What if matchmaking is blind

Unknown

In most competitive games with matchmaking system, you don't get to see your opponent until the game begins. MPQ, obviously, doesn't work like that, but what if it did? We'll just say that all your opponents show up as ??? with no rating/team information and the underlying algorithm hasn't changed on who you get matched with, just that you can no longer see any information regarding the status of that guy. Retaliation will still show the opponent's information since otherwise it's kind of crazy to retaliate without knowing that information.

Pros:

There will be basically no advantage to collusion when you have no idea who your opponent is.

Shield hopping and Sentry bombing tactics will be less effective since you can't count on getting much value in a shield break, and that you should have more time before the attacks come in after a shield break because nobody can single you out. This will likely reduce the dependence on outspending your opponent. This might be considered a con to some players and D3.

No one will suddenly lose a ton of points from random attacks, especially ones made by the same person, since it is impossible to target any particular person outside of sheer luck. Retaliations are still fair game.

Cons:

You could get matched up with someone who you have no possible chance of winning. Perhaps players should be offered an option to surrender before making any moves for no health loss (but rating loss occurs) in this case.

High point shield breaks might not even be workable in this system when you get 3 guys worth 1 point.

Hitting your own alliance members will be generally bad in this system and will be unavoidable. One simple fix would be to make it impossible to be matched up against the same alliance, though this doesn't solve the case for extended alliance. Some players might view as a good thing, though.

I don't consider the fact that you could get a tough opponent worth very little points to be a drawback because that is equally likely to happen to everyone so while you get more bad games so does everyone else so that should balance itself out.

Unknown

I'd be game to try it.

Raekwen

Why go to that extent? Why not just remove the player's name/alliance info from the matchup screen, so you have no idea which team you are facing? I mean, I guess you could try to get around it by putting up a 165 Sentry/Daken combo so people know it's you, etc.. but what a pita.

Unknown

raek13 wrote:

Why go to that extent? Why not just remove the player's name/alliance info from the matchup screen, so you have no idea which team you are facing? I mean, I guess you could try to get around it by putting up a 165 Sentry/Daken combo so people know it's you, etc.. but what a pita.

Seeing the rating usually allows you to infer whether that guy is one of your own guys. Well, currently it doesn't work too well since that point you see is often out of date, but then that's just the same as hiding the information if we rely on the game's inaccurate display to hide the identity of the player. Also, this doesn't work in the case of very high point collusion circles. That is, suppose I got ABCD with 1500 points that are all shielded. Since there are very few opponents in that range, we can simply have A shield braek, and then BCD just look for the guy with 1500 points that has Sentry/Daken/Featured while A is unshielded, and that will almost certainly be A.

Raekwen

Fair enough, it wouldnt do enough at the high end. Perhaps hiding their score as well? But yes, the limited player pool at that level means only having to scroll through a few people to figure out who is who. I'm not sure I like the completely blind option though, there is a skill in choosing which teams to take on and which you know you cant. Especially with the consequence being health packs.

Unknown

raek13 wrote:

Fair enough, it wouldnt do enough at the high end. Perhaps hiding their score as well? But yes, the limited player pool at that level means only having to scroll through a few people to figure out who is who. I'm not sure I like the completely blind option though, there is a skill in choosing which teams to take on and which you know you cant. Esepecially with the consequence being health packs.

Yes the score should be hidden and I guess I wasn't clear on that, because otherwise the score alone is probably enough for you to figure out who your opponent is once you get high enough.

I thought about the roster diversity issue but do people really change their team to fight different opponents? It's just so hard to defend in this game, I very rarely change my team because you can't risk having other people see characters that are pushovers on defense, even if they have some kind of massive advantage in a particular matchup.

I realize you can easily end up in a terrible matchup which is why I suggest the ability to surrender with no health loss if you didn't make a single move. I'd think having such scenario possible would encourage more roster diversity. Right now if you're running some weird setup, everyone can see it and figure out who to bring to counter if they want to. For example let's say you go with OBW/The Hood/featured. This is a team that will lose very badly to Daken, but might be quite good against a team of high AP move guys. But currently since you can see this, you would never bring say Thor/featured/BP against that, so you're not getting much value out of a rather dangerous team. You'd expect Magneto and Daken to eat your team for breakfast while the teams you'd match up well will just skip you, so you wouldn't take such a risk in the first place.

Unknown

It'd be an interesting tournament idea, perhaps an elite tourney?
Other pros:
Discourages retreat, extra motivation to fight it out.

Cons:
At lower levels players would hit a wall, where they would just be retreating 10 matches to get one playable one, where they might then get destroyed due to low health.

Unknown

I dunno what games don't allow you to see your opponents before a match begins, but most of the competitive games I play fully allow you to.

