Tanking Solution: Make MMR desirable

Unknown

I have been browsing these forums and learning a lot of tidbits about the game, but the one that I find the most ridiculous is tanking. If there is an advantage to losing matches there is something wrong with the game design. If a big part of being successful in the high end of the game involves intentionally losing, something needs to be changed.

As I see it, the problem boils down to the fact that having high MMR gives you harder matchups, but you get no benefit. So people tank to get easier matchups but their rewards are completely unchanged. There needs to be SOMETHING that you get for having high MMR. If you fight harder opponents you should get better rewards. If you are still losing battles, you can tank and get to fight easier people, but it should be a dilemma (I could do this and get easier matchups, but it would cost me _____).

I have a few ideas of what high MMR could get you.

1. ISO8 multiplier. Pretty analogous to exp in RPGs. The harder monsters are always worth more

2. Better brackets. Right now, everyone has the same brackets. Hollowpoint Kiss (the current PVP event) has first place getting invisible woman. Maybe the higher brackets get that prize at 1-2 place, or 1-3 place. Maybe the psylocke reward starts at 75 instead of 50. Maybe instead of getting 3000 iso8 in the 2-5 slot, you get 5000. Maybe you could even have a new reward at the top, at some point intead of 1-3 getting blue invisible woman, it changes to 2-4 getting that and first place getting blue and green. These are just a few examples, but it seems like it should be easy to scale things up as your MMR goes up and you are being put into harder brackets.

3. Make it so you lose less points in PVP tournaments for losses when you have higher MMR. This should make the higher progression rewards attainable.

Again, these are just a few ideas I have, but the main point is to make MMR something you want. There is a reward for having it and people will want it, so they won't want to tank anymore. Hell, it could even be a stat somewhere on your profile.

Unknown

You make a good point (set of points).

If there was some way to tie MMR to an ELO style rating (chess ranking system), and then use ELO ratings to determine bracketing for PvP/PvE events that would make a lot more sense. Then tying the higher brackets to better prizes would make more sense.

Having better prizes for higher ELO brackets would make the system much harder to exploit.

Unknown

If you've the equivalent of an awesome bracket, all that does is make people in the not-awesome bracketfeel like second class citizens.

Given that the last place of a guy in the 'awesome bracket' is likely a stronger player than the first place of the 'not awesome bracket' assuming the MMR is actually correct (and it usually is, which is why people tank because you can't reliably fend off guys equally as strong as you), that also makes the reward structure rather difficult.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

If you've the equivalent of an awesome bracket, all that does is make people in the not-awesome bracketfeel like second class citizens.

I could see that being a problem if there were just 2 brackets, awesome and regular. But I was thinking of something much more gradual. Maybe there are 20 different levels. Each move up is fairly small, but all of them together would be significant. I also think it would be cool if you could see the other brackets, show me my bracket and the one above me and the one below me. Small changes could easily be motivating, for example, right now I'm #72 in the hollowpoint kiss tourney and I want to get 50 for the psylocke cover. Probably won't happen. But if I could see that in the next bracket up I would only need #60 I would wish I was there. Similarly, there was a past tournament where I was trying to stay in the 2-5 slot. If I could see that in the next bracket I would only need to be #6 instead of #5, it would be nice to have that breathing room.

Unknown

Hausdorff wrote:

Again, these are just a few ideas I have, but the main point is to make MMR something you want. There is a reward for having it and people will want it, so they won't want to tank anymore. Hell, it could even be a stat somewhere on your profile.

Maybe it can be something even simpler. Weird idea upcoming.

Make MMR equivalent to score in PvP. In each event you start out with zero and get matched against players who are roughly in your score range, scoring rules stay the same. That's an utter smackfest at the start until the stronger players move up ahead, then it automatically balances out. Eliminates tanking, you want a high score to win, intentionally finishing with a low score won't have any benefit for future events.

