Matchmaking and Threat

[Poperon 141]

9 hours ago, Kewlin said:

 

It's not necessary, they can just play with you in Gold, lol. There is no excuse for dethreating, purposefully dethreating means you're a selfish jerk, end of story.

 

 

It's just you, this solution wouldn't work.

 

1) I don't know where you're getting your idea from that veterans can't stomp newbies just because they aren't geared up, but it's not correct. Every time I've started up a new account I destroyed everyone the game matched me with until it decided I was Gold, and let's be honest, even once you get to Gold the only real downside you have is not having CA3, which isn't a huge deal breaker IMO.

1-a) K Kewlin, no need to be passive agressive (rude) about it ok. Your ideas will be heard too, no need to put others down right away. Also, i threw my suggestion here for Matt and their team as it was asked by Matt himself, to "wonder" if it's somehow feasible or not. (Anyway, somehow I already knew/felt that you would turn my idea down, as you did the same the last time i posted about it on the old forums)... We are all here trying to help/save APB somehow... Ideas are cost free

1-b) My "idea of a newer system" isn't considering Green, Bronze, Silver, Gold. FORGET ABOUT THEM, you are already obsessed with colors. They would not exist as a matter of classification. It would be either a neutral color, just to show what "threat" symbol you are (Lieutnant, Hired Gun, rank names...), or the colors would just be... colors.

 

And, as stated by yourself, if you "destroyed" newer players with newer accounts, you should not be doing it (sounds not much different from a dethreater for me). Since 2011, i already have the very same account that i started with, no need to go around creating thousand accounts. I'm wondering why are you going around "destroying" everyone with a newer character... BUT, as a countermeasure, Dev Team could create a system like: If you have 1 "advanced" character on your account, if you create a newer character, the system would see that you are already a "vet/experienced player" and it would not let you join the Beginner District. This way, destroyers like you wouldn't stomp beginners.

 

 

2) This doesn't even remotely make any sense, because being bad at APB has nothing to do with rank. People can be legitimately Bronzes all the way up to 255.

 

3) What do you mean threat icons stay but aren't considered as a skill factor? What does that even mean?

 

People need to realize that under no circumstances should rank and skill be associated with each other, as there simply is no correlation.

 

2) By rank, i mean the current system, that doesn't mean anything as much as you "advanced" throughout Contacts, not as a matter of skill. Right now, we have very skilled players low ranked, and very poor skilled players with top ranks. It really doesn't mean anything, and would be treated the same. The fact that matters with rank is just as much as you want to advance, or if you just want to go around doing missions, killing people, but not giving a f* about progression. A simple N-tec or a STAR may stomp even the best equiped veteran players as you stated. Again, i'm not treating RANK as SKILL, i'm treating it just as simple numbers to take a player from "DISTRICT A", to "DISTRICT B"; nothing more, nothing less. Just numbers.

Rank would just mean progress, and that's it. Not as a "hey, i'm 255 i'm better than you" as you're probably wondering... It's the same as on GTA main story missions. You can either decide if you are ready to follow that path, or if you just want to play around, get to know the game a little better, its mechanics, than you get back on the main rails. (Also, if you just keep playing missions without any real commitment, you'll keep gaining EXP to NPCs, and you'll advance either way. So, you'll need to "get better" at the game, sooner of later...)
 

3) By threat icons i mean these:

The talks here were that some people are asking to "HIDE" threat, and i may have misunderstood what they meant with that, but i took it as they are asking to go away with these symbols. And this would be devastating. I don't consider them as "skill" or anything, it just shows my commitment to the game, and my personal progress. Some people clearly treat these mere symbols as "skill" or if it's used as some part of the matchmaking's algorythm.

Basically, it's just two pools of players: a "beginners" pool, and a "advanced pool". Advanced in game, not in skill.

