Daaaaaaaaaddy!!!!!!!!!!!!

About the whole ranking and balance-discussions:
[serious)
I played around 50 games in the last 4 days and maybe won 4 of them...

(irony)
This is just not fun. I want a handicap system, so i can win against better players reliably. Oh and i am also afraid to loose rating, can we make it so that rating doesn´t go down when you loose? oh and if you don´t listen to me i will give this game a negative review on steam.

(serious)
is this a competitive game or a protectionistic kindergarden?

To the players: loosing and skill-differences are part of competitive pvp-games. loosing hurts me as well and gets me into bad mood, but if you can´t stand loosing, those kind of games are maybe not the thing of choice for you.

To the devs: you want an anti-elitist game, fine. but why did you make it elitist BY DESIGN then? This game has such a steep learning curve that it is elitist in it´s very own fundamental structures.

But isnt the large number of units, the many viable strategys and tactics what makes zerok gun in the first place?

I mean most rts games are lame because they lack those things.

Maybe you just reached a point in the learning curve where playing more wont help you anymore. At that point you need to kinda review your taughts during the game, and then rewatch the game to see what your thaughts should have been.
At that point you are at, from what i know about you, you need to force yourself to think differently, use different tactics, becoome more creative and see different strategys in order to win against higher ranked players.

Anir i didn´t say i dislike the steep learning-curve. On the contrary, i think this is what makes the game great.
Before i came here i played 2 other competitive games:
Go/Baduk/Weiqi:
Binge-learn patterns, opening- and mid-game-sequences, no chance of reaching any elo above 2300 unless you dedicate your entire luife to the game and even then no chance of reaching anything above 2500 if you didn´t start at the age of 3 and then becoming scolar of a professional really early.
Super Smash Brothers Melee:
Sit in your room alone for years to practise frame-perfect-inputs and combos. Practised at least 3 hours per day for a year, went to a local tournament (very low level compared to international standarts), got trashed by the weakest player there.

Actually ZK is the game i made the most progress so far i think. I am attracted to it because i have to learn alot without it becoming a boring repetitive skill-grind.
Also, when i was new and a real real noob, people were friendly and ready to help me and accept my mistakes as soon as i communicated with them and showed my willingness to learn. The absolute mayority of this community is very friendly and just becomes annoyed or even hostile if you as a new player ignore advice or become brazen or hostile yourself. Hostility that i witnessed was never due to pure lack of skill, but always about your behaviour as a person. (OFC there might be the odd exeptions, but those are just such: exeptions.)

I think you guys are framing things in such a way that anything would look bad given this treatment.

"Fighting games are just punching and kicking until someone wins."

"Racing games are just who goes the fastest".

"Shooting games are just who shoot the other first".

Of course when you remove the nuance and distill it down to the most basic components, then uncharitably describe it, it sounds bad.

It's true, most people are beatable just by having macro when they don't. But this only really works when there's an imbalance in macro ability. When macro ability is equal, it's other factors that win games.

Define the bounds of "creative". My understanding is that things stop being creative once they have been shown to win. Then they're just standard. The meta evolves over time with or without balance changes, so presumably creativity is happening.

katastrophe
I think it takes exceptional psychological resilience to lose that much and still keep going. It's a commendable attitude, but I wouldn't make fun of others for not being able to replicate your feat. People differ significantly in how they interpret losses. If it were one or two people I'd disregard them, but I think most players have this issue to some degree. Ladder anxiety is pretty common even in games with larger communities (and thus more fair matchmaking). Playing competitive games for many is like gambling but with your self esteem. I'm not saying that's good tho.

Regarding the game, I don't see it as intrinsically elitist. They don't add any "macro" mechanics to tax apm artificially, in fact, quite the opposite. I'd say the emphasis is more on exploration in a strategy sand-box than on distinguishing the noobs from the pros. Elitism is just an unfortunate side-effect of having so many noob-traps in a game to explore; the people that know the noob-traps have seniority over those who don't. This effect is amplified by the fact that both classes of player are thrown in together due to the constraints of a small community. You wouldn't see so much baww if highly-skilled players weren't forced into the same space as the less-skilled players in order to find games. It's like if a highschooler were held back in kindergarten or something, it's just not teaching them anything.

