MMR and Tanking?

Unknown

Hi, been lurking for a while, playing since the beginning but not really posting until now. I've gotten decently far, spent a bit of money on the game, having fun but also getting tot he point where I'm trying to be better at the tourneys.

Seems like a relatively good and knowledgeable community here, so I figured I'd ask a few questions.

1. How does MMR work? What does it affect in tourneys exactly?
2. What is tanking, how does it work, what's the use? I'm assuming it involves putting a weak team out to deliberately lose a lot, and it lowers your MMR rating, but to what end?

I did a search on 'MMR' but couldn't find anything too clear, so I'm hoping you all could help. Thanks in advance!

Unknown

1. Your Match Making Rating affects which opponents will come up for you as options to fight in pvp events (weekly/weekend tournaments, lightning rounds, shield training). We don't know how it's calculated but lets say in pvp you've entered 100 battles and won 95 of them. If another player has done the same then the two of you will have similar mmr's and will more than likely see each other as opponents. A bit of an over simplification but I think it makes the point.

2. You got it. One problem with MMR is it doesn't take your actual roster in to account, just your performance. So if you've been grinding in the Shield Training with a bunch of 1* characters and increasing you mmr you may start seeing teams filled with 2*'s or beyond just because they've done the same as you performance-wise.

MMR hell as DumDumDugan calls it is a problem for highly rated players because the only opponents they'll see are super teams with max level Ragnaroks, Spidermans and Magnetos so tanking with low characters can lower you rating by somehow (again we don't know the formula) skewing your wins/losses. The same logic applies to players are all levels, especially those that got ahead of themselves by grinding/boosting/whatever.


If I've said something that is incorrect rest assured someone will be by shortly to correct me

Unknown

The MMR is probably just a persistent ELO rating. You're pretty much wasting your time trying to tank those scores because it's a proven system that works and is very temper-proof unless you start purposely losing every game you play, but even then it would take around 10 games before the it gets corrected again.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

The MMR is probably just a persistent ELO rating. You're pretty much wasting your time trying to tank those scores because it's a proven system that works and is very temper-proof unless you start purposely losing every game you play, but even then it would take around 10 games before the it gets corrected again.

Except, of course, that it does work, and it takes considerably more than 10 games for it to "fix" itself. In my experience it takes closer to 100 games -- two full, hard played tournaments.

Note that they are continuing to tweak the rating system to reduce the effect of this. And, as you've said repeatedly yourself, this game does not work with ELO well. The AI is too dumb.

Unknown

Zathrus wrote:

In my experience it takes closer to 100 games -- two full, hard played tournaments.

Anyone who disagrees with this either hasn't done it long enough or it just flat out doing it incorrectly.

Unknown

As someone who has been able to keep playing because of tanking, it IS effective (at least for a period of time), and not a waste of time. I started playing the game at launch, and by the time the really hardcore players were starting to max out their teams, my MMR was up to the point where that's nearly all I was seeing. If I hadn't found out about tanking, I would have had a much harder time winning the later tournements I did, and probably would have burnt out frustrated trying to remain competitive against teams that quite frankly outclassed me. Without tanking, you will hit a progression wall, where you'll either need to burn tons of ISO on boosts (meaning you'll progress slower cause you can't level your characters as fast) to try and remain competative, or you'll fight team unboosted, probably win but with serious injury, and not be able to play as much, slowing your progression, and causing lots of frustration. The system needs to be fixed, but unfortunately there is no magic bullet. Tanking is a least a band-aid.

Unknown

Kyosokun wrote:

The system needs to be fixed, but unfortunately there is no magic bullet. Tanking is a least a band-aid.

Exactly, because while I feel horrible for doing it I'm not going to stop.

EDIT: And bugpop is right for calling it shenanigans.

Unknown

Does retreating count as a loss or do you actually have to get your characters downed?

Unknown

ApolloAndy wrote:

Does retreating count as a loss or do you actually have to get your characters downed?

Not sure, but why do you ask?

Unknown

Probably because you can lose games quickly if retreating count as a loss. Just take 3 level 1 guys and attack someone and retreat, yield, and then repeat it 3 times, and then wait 10 minutes to do it again (or use even more fodder characters).

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Probably because you can lose games quickly if retreating count as a loss. Just take 3 level 1 guys and attack someone and retreat, yield, and then repeat it 3 times, and then wait 10 minutes to do it again (or use even more fodder characters).

I figure you're right,

Apollo, if that's the reason you asked I would say it's not worth the effort on your part. It's far easier to put in a bunch of low level guys, retreat, yield (no idea if this makes a difference) and then just let the losses pile up.

Just think about how often we're all usually attached during a tourney and then imagine how much worse it would be if your team sucked... the losses add up pretty quick.

Unknown

The guy asked what tanking is and so far no one has answered it...I read on another post that someone reached 3000 in the shield rating then just 'put up his magman **** team'. But how does the system determine which characters your opponent fights when you just defend??

Unknown

Whichever team you last attacked with is the team that will defend when opponents attack you.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

The MMR is probably just a persistent ELO rating. You're pretty much wasting your time trying to tank those scores because it's a proven system that works and is very temper-proof unless you start purposely losing every game you play, but even then it would take around 10 games before the it gets corrected again.

Are you kidding or deliberately $@#$@#? Yes, the Elo system is something that is working. It was invented for the chess environment, and its specific setup. A mandatory element of it that you play the games, all of them. Having full control.

