault, it’s his own… because he expects other super players will be playing tier 2 as well, and his queue will be longer looking for “equally skilled threshold players” but found none… then the new rule is void and he is treated normally and is sat on the first available spot, we can’t fix stupid.

It is expected to some degree that the higher the tank level, the higher the skill may be required on ladders, but that equally scales with the tank they are driving (advance tiers), however we don’t want to make it overly difficult for players who recently purchased a tank to be tossed into a “hellfire deathmatch with monster tanks everywhere” and thus, scaling tiers will have a much harder difficulty than intended, so we should void the MM rule for newly purchased tanks in favor of preferential MM as it currently is to allow player room to learn their newly acquired tanks, and even so, the solution is not ideal.

A bad player has the same right to play a tier X than anyone else, but likely as the tier increases and his skill doesn’t improve, most likely MM won’t be able to find the ladder to be put with the “special kids” and thus he will end in a regular match with great/good/regular players, specially at tier X since in regular games there isn’t as many playing at that level than its at Tier 8, we can’t fix that either, because given the actual population of terrible players being actually lower than the whines claiming, he would be waiting forever to get into the match, curiously enough, so will the superb players at that Level.

We also have to consider how to balance players who are exceptional at certain levels but go abyssal on other levels or tanks (light tank god becomes a piston burner while driving heavy tanks). Balancing that based on numbers is going to be a less than adequate task with the current information feed. So a change will be necessary on the personal rating formulas

(and a followup e-mail and conclusion)

I think we can’t bring more ideas for now, the priority is low and we have over extended this, right now we focus on Hidden Village redo, Stalingrad, and prepare Black Forest and engine upgrade, light tank premastering and the new tree camouflage vectors and renders for camo. Hereby this topic is closed for reserve until the results of player feedback are back and a control group has started.