What type of games did you play? (looked at replay list, can't get a feeling)

I played one game against you in MM, 2v2 and it felt quite balanced. Probably it was effort to deal with the ally (lower rank) as I needed to ask couple of obvious things (go there, retreat, repair, etc.) but overall I did not feel it was a clear win.

In my experience, after steam:

• the larger team games feel horribly unbalanced (would not say "are", but as a non top10 player is hard to influence them)
• MM teams is more about interacting with your team mate (usually lower experience/a bit dizzy)
• 1v1 with same WHR are hard to find (you either play with someone better, or with someone lower, and as the better ones play more the chance is that you will get someone better)

The biggest difference from before steam is that the cluster fucks are larger => more annoying, random, etc.

And about the rank. "loosing blue/white" would be fine, I got there not because I got much better, but because of the influx of players. I would care more about the ranking in the ladder, and that one stays "rather" constant for me.

quote: I want a handicap system

This may actually be a good idea.
Unbalanced matches are unfun for both the weaker player that gets trashed with no hope to do anything, and the stronger player who has no challenge.

Go has the same problem, where unbalanced games are considered uninteresting, and solves it with a handicap system (in this case, starting with stones already in place at specific positions).

The Zero-K equivalent could be an extra metal income from the mexes. For example, a specific mex would appear as being 2.0 for the stronger player and 2.2 for the weaker player. In reclaim-heavy maps, maybe there should also be extra reclaimable stuff around their starting box.

might be an interesting option for casual games, but can´t be implemented into the MM for obvious reasons.

it also has some cons:
handicap games in go have their own meta and most of the people i play with don´t really like them because of that.
They force the stronger player to use overplay-tactics (tactics that are obviously unviable normally like rushing krow in 1v1 in the hope that your opponent does nothing for the first 6 minutes) at least in the <2000 elo region. The problem is that it does not teach the weaker player anything. And the games are distintly "ugly" because of that.

Tldr; git gud

I suggested a concrete and general handicap system 2 years ago. It works for any team constellation and based on any probability prediction system. So, you can treat WHR as one of the "even more general systems" mentioned there.

I intended to use it only for games with high skill difference, but in principle, it could be used in any case.

Just to comment on the concept of handicaps and Go:

tdlr - Non-mandatory handicaps done well can be fun for everyone, and may be underutilized in general. There exists an option for using "organic scenario" handicaps to give skill-distant players a way to play an even match, if they so choose.

Handicaps (and also bidding systems to equalize asymmetrically-played games/maps, like Axis&Allies does for instance) have probably not organically evolved yet in many places, because of how jarring they are to groups that haven't used to them (also lots of humans just like to see raw wins). I love Go, and that was my first introduction to handicaps.

Now, to be fair, playing a stacked game is already a completely different meta, so the discussion is simply about coming up with a fun way to do something that there is no fun way to do right now. I agree with the meta-changing aspect of Go handicaps, and similarly, if we just multiplied metal income, while easy to implement, could create an unintuitive and persistent change in gameplay on every level. But there's an even more elegant solution that involves handicapping with organic scenarios.

For instance, ever lost your first scout to their scout? Bam, there's an organic handicap option right there, starting one player with a scout but not the other.
Ever had both scouts mutually kill each other, but it was in your base so you had the reclaim? There's another option, starting one player with reclaim by their base.
Same with one player having an extra wind gen or mex because the other lost it.

Especially with things like reclaim, there's lots of options for granularity. If there are any concerns with even the most promising idea still being too unnatural because of having it at game start, you can delay the bonus to a natural time, say 1 minute into the game or something.

Perhaps at game start, the commander has a command to place a "handicap wreck", which would be a single wreck with metal equal to players' difference in mmr. But it has a 1-minute delay on being reclaimable.

To get into logistics for a second if that sounds confusing: the servers keep track of handicap win ratios for given "handicap constants" and adjust them until the handicap constant results in 50/50 win ratios. As in: ReclaimHandicap = mmr * HandicapConstant.