Thinking that it works all the same fine when you play half the games for sure win against a dumb UI plus all the attackers' advantages (leaving ~5% chance to losing to bad luck). And losing another half that the same dumb UI plays on your behalf -- is more than nuts. A coin toss system could provide results more fair.

It would be a good and proved system if the players were fighting each other directly, and having equal chance to boosts, starting round, etc.

Can you explain how it got "proven" for this setup?

Unknown

So let me get this right. If I want to have a better distribution of beatable teams and fewer "OH MY GOD! HOW MUCH MONEY HAVE YOU SPENT!?" teams all I have to do is take the worst team I have, enter a tournament, lose, and then just watch the losses stack up? And that will improve the matches I get when playing a tourney I actually care about?

Unknown

Voxil wrote:

So let me get this right. If I want to have a better distribution of beatable teams and fewer "OH MY GOD! HOW MUCH MONEY HAVE YOU SPENT!?" teams all I have to do is take the worst team I have, enter a tournament, lose, and then just watch the losses stack up? And that will improve the matches I get when playing a tourney I actually care about?

for now, yes

Unknown

Voxil wrote:

So let me get this right. If I want to have a better distribution of beatable teams and fewer "OH MY GOD! HOW MUCH MONEY HAVE YOU SPENT!?" teams all I have to do is take the worst team I have, enter a tournament, lose, and then just watch the losses stack up? And that will improve the matches I get when playing a tourney I actually care about?

Yes, it appear to be the case as awful as it sounds. But we keep shouting until someone gets tired enough to make it better.

Seems first obstacle is to make devs believe the problem exists alright in the system and depart from the "theory" of a "proven" system for a completely different arena.

As I wrote before Elo made the system for a level game where two equally skilled players have equal chance to win. And figured to correlate "skill" he measured in points to the statistics of the match result. It is just completely worthless for a game where the outcome is determined by who is attacker and who is defender. If that gets accepted as base there might be a second step. Elsewhere we already heard on upcoming change to some pairing hell cases, what means it's not a laziness/reluctance to work issue, but a philosophical one.

Unknown

What pasa_ said, pretty much. Also, how well you'll do also depends on what team you're fielding, which is part of why the tanking strategy works so much better than it ought to that it becomes the dominant strategy. A 1500-MMR player with all lvl 100 3*s is going to beat a 1500-MMR player with level 1 starters, even if the former is played by an AI.

It's not -completely- broken, if that makes you feel any better. If you tank, you lose points on the ladder even as your MMR is going down (I'm not 100% sure whether they're the same thing), so if you tank for several hours, you invariably have to spend a fair bit of time rebuilding what you lost, which runs your MMR back up somewhat until you're up against heavy hitters again. You gain "ladder points" faster than your MMR recovers (I think), at least, so it's still a net gain; it's just not as game-breakingly gainful as it might have been.

It's still ultimately worth fixing, however, according to the general consensus around here.

Demiurge_Will

We're making and have recently made changes to matchmaking & the rating system, a couple of which are aimed at making tanking less important, less appealing, or less effective. (One thing we did recently is shift the matchmaking search window to give more weight to your event rating relative to your hidden persistent rating.) I'm not sure that we can ever totally eliminate manipulating your rating to gain an advantage - it's an issue in every sport with a rating system, even ones without asynchronous play and shields and all the other things that make rating in our game weirder than it is in, say, chess. But yeah, we hear you, it's a quirky way to get ahead and it can be less effective than it is now.

We move slowly with this stuff because it's often very hard to predict what will happen with a rating/matchmaking system before you see it in action with a real player population, so we make small changes and watch for a bit before making another change, but you can expect more changes designed to make this better in the future.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

We're making and have recently made changes to matchmaking & the rating system, a couple of which are aimed at making tanking less important, less appealing, or less effective. (One thing we did recently is shift the matchmaking search window to give more weight to your event rating relative to your hidden persistent rating.) I'm not sure that we can ever totally eliminate manipulating your rating to gain an advantage - it's an issue in every sport with a rating system, even ones without asynchronous play and shields and all the other things that make rating in our game weirder than it is in, say, chess. But yeah, we hear you, it's a quirky way to get ahead and it can be less effective than it is now.

We move slowly with this stuff because it's often very hard to predict what will happen with a rating/matchmaking system before you see it in action with a real player population, so we make small changes and watch for a bit before making another change, but you can expect more changes designed to make this better in the future.

It's very odd to me to see a (I assume male) with the xxxxxx-xxxxx last name. Maybe it's a weird city people thing.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

We're making and have recently made changes to matchmaking & the rating system, a couple of which are aimed at making tanking less important, less appealing, or less effective. (One thing we did recently is shift the matchmaking search window to give more weight to your event rating relative to your hidden persistent rating.) I'm not sure that we can ever totally eliminate manipulating your rating to gain an advantage - it's an issue in every sport with a rating system, even ones without asynchronous play and shields and all the other things that make rating in our game weirder than it is in, say, chess. But yeah, we hear you, it's a quirky way to get ahead and it can be less effective than it is now.

We move slowly with this stuff because it's often very hard to predict what will happen with a rating/matchmaking system before you see it in action with a real player population, so we make small changes and watch for a bit before making another change, but you can expect more changes designed to make this better in the future.

Why does it seem that there could be as many as 30 opponents to choose from and at other times, as few at 6?