Just players against players. In a mission you could either get an enemy team with high skilled players, or a team with a mix of good and bad players, etc.
The system right now tries to take the best players for your team and for the enemy team, and almost always it ends not so well...
(Lots of algorythms just to screw things up in the end... meh)

 

Edited October 22, 2018 by Poperon

[Kewlin 692]

12 minutes ago, Poperon said:

K Kewlin, no need to be passive agressive (rude) about it ok. Your ideas will be heard too, no need to put others down right away. Also, i threw my suggestion here for Matt and their team as it was asked by Matt himself, to "wonder" if it's somehow feasible or not. (Anyway, somehow I already knew/felt that you would turn my idea down, as you did the same the last time i posted about it on the old forums)... We are all here trying to help/save APB somehow... Ideas are cost free

 

I wasn't being passive aggressive, but okay. Maybe I was rude, but I honestly don't give a fuck about being rude on here 90% of the time: I just told you why your ideas are bad in my opinion in the most precise and concise way I easily and naturally could.

 

 

13 minutes ago, Poperon said:

My "idea of a newer system" isn't considering Green, Bronze, Silver, Gold. FORGET ABOUT THEM, you are already obsessed with colors. They would not exist as a matter of classification. It would be either a neutral color, just to show what "threat" symbol you are (Lieutnant, Hired Gun, rank names...), or the colors would just be... colors.

 

You're referring to "rank," not "threat." I can only go off of what you say, and as it is you accidentally used the wrong term, so there was an understandable misunderstanding. If you remove the color from a player's icon, it's no longer a "threat" icon in any way as it only shows a player's approximate "rank."

 

 

14 minutes ago, Poperon said:

And, as stated by yourself, if you "destroyed" newer players with newer accounts, you should not be doing it (sounds not much different from a dethreater for me). Since 2011, i already have the very same account that i started with, no need to go around creating thousand accounts. I'm wondering why are you going around "destroying" everyone with a newer character...

 

They were RAF accounts, I was only making new accounts because G1 basically asked us to. (Before anyone potentially says that wasn't the intended purpose, they stated that they were fine with people cheating the system as it was a test.)

 

 

19 minutes ago, Poperon said:

Again, i'm not treating RANK as SKILL, i'm treating it just as simple numbers to take a player from "DISTRICT A", to "DISTRICT B"; nothing more, nothing less. Just numbers.

 

I get what you're saying, and I get your intent, but the fact stands that what you're suggesting promotes smurfing, as it gives smurfs an easy way to face primarily newbies. It would be far more productive IMO to simply match them with players of similar skills, regardless of rank or playtime (as rank ultimately, as you yourself admitted, means nothing, even on new accounts.) Don't forget, similarly, that new players can be anywhere from Bronze to Gold easily.

 

 

21 minutes ago, Poperon said:

The talks here were that some people are asking to "HIDE" threat, and i may have misunderstood what they meant with that, but i took it as they are asking to go away with these symbols.

 

As I said earlier, you entirely misunderstood what they were saying. Threat is your color, I.E. Green, Bronze, Silver, or Gold.

 

 

Keep on making suggestions, but I'm not going to stop telling people when I think they're wrong or how they could be more correct.

[ExoticZ 131]

Just go back to old matchmaking system from 2010/2011. Where you had levels of each threat.

Gold: 1-10

Silver: 1-10

etc...

 

It was not perfect but it is a lot better than the current system.

[Softdeath 22]

from what I understand from the post, instead of having bronze/silver/gold waterfront and financial districts there would only be one big district correct? this idea seems awesome, however I don't really like the server phasing part, being on a huge map with only team vs team would make the world feel empty, why not instead classify district areas as in "zones" where each zone would have a chance of becoming a "mission stage" and you would base each zone based on the amount of missions inside of it, so for example if there was 100 players in the district and the district had 10 zones, where 5 of them had a "mission stage" the algorithm would instead place us in an "empty" zone, and if all 10 zones had missions in them, it would choose the one with least amount of players for example, I think this would fix the issue of overpopulating the server due to having only 2 giant districts and at the same time the server would not feel empty due to phasing every time I have a new mission. one of the beauties of APB is encountering other players during a mission and perhaps having a collision or two while driving along the road.....

Edited October 22, 2018 by Softdeath

[mynd 120]

7 hours ago, ExoticZ said:

Just go back to old matchmaking system from 2010/2011. Where you had levels of each threat.

Gold: 1-10

Silver: 1-10

etc...

 

It was not perfect but it is a lot better than the current system.

This is such a misconception that the old team cleared up for us a couple of times.  The old threat system was no different than what we have now, it's just REPRESENTED differently now.  Same numbers exist underneath this.  The "perception" that it's better could come from the fact they had a much bigger playerbase back then.