Unknown

daibar wrote:

It'd be an interesting tournament idea, perhaps an elite tourney?
Other pros:
Discourages retreat, extra motivation to fight it out.

Cons:
At lower levels players would hit a wall, where they would just be retreating 10 matches to get one playable one, where they might then get destroyed due to low health.

If this is a new event type then I'm not opposed to more radical ideas like every character heals to 100% after every fight. In such a system, it wouldn't be that advantageous to try to play as much as you can because as your score gets to the top, your retaliation gives away your identity/rating, which is not what you want.

Unknown

fidsah wrote:

I dunno what games don't allow you to see your opponents before a match begins, but most of the competitive games I play fully allow you to.

Perhaps I'm not being clear. What I mean is most games do not allow you to see the identity of your opponent and then decide if you want to play them or not in a matchmaking system. By the time the identity of your opponent is known, your only choice is to surrender or keep fighting. If you queue up a game in LoL and you see your opponents are all Korean gaming gods, you don't get to back out of that fight without taking a loss.

Raekwen

I guess I wasnt just concerned with the health penalty, but the points penalty as well. A little bad luck and you can be 100 points down, which isn't very encouraging. While I, like most people, spend way too much ISO skipping, being able to know what I'm getting myself into before I choose to enter a match is something I'm loathe to give up. Alliance mates aside, I couldn't care less who I am attacking though, I rarely look at names.

Unknown

What if it allows you to see just the avatars of the opposing team? No levels, points or identity.

Or, another idea (which unfortunately is rather server intensive) - you can't play the same opponent more than once per tournament.

Nemek

You know, I was actually thinking about this fairly recently. I've played a TON of Starcraft 2 over the last couple of years and I've generally liked the the matchmaking system in how it's blind and have wondered about how it would play out in the MPQ system.

I think the main thing that would need to be addressed before such a system is put into place is the effectiveness of tanking, though. It would put a serious hurt on enjoyment when low-level teams queue up for a match and find themselves against triple maxed 3*s. Especially with no more healing, bad luck would put a stop to any sort of run immediately.

I certainly wouldn't be opposed to trying it out!

Unknown

I'm quite baffled. Really why not go all the way and skip the heroes and the match3 altogether just pick one of 3 buttons labeled rock, paper, scissors and get on with it?

Are we seriously considering removal of the really little remaining strategic elements of this stale and blank game? Just attack away on unknown team selecting mine on a whim/ wild guess instead of what fits? "Picking" the opponent without looking at roster what was one of the greatest improvements to the game?

And all for what? Because we have a small group surrounded with suspect? How about curing the root cause in some relevant way? Say mass ignoring them, putting them in a mental quarantine in and out of game. If DU colludes with them and refuses actual sandboxing, this community could do the same. IF will actually exists and is wide to deal with this in the first place. Or just treat it at its deserved face value: ignore its existence for good.


Another alternative would be to create Leagues. For simplicity it could be based on alliances, and even use the same interface: a commander could add other alliances just without limit and kick them. And League-only events could be possible. Allowing the community to split itself to small groups to form small competitive events. Or large groups excluding whoever considered not welcome.

Unknown

Roster diveristy is not possible while the identity of the opponent is known. Let's say there are only 3 characters in MPQ: Thor, Hood, and Daken, and they follow a strict triangle inequality of Thor > Daken > Hood > Thor. So there should be plenty of choices like this, no? No, because you can see who your opponent is. If you see Thor, you use your Hood, and if you don't have Hood, you just skip that guy. Let's say featured + OBW + Hood is very strong against featured + Fury + Thor since the latter are strong character that require a lot of AP, and Fury + Thor seems like it'd be a very good team, so is featured + OBW + Hood a good team? No, because whoever is running Fury + Thor will notice that his characters match up poorly against OBW + Hood and just skip you or sub someone else, while your team is very vulnerable to a whole mess of additional characters for having such low total HP pool.

Roster diversity is when you're cleaning up opposition with Fury + Thor and got humbled by an unexpected OBW + Hood, and then you have to think maybe you shouldn't just put the two characters with the biggest AP abilities in the same team. This simply cannot happen in the current game unless you had some kind of mental lapse and forgot OBW + Hood are both strong versus high AP move guys.

For the health issue, one idea I had is just eliminate loss of health for retreating in any PvP events under this system. So you get a bad matchup that doesn't look remotely winnable? Make like 2 moves and see if a miracle happens and then quit. You still lose the PvP rating of course. Yes you could lose more PvP rating while climbing, but this affects everyone that's as strong as you. You should also have less sudden drastic drop in rating when you go over a certain threshold to counterbalance this.