There's of course a downside to this approach, weak rosters will no longer be able to get anywhere close to good placements, ruining their chance at getting placement and progression rewards. To balance this out, remove all progression rewards. Introduce a third currency instead, "fame" for lack of better names. At the end of each PvP event, your score gets added to your "fame". Use this "fame" to buy special offers that serve as replacement for progression rewards (e.g. cheap covers of fixed 1* heroes like Black Widow, various boosts, moderately expensive special tokens, very expensive once per day deals of the 2* - 4* hero covers formerly bound to progression). Newer players should be able to afford the cheap covers just by winning a fight or two, helping them to fare better in future events. Strong players should be able to buy an expensive rare cover or two after placing close to the top. All players should be able to save up their "fame" for rewards more to their liking in future events.

Unknown

Let's take any two difficulty bracket in any such system. Assuming the bracket places the players appropriately, let's say bracket A is higher than bracket B.

Then, by definition, the last place player of bracket A is stronger than the first place player of bracket B.

So for the rewards to work out, the prize for last place in bracket A has to be equal to greater than the first place prize of bracket B. Otherwise the last player of bracket A will just try to lose more to get to the lesser bracket where he will be the best player.

This is obviously not a workable model since you'd have the top bracket's last place prize would be an IW cover + 3 3*s at this rate.

djpt05

Why not just get rid of the notion of tanking?

Your MMR can only go up (more challenging opponents) based on how well you perform and just stay nuetral if you show evidence of tanking?

Also I am only talking about PvP MMR I am not refering to scaling in PvE

Dormammu

djpt05 wrote:

Why not just get rid of the notion of tanking?

Your MMR can only go up (more challenging opponents) based on how well you perform and just stay nuetral if you show evidence of tanking?

This wouldn't work either. Suppose you reach a high tier of MMR and can't win a match, how will your MMR lessen if all you do is lose because you're fighting superior opponents? How will the game know if you are tanking or not? Excessive retreating might be easier to track, but I'm not sure about consistently losing (either on defense or offense).

Unknown

Dormammu wrote:

djpt05 wrote:

Why not just get rid of the notion of tanking?

Your MMR can only go up (more challenging opponents) based on how well you perform and just stay nuetral if you show evidence of tanking?

This wouldn't work either. Suppose you reach a high tier of MMR and can't win a match, how will your MMR lessen if all you do is lose because you're fighting superior opponents? How will the game know if you are tanking or not? Excessive retreating might be easier to track, but I'm not sure about consistently losing (either on defense or offense).

Actually if your MMR never goes down then eventually other people would pass you up if you can never win a match. That might not be a bad idea but I'd think at some point you got to reset the number because otherwise people at the top will eventually have some ridiculous number equivalent for that number, which means any new guys will take forever to get there even if they're as strong as the top players. So if you do that, periodically you need to say just halve everyone's MMR rating, to prevent the gap from becoming too big.

Edit: Here's my proposal of a system. We know MMR is probably similar to your rating, e.g you win games it goes up, and if you lose it goes down, so it can be represented as a number. Let's say 1000 is the highest MMR you can currently achieve.

Now, we change it so you can't lose MMR rating. So if you have 1000 it stays at 1000 and you can't lower it. The only way to get easier matchup is wait, since other people will eventually get more MMR rating for winning so the easier guys will eventually have more MMR rating while the guys who are at 1000 eventually accumulate more. Note that you still have an incentive to play and accumulate MMR simply because otherwise you can't get PvP rating points.

At the end of every major event, the MMR is normalized so that whoever achieved the highest MMR is now at 1000. That is, if the top guy has a MMR of 2000, then everyone's MMR is halved. This means if you somehow got too high of MMR it should only take sitting out one tournament to fix.

firethorne

The other player isn't actually competing. You're only fighting an AI controlled version of their roster. So, why use MMR at all?

Why not just offer three teams, based on your characters' levels. One slightly under your level, offering less points for a win, one team on par with you, and one that is higher than your team, but offering more points.

Unknown

firethorne wrote:

The other player isn't actually competing. You're only fighting an AI controlled version of their roster. So, why use MMR at all?

Why not just offer three teams, based on your characters' levels. One slightly under your level, offering less points for a win, one team on par with you, and one that is higher than your team, but offering more points.