[YumiSakura 86]

7 hours ago, mynd said:

This is such a misconception that the old team cleared up for us a couple of times.  The old threat system was no different than what we have now, it's just REPRESENTED differently now.  Same numbers exist underneath this.  The "perception" that it's better could come from the fact they had a much bigger playerbase back then.

one thing that was changed around the time of hard segregation being lifted was that gold now starts at what was silver 6, making it far easier to obtain gold threat.

Edited October 22, 2018 by YumiSakura

[Isais 11]

19 hours ago, ExoticZ said:

Just go back to old matchmaking system from 2010/2011. Where you had levels of each threat.

Gold: 1-10

Silver: 1-10

etc...

 

It was not perfect but it is a lot better than the current system.

Indeed,  it'll be a great stop gap. I do miss and prefer it over the rubbish that's in now.

[dett2 64]

Nice Idea.

But it makes more waiting time before each missions (like a loading , wait a match making).

That will be a stress.

[Kewlin 692]

11 minutes ago, dett2 said:

Nice Idea.

But it makes more waiting time before each missions (like a loading , wait a match making).

That will be a stress.

 

There really shouldn't be much of a load time though, that's why they need to wait until they upgrade to UE3.5. Overall this should make matchmaking much faster in theory.

[TheJellyGoo 343]

Remove threat and you will lose a chunk of the playerbase. The reason people left is because we have played the game over and over and over.

Taking away the number one incentive of playing in pvp gameplay- progress in elo - will not help to create a healthy environment.

You want people to grind? Make higher threat an accomplishment and not a laughing stock as of now.

[finaljustice 8]

I can't remember if it was the entire time we had that old visual threat system, but we could also opt out of matches. You could decline op you didn't want to fight.

 

Terrible idea. Let's explore it.

 

What if, when the mm can't find close enough-ish teams to match, instead of just throwing more lower rating players to auto-lose, the mm puts the highest rated players in a "lobby". Let's say its crims. Out of these 40 crims, the 3 or so are higher mmr than the top ends, so the mm is having a hard time getting a group of enfs to start a match.

 

Currently, these top crims have to wait and eventually mm puts together an auto-lose team. Instead, let people opt in/out of a lobby with active pvp for those who opt in, but don't spawn the first objective until both sides have an even-ish match. Choose objectives "balanced" for the number of players. For those that opt out, no one wants them anyway, and they don't want to be there. Let solos and groups join so the mmr balance can flip back and forth until the practically the whole district finally makes it even enough to drop an objective. At City Hall.

 

Call it, Anarchy District.

 

Still a terrible idea.

[Revoluzzer 274]

10 hours ago, YumiSakura said:

one thing that was changed around the time of hard segregation being lifted was that gold now starts at what was silver 6, making it far easier to obtain gold threat.

Do you have a source for this? I can not recall any such thing.

 

 

2 hours ago, TheJellyGoo said:

Remove threat and you will lose a chunk of the playerbase. The reason people left is because we have played the game over and over and over.

Taking away the number one incentive of playing in pvp gameplay- progress in elo - will not help to create a healthy environment.

You want people to grind? Make higher threat an accomplishment and not a laughing stock as of now.

Keeping a "threat progression" will keep two kinds of players who will do anything to win: Those who de-threat to get easier opposition and those who use every dirty trick to win.

A skill-rating system isn't meant to be progressive and promoting it as such just leads to a bunch of problems. This was one of the fundamental issues with the original TL1-15 system, making players believe TL15 was the end-goal.

 

2 hours ago, finaljustice said:

I can't remember if it was the entire time we had that old visual threat system, but we could also opt out of matches. You could decline op you didn't want to fight.

This did only exist early in APB. You would either be sent on an unopposed mission or receive a "Dispatch" against other players. In this case you'd see the threat level icon for each opponent. Naturally most players would dismiss dispatches against high threat teams, which lead to those players having to wait for opposition most of their play-session.

[neophobia 216]

On 10/20/2018 at 12:59 AM, Hexerin said:

Even if you hide threat level and remove district instance choice, it's still possible (and easy) to dethreat because it's an automated system.

go manual or nothing

[TheJellyGoo 343]

42 minutes ago, Revoluzzer said:

[...]

