Cheaters

No one is taking a smurf's cheating accusations seriously. Smurfing itself is cheating.

So I don't consider people using !start command cheating either.

I really don't care what you think Pantifax, I have zero respect for smurfing and don't think we should consider complaints of smurfs as legitimate.

Just because something is possible doesn't make it right. The heart of your argument is "people have done this for a long time and therefore it should keep happening". That's a poor excuse. Before ranks, ingame time was used. It wasn't great, but at least it provided some measure of balance. Smurfing was wrong during that time, as well, to the point that many hosts started manually ranking smurfs to their correct level, and down-ranking those with a ton of gametime but were still terrible players.

Regardless of how things used to be, we currently do have a way to play balanced games, and smurfing detracts from that. It turns out that most people don't want to newb-bash, or be the ones that are bashed. Popular RTS games like Starcraft use elo-divided leagues to ensure that you're only playing with players of similar skill levels. ZK doesn't have quite enough players to ensure this, so balance is at least attempted on games involving a wide variety of skill levels.

The heart of my argument: people want to play fair games. Smurfing deliberately gives you an advantage that no one else has, which is sort of the definition of cheating. I don't get my panties in a wad over smurfs, but if a well-known and obvious smurf starts complaining about players cheating against them, it makes me lol. This is why I could care less when once a day Neon complains about someone "cheating" against him.

>ELO is far from perfect with everyone playing team games, especially as if you are a new player you will gain elo very quickly, at a rate that is quicker than your skill at the game increases.

You don't quite understand ZK's implementation of Elo. First: all new players get a 250 Elo subtraction that slowly diminishes over many games, to counteract the very problem you're describing. So even though they may be gaining Elo too quickly, they always have a 250 Elo handicap until it diminishes. Second: they player in question was over level 100. His Elo had stabilized long ago.

>A fair game consists of an equal number of players with an equal opportunity to win. As long as these conditions have been met, it's a fair game.
AND
>I think noobs learn more from losing than they do from winning.

So let's take the top 10 Elo players and stack them against the worst 10 Elo players. Nothing will be learned by either party. The Top 10 will roll the bottom 10 so quickly people will doubt if the game ever happened. Of course you can learn by winning or losing, and Elo-matched games have a consistent 50/50 outcome.

>How often does the higher elo team win? If it's consistently wrong, then is the balancing mechanism making the game imbalanced?

It's not consistently wrong. The top Elo players are really the best players in the game. If Elo was failing, you'd see a random distribution of skill vs Elo. Instead, you see a fairly linear distribution. TBH, I would be interested in seeing a 3-dimensional graph. On the X-axis is average Elo of all players in the game. On the Y-axis would be the difference in Elo between the teams. On the Z-axis you'd see win percentage of the higher Elo team. I'm pretty sure we'd get some telling data there, for or against Elo balance.

>Playing a game should be about you doing the best that you are able and earning the respect of your peers regardless of whether you win or loose.

Agreed, within limits. There are reasons that FIFA World Cup Champions are not playing primary schools. Neither side would want that. Instead, there are various levels of play, and within each level the game is more-or-less fair. We aren't there yet with ZK, but if you were to mix half the World Cup team with half the primary school team, you'd be a hell of a lot closer to a fair match that everyone would enjoy.

I think if you take the extreme scales of elo, provided these people play a LOT of games, it's probably accurate.

If we want to go for examples then i'll refer you to the game linked to by the OP.

You refer to HiKitty as being a smurf, yet he has a high elo of 1838... so i don't understand how you can call him a smurf, if he had low elo then i could understand it as by definition a smurf is a good player masquerading as a bad one. Where is the deception?

Altius's account is 2 weeks old and he has an ELO over 1600, the other guy has a 15 month old account so there's not much point mentioning him.

I would imagine that altius' elo is inflated beyond his actual ability because he hasn't played enough games for him to have such a high elo. (Or he's a genuine smurf)

If you look at the ammount of elo that's handed out, 14+ to a mid-high elo player and 29- to a high elo player this is obviously imbalanced. In a 2v1 situation the team with 1 should stand to lose very little elo if they lose the game or gain a lot of elo if they win. The team with 2 should stand to lose a lot of elo if they lose and gain a little if they win.