Simple - I like it.

Unknown

I thought about this some more and here's what I noticed. Up to a certain point, increasing MMR correleates strongly with increasing PvP rating. That is, although your opponents are stronger, as you do better in PvP (indicated by a higher MMR) you'll still usually end up with better PvP rating. But after a certain point, rather than having PvP rating plateau relative to your MMR, it actually plummets as you get matched up with incredibly difficult opponents who are impossible to sneak ahead.

So what should happen is people in the highest MMR rating should have a bonus to iso 8 gained during PvP matches and maybe even a chance to get HP when their PvP rating is below a certain number (say, 900, because anyone with a top MMR rating should be more than capable of hitting that if they tanked) to account for this discrepency.

Now what's stopping people from having a MMR from purposely losing to get more iso 8? Well if you purposely lose, your MMR will tank and you'd no longer have that bonus to begin with. So you'd still have to try to win as much as you can to get this bonus.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I thought about this some more and here's what I noticed. Up to a certain point, increasing MMR correleates strongly with increasing PvP rating. That is, although your opponents are stronger, as you do better in PvP (indicated by a higher MMR) you'll still usually end up with better PvP rating. But after a certain point, rather than having PvP rating plateau relative to your MMR, it actually plummets as you get matched up with incredibly difficult opponents who are impossible to sneak ahead.

So what should happen is people in the highest MMR rating should have a bonus to iso 8 gained during PvP matches and maybe even a chance to get HP when their PvP rating is below a certain number (say, 900, because anyone with a top MMR rating should be more than capable of hitting that if they tanked) to account for this discrepency.

Now what's stopping people from having a MMR from purposely losing to get more iso 8? Well if you purposely lose, your MMR will tank and you'd no longer have that bonus to begin with. So you'd still have to try to win as much as you can to get this bonus.

But it's not just about getting more ISO. I would have thought it was more about winning an event, as currently that is the only reliable way of getting a cover you want.

Unknown

I thought I'd add my voice to a very important topic. I love this game, but not the MMR-management subgame. I hate having to deliberately lose in order to stay competitive. As was said in the original post, and needs saying again, this is a bad design flaw. It'd be nice to hear from D3 about whether they're working on a fix.

_RiO_

Susra wrote:

I thought I'd add my voice to a very important topic. I love this game, but not the MMR-management subgame. I hate having to deliberately lose in order to stay competitive. As was said in the original post, and needs saying again, this is a bad design flaw. It'd be nice to hear from D3 about whether they're working on a fix.

With the shield and boost mechanics, the broken MMR contributes to generating income.
So whatever forthcoming fix there may be, there will be two certainties. The first is that it will be heralded as the best thing since sliced bread and we will have a clique of suckups to sing its praises. The second is that we will find a few subtle and deliberate failings attached to it that are designed so as to retain the status quo.

[...]
No wait; three certainties. Three.
The 'fix' will also contain an additional monetization hook.

Unknown

I don't understand why the game needs MMR at all. I get that it's about dynamically adjusting the difficulty of pvp, but it takes control away from the players, which is generally undesirable.

If I was dictator-for-life at d3, here's what I would do:

-Eliminate MMR tracking.
-Brackets would once again be based on the time you joined an event
-No skip tax.
-The points awarded for each match would be determined by the ratio of your opponents' average level vs. your team's average level. In other words, you'd get more points for beating teams stronger than your own. It would have nothing to do with how many points your opponent had earned during the event!

As I see it, this system would have several advantages. (1) It would give players more control to determine the difficulty of their gaming experience for themselves. If you want to beat up on 1-star teams with your 3-stars, you can, but you won't get much for it (2) At the same time, it would give players an incentive to pick the hardest matches they think they can still win, to advance up the leaderboards faster. (3) It might also increase PVP diversity-- if you have a maxed-out level 141 team it would be harder to earn points, but you could still earn points quickly by using your less-leveled backup team. (4) It would eliminate the frustration of being attacked by everyone all at once when you're near the top.