Keeping a "threat progression" will keep two kinds of players who will do anything to win: Those who de-threat to get easier opposition and those who use every dirty trick to win.

A skill-rating system isn't meant to be progressive and promoting it as such just leads to a bunch of problems. This was one of the fundamental issues with the original TL1-15 system, making players believe TL15 was the end-goal.

[...]

No system is perfect especially when there will always be people trying to undermine it.

Dethreating is not an excuse to throw a skill-system out of a window it simply needs to be supervised and sanctioned.

Tryharding is just something that comes with gaming and has nothing to do with threat in itself but a players character/mindset (some want easy times even in singleplayer games).

Ultimately a question of balancing the features of the game. If there are tools that support cheap plays and dirty tricks that's the fault of a games balancing.

Also you seem to gladly forget or ignore the actual main playerbase (the third kind apart from those two groups), those who just play the game by the rules.

And it can very well be a personal goal to progress in a games elo and improve yourself - thats in the freedom of the system.

Stay where you are and play casually or work to climb. The system is there to provide you with the fitting opposition.

No fundamental issue with a system when it's the players choice to decide what to do in it's set frame. 

 

[Elara 0]

I stumbled back into this game. If you want to chat about threat I'm sure we can have a discussion  =]

[LilyV3 323]

The cross district MM idea is quite old, and yes it is the only optimised solution we can get when it comes to the possible pool of players to choose from.

It also automatically solves solutions of people dethreating and stomping lowies on districts they shouldn't be, As soon as they threta up again they get mached with proper opponenets again.

 

One thing we still need to talk about is how threat is defined. This one seems to still leave a lot of inaccuracy making a lot people being labelled wrong. Yet this is also affected by bad matchups and dethreaters. So maybe this is worth a look after the district crossing MM is done and stuff has settled for like 1 or 2 month to see how threat definition is working when better and proper matchups happen.

 

But please, even with shifting DO NOT remove instance choice, people should still manually be able to choose and meet in the same district, thats vital for non Mission gameplay related Events like racing, meeting, fooling around, etc.

Edited October 23, 2018 by LilyV3

[sundere 25]

On 10/19/2018 at 10:12 PM, Salvick said:

 

I'd like to bring a question, I always wonder why South America is barely considered at all by any gaming company. Is not like there are so few players from this region as you could easily find yourself if you could gather these stats.

 

I do understand instead that it is related with the costs to keep a server up it implies, while I'd let in your hands the idea to evaluate the cost/benefits rate of such investment since a bunch of us have been loyal to this game for years spending investing above the average in our purchases, and a lot of South American players left the game or ended up playing less often when the DDoS mitigation and server relocation started in the G1 era.

 

And for those who always think of "Brazil" when someone says something about South America well, just take a look at the map to figure out we are way more than just Brazilians. Regards everyone.

Im from chile lol

[Revoluzzer 274]

10 hours ago, TheJellyGoo said:

Dethreating is not an excuse to throw a skill-system out of a window it simply needs to be supervised and sanctioned.

I don't think anyone really wants to throw out the skill-system, only the visual representation.

[Kewlin 692]

12 hours ago, Revoluzzer said:

Keeping a "threat progression" will keep two kinds of players who will do anything to win: Those who de-threat to get easier opposition and those who use every dirty trick to win.

A skill-rating system isn't meant to be progressive and promoting it as such just leads to a bunch of problems. This was one of the fundamental issues with the original TL1-15 system, making players believe TL15 was the end-goal.

 

Thanks for saying this, I'm always glad to see someone else who has a few posts who gets that the old system had major flaws and that promoting players to play to get a higher rating is a flawed system.

Edited October 23, 2018 by Kewlin

[Shui 225]

On 10/20/2018 at 12:45 AM, MattScott said:

 We eliminate visible threat levels, because it's not information you can act on.

So ... why should I play the game then?
Thats really not the right way to go.

I want to have a rank. A rank I and my enemies can see.

On 10/20/2018 at 1:55 AM, Hexerin said:

As @ky4 stated, the upgrade to UE3.5 and matchmaking/threat changes will draw many players back. Especially if @MattScott pushes an advertisement campaign about it.

We are not gone, only waiting for the EU.