Also the balancing does not take into account an individual player being horendously bad compared to everyone else in the game. I lost 4 games in a row the other day because the same team mate was balanced onto my team repeatedly. When i say bad, Dante's and catapults were being built on a big open map and in another game ducks were being sent against glaives.. i probably lost a whole bunch of elo for that, not because i personally played terribly (not that there haven't been games where i have majorly fucked up).

That means for the next game i'll be put on 1 team and a noob will get put on the other to balance out the elo, i'll own the noob and the teams will have been imbalanced.

It doesn't matter if if you have a 250 point handicap, the way the system is designed, a low elo player gets more elo for winning than a high elo player because he will usually be playing against opposition that have a higher elo than themselves.

Just like in the above game, the ammount of elo gained was disproportionate to the ammount of elo lost because of the difference in elo between the winning and loosing team.

A player with low ELO will always gain elo quicker than a player with high elo.

Losing makes you consider your strategy and think how you could do things better, winning makes you think that you played great and you can do the same the next game, when really, you only won the game because your team mate managed to own someone's base early on.

I'm not arguing against the concept of ranking as a whole, just some peoples obsession with ELO as the defacto authority on equally distributing ability amongst teams is laughable because there are so many scenarios where it FAILS.

It should be used as a guide, but the idea that someone's ELO isn't correctly reflecting their ability upsets game balance carries no weight when the system itself can upset game balance even when all the conditions for making it work properly have been observed.

And in regards to your analogy regarding the worst players vs the best players and not learning anything?

The worst players would learn, a lot, they would see what the best players did and try to emulate that. The best players wouldn't learn anything though, because they won ;)

You're rather straw manning my argument. Most games don't consist of the top elo players and the lowest elo players, you can't exclude everything inbetween and say ELO balances perfectly!

Winning can only reinforce what you have concluded during your reflection on why you lost before, but you wont ever know if you could have done better. You could have done something terrible and you would never know because you won. This is why in so many games playing the AI until you win consistently does not translate to playing against real people because you don't lose and there is no mechanism for improvement.

> Winning makes you think about what you did to win and try to emulate those future strategies.

And if it was your team that carried you then you learn nothing.

> Losing makes you think that your team sucks and they should have supported you better.

Typically everyone bitches about you before trying to kick you, if you had a bad game and then you learn why you screwed up. Someone who cannot be intelectually honest and look at the game objectively, will never learn because they cannot analyse their performance. It's not there fault when they lose and they don't care how they won, as long as they win.

> I've seen great pros say "hey, I screwed up because I was trying something new and it failed."

Well, imagine if he tried that same tactic and won because his team mates did great? Then he wouldn't have learnt that it can so easily fail, but because he lost he learnt something! :D

I'm not trying to say that the elo system is completely innefective, but i'm stating that people should be confirming it as an absolute 100% fair way of balancing games and at the low end of the elo scale, especially for new players, it can be wildly innacurate.

You don't notice it so much if you play 8v8, but 4v4 having a bad player with over inflated ELO on your team is worse than 1 extra good player being put on a team amongst mostly average players due to smurfing.

I'm not advocating smurfing, i just don't think it's that big a deal and the game will quickly over inflate their elo when they win anyway so they wont be a smurf any more. Anti-smurfing is not enforceable either.

Also i didn't say losing was the only way to learn, i said people learn more from losing than they do from winning.

I noticed one of your Coms is called elrectric feel... is that a homage to the MGMT song?

Well, the thing is, neither of us are really wrong.

I'm generalizing with stereotypes and you're generalizing in a none stereotypical way.

Really i just want things to be like the good old days where you joined a game and picked team a and b, now people (not you personally) get distracted with petty concerns about playing on a map they know against people that they can beat.

Of course democracy and elo balancing represent progress, it's just the people that have not progressed ;)

Hence Ion/neon/hellokitty and his multiple nicknames. I think it's more to do with anonymity than upsetting game balance?

People that liked MGMT, also liked Empire of the sun and might like Secret Machines.

If you didn't read it it wasn't for you.

Offtopic. Gif is such old image format from 1989 and still is widely used. This blows my mind...