I'm sure others have suggested similar things. Does this idea have a fatal flaw I'm not seeing? (Besides making those nasty shields less necessary )

Unknown

I agree with you. The flaw probably is that if you get different (easier) matches for your back-up team, how would the system determine your defensive team then? The strongest? The weakest? If it's the strongest, you lose more points to others, if it's the weakest, a new kind of tanking is born (play your last match of the day with a sucky team so that people won't bother attacking you).

I'd very much appreciate it if that MMR issue got fixed. With extreme difficulty I've worked my way up past #200 in Starfall (and otherwise I always score Top 50 or better, recently I've frequently finished Top 20 while before the MMR change I regularly made the Top 10 and even won a few events) because pretty much all the matches I get are absurdly hard, at least half of them containing two level 141 characters (and my own highest level is 100). I mean, how am I supposed to win anything that way? And believe me, I've tried...

MaskedMan

Seems to me the solution is to make the starting MMR for the event the lowest MMR you can ever achieve. Then losing at the beginning of an even would hurt your season totals and provide no benefit. Once you get up higher however and get beat you still go down as normal (as long as it isn't lower than starting MMR).

Seems pretty simple, possibly I don't understand the complexities.

atomzed

mmr is mainly there for match making. Take away the match making algorithm, then the 1* and 2* players will have difficulty.

Having said that, the unintended consequence is that people want to lose to keep MMR low.

My simple solution is to keep each pvp MMR distinct. Right now, mmr is accumulative. Your wins in sims, Trial by combat, Magnetic mayhem all adds up.

If we keep the mmr for each pvp distinct, and reset the mmr every time a new pvp starts, then it's virtually impossible to tank. You need to score points, you can't tank. (This solution is similar to the suggestion by phantron)

Unknown

I'll start with a proposal:
Change the MMR lost in an active battle based on how close you came. I think if you manage to KO 2 of the enemies, and lose to the remaining hero, your MMR reduction should be 1/3 of what it is now. If you KO 1 before losing, your MMR reduction should be 2/3. Encourage people to try tough fights and if they come close, give them a little bit less of a penalty, while still adjusting their targeting brackets.

----
We believe that MMR takes into account:
1. Roster strength.
2. Past performance in previous tournaments.
3. Win/loss ratio.

2. Has been shown anecdotally, by people who skipped one tournament or went on vacation and then found themselves in a much easier bracket.
3. Has been shown by anyone's who tried tanking.

So what problems were Demiurge trying to solve by introducing a MMR system that depends on more than just your current MMR?
A. Making it fair and desirable for lower ranked players to try to compete and improve.
B. Making it so people don't hit a wall.
C. If people take a break from the game, it rewards them by making it easier when they come back.
The system HAS improved since early days, despite the flaws it has now.

The problem really seems to be in the win/loss ratio aspect. When you get to tough matches, Demiurge expects you to try and lose most of the time. If you win the match, great! Move on to higher difficulty. If you don't, you get to try again at slightly lower difficulty. It looks like if they don't want people to lose 3 matches in a row, say f-it and quit for the day, so they offer them easier matches. This itself is good: none of us wants to be stuck behind the same difficulty wall for all our matches (eg. the 166 wall transitioners complain about). However, we all know it's faster to tank, than to actually try to win a hard fight. This gets abused by people who lose match after match on purpose. I think the real solution is to reduce the effect of played win/loss ratio. Stop shifting down the bracket of targets you can hit after a smaller amount of losses. Make tanking less desirable.

None of the other fixes proposed won't ensure you won't get into a competitive bracket. Making each PVP MMR distinct goes against Demiurge's desire to reward players for returning/newer players for trying the game. The veteran game is just more competitive now as people become more skilled, and yearning for the 'good ol days' doesn't change anything.

Although it's unpopular, I'll defend the skip tax. Without the skip tax we wouldn't have the match iso bonus either. And also, if you could find the same person over and over for free, and just hit them 10 times for points, wouldn't you do it? I know I would. Skip tax is small enough that it isn't a huge hinderance, and makes some people actually want to try to defeat the current teams listed there even if they're tough.