On 10/20/2018 at 6:55 AM, NotZombieBiscuit said:

Inb4 this thread is filled with people asking for higher threat levels again without even realising how the threat system works.

Scared you wont reach it, scrub?

On 10/20/2018 at 7:32 AM, BXNNXD said:

how would you feel about dynamic threat levels - i.e. only a certain % of the population can be gold/silver/bronze/green at any given time (if someone upthreats to gold it means someone else dethreated to silver)

 

Sounds nice.
I would (srsly no joke here) make hundreds of accounts to make all these scrubs silver.

On 10/20/2018 at 10:43 AM, HighSociety said:

Maybe right but also keep in mind there are some people who just dethreat to play together with friends who are new to APB 

idgaf
They should get temp/perm banned.
If they want to play together the scrub can join the higher district and get shit on.

And not the veteran claps the scrubs and fks the playerbase.

On 10/22/2018 at 2:03 AM, mynd said:

If there ends up being just one game world, what is going to happen with duplicate names from different regions?  I've my mains on all the regions so I personally wouldn't be affected.

 

Honestly, I wish we could switch to a modern naming system where anyone could have whatever name they wanted, but be differentiated by #1234 etc.

Like in every other game.
The older character keeps the name, the newer one will get a name change.

With your "modern naming system" there would be many fakes ...

On 10/22/2018 at 8:55 AM, ExoticZ said:

Just go back to old matchmaking system from 2010/2011. Where you had levels of each threat.

Gold: 1-10

Silver: 1-10

etc...

 

It was not perfect but it is a lot better than the current system.

^this

It was nice that people were already scared from my rank.

Now Im just another gold until I clap them.

On 10/23/2018 at 5:40 AM, dett2 said:

Nice Idea.

But it makes more waiting time before each missions (like a loading , wait a match making).

That will be a stress.

Yep, I think the same.
But I am optimistic it wont be that bad.

[HighSociety 148]

3 minutes ago, Halelulia said:

idgaf
They should get temp/perm banned.
If they want to play together the scrub can join the higher district and get shit on.

And not the veteran claps the scrubs and fks the playerbase.

i'm against dethreating too...

but it makes no difference scrubs get shit on and leave or friend of scrub shits on another scrub who leaves, just to say it in ur words.

Playerbase fked in both cases.

[Shui 225]

4 minutes ago, HighSociety said:

i'm against dethreating too...

but it makes no difference scrubs get shit on and leave or friend of scrub shits on another scrub who leaves, just to say it in ur words.

Playerbase fked in both cases.

No, you already said it by yourself.

First case only 1 is affected (the scrub friend) and this guy can always go back to bronze district.

Second case mutliple are affected who could leave the game.

[HighSociety 148]

5 minutes ago, Halelulia said:

No, you already said it by yourself.

First case only 1 is affected (the scrub friend) and this guy can always go back to bronze district.

Second case mutliple are affected who could leave the game.

Well u are right here

[Queen of Love 452]

Maybe is not easy win, but should be easy have fun.

 

And fun means No dethreaters, No Trueogre/Volcano/Remote Detonator in bronze district.

Plus the performance should allow to have a time to kill near to official stats, not with a multiplier of x3 due to technical issues.

 

APB in the first years had some special feature ispired by freedom of gamers playing , like racing, stunts, explore Out of Bound map.

The g1 restrictions simply destroyed the marvellous toy box freedom that signed the unique originality of APB.

 

The phasing is a good choice. I hope it will give priority to technical performance of player. 

Hide the threat level could be another strong point. The most used insult in any district is "silver" plus various comments,  with a simply threat hiding we could remove 50% of district toxicity.

 

note: could you see the marvellous score record of "some" Goldies that get 30.0.0d alone vs 3 decent players and then suddenly in next match become a miserable 1.1.24d losing also vs the city pedestrians ? could be  better than BE for spot cheaters/dethreater/toxicity.

[SK4LP 62]

we gonna loose some sides of the MMO part ... (I would have preferred , new lvl and mission, for clan only, (a hardcore gamer sandbox))

What make some goin to bronze and dethreatin, wasn t the will to be a "king of the hill" ... but essentially the fact they want more fun ...

 

hope clan who play in an "east team" mod, will have a malus on new "team balance"

 

back to macro user and mouse wheel shooter ....