Raekwen

The rating loss would only widen the gap between teams with a more diverse roster and those building up. For those who have the chars available, their "retreat rate" would be significantly less than, say, a building 2* roster who gets unlucky in the randomness. So it wouldn't be affecting everyone evenly.

Edit: I just noticed you wrote "everyone as strong as you." While I used an individual example, the same holds true with groups of people at the same level.

Unknown

raek13 wrote:

Why go to that extent? Why not just remove the player's name/alliance info from the matchup screen, so you have no idea which team you are facing? I mean, I guess you could try to get around it by putting up a 165 Sentry/Daken combo so people know it's you, etc.. but what a pita.

I would agree with this way but not being able to see team / levels/ points would be a horrible idea. There is strategy in knowing who you are going up against. If I see a team of thor sentry and lazy cap I would maybe want to bring hood in to help slow them down since they are already slow to begin with. If I see a low hp high damage team though, maybe i would swap hood out for daken to start putting out a ton of damage. As it is, I know a lot of guys (including me) just end up running the exact same team the whole pvp but still, I think having blind match ups would just be too frustrating. They would also have to stop attacking your own alliance members. (alt alliances are fair game though, RIP swaping.)

Really though, the main reason this would be a horrible idea is the fact that at the top of the leaderboard there are far too many 1-8 point matches. All this would do would make a super retal war of guys hitting you with super juicy retals where you end up losing 30-40 points for attacking them. D3 would end up losing money because what's the point of shield hopping if you can only get 20 points more out of every two match hop?

Unknown

An excellent idea popped up recently in another thread. We could have continuous LR-like PVPs (2h length), each imposing random or semirandom buffs and debuffs on all the characters. (in original idea buffing 3-3 random ** and *** characters).

Roster diversity? Yes please. make up something for this short period from what you have and meet what others come up with. Like sealed in MtG.

And the idea can be easily enhanced further. Like that thing they added to twist Duels with the world cards. Other global effects could be imposed like improving/gimping some colors, adding or sinking AP every turn... switch AP, switch characters, ...

Like another excellent game, Spectromancer. That is a very simple setup, but in the "campaign" mode has more like special things that twist the game.

Again I'm back to the usual depression point, so much fun could be created from this game for so many people with really small effort if that ever was the goal just for a small percent. And most would provide more profit too, not less.

Unknown

Being able to switch your team especially after you know what your opponent's team is what eliminates diversity. To use MTG, if you can see your opponent is indeed playing a red burn deck and you get to change your deck (not just sideboard) it's pretty trivial to have a deck that's extremely strong against burn spells and win the game most of the time. That's not diversity. It just means you have a deck/team that's optimal against every deck/team you're expected to see. I was reading one of the events and a guy sideboarded a bunch of persistent life gain cards which is rarely used because he thinks there will be a lot of burn decks, and he guessed correctly and persistent life gain cards eat burn spells for breakfast but isn't exactly useful against anything else. That's diversity for using cards that people normally wouldn't sideboard, because his opponent is stuck with a certain overall strategy (burn spells) that cannot deal with his otherwise weak cards.

People have one strong team they roll out becuase it's not like you can roll out Hood + OBW and expect anyone to actually attack you with high AP move guys. They'll see that this matchup is very bad and either switch their team or just skip you. The attack has to be blind for gambles like running OBW + Hood to even have a chance to payoff. Another example would be Daken + Hulk. Hulk is not really a top tier character, and if people can see Hulk + Daken it's quite clear that you've an anti strike tile team and they can deal with it, so you would never get the defensive matchups you want, and of course this isn't a particularly strong team fighting anyone else so you end up with just a weaker team compared to say, Thor + Daken. But if the enemy can't see your characters until the fight starts, then there are some cases where Hulk + Daken is better than Thor + Daken, even though Thor is a significantly stronger character overall.

I did say there's going to be problem with shield breaks but in this system it'd be much harder to get the such high points that makes matchups difficult to find in the first place, because you can't select your targets. Yes this reduces the effectiveness of spending, but even if D3 is totally greedy, we know historically shields do not account for a significant portion of their revenue, so even if shield revenue goes down for being less effective, having a better format can easily increase revenue in other areas.

Unknown

This would be fun to try as a one off or elite tournament but I would kind of hate if it became the new normal.

Cragger

This game really only became fun once I learned of the existence of the "skip" button. (a statement which may make some dev's head's spin) Most other games give you no option in opponents, and I assumed that the three nodes were the options. Once I was able to skip around and, in effect, peruse effective rosters versus ineffective ones, the game became an incredibly rewarding puzzle which I have had quite a lot of fun solving. If it went away, so would I.

You suggestion, while valid in most of it's points, really only addresses the symptoms and not the underlying problems. I will let the archive of internet-complaints stand on its own as to the symptoms; the game designers need to address the underlying problems.