MMR changes, shields, and skip tax

reckless442

I have been pretty cool with the skip tax, but tonight I began to really resent how it operates.

There has been a lot of discussion about the crazy MMR in the SHIELD Simulator, but most of it has focused on two issues: (1) that people were seeing high-level opponents from the very beginning of the event; and (2) that people with higher scores were being hit for massive losses because they were exposed to players much farther down the leaderboard than in the past.

One of the side-effects of exposing players to so many potential losses is that they not only must shield, but that they must limit the amount of time they expose themselves to possible attack. So many of us are forced to shield-hop if we want to maintain our scores or rise even by small amounts up the scoreboard. But to do that, it is necessary to find targets worth reasonable points. The options are more limited in that range, particularly when so many other players are shielded. So what happens is that players are forced to do a lot of skipping -- at the cost of substantial ISO.

Normally, I am okay with that cost. However, in the SHIELD simulator, as I was trying to reach 3000 points, all of sudden, I began getting matched with teams that I had no business seeing. Even though I was running a max-level team of 3-stars, I was matched with opponents consisting of IM35/Modern Storm/Modern Black Widow or level 15 3*s. Players with scores in the double-digits. Skip after skip offered me 1-point matches. It made no sense to fight those matches, knowing that one loss while unshielded would lose me 45 points or more. At the same time, I knew that from alliance mates of reasonable targets that I could target, but to find them (when I managed to), I had to burn thousands of ISO on skips.

That made no sense and is contrary to the MMR system that has been described to us. Those were not even teams that I saw when I began the event and had no points. It just reeks of another way that the developers are sucking HP and ISO from players. Now that shields are an effective necessity at the higher levels of PVPs, the skip tax becomes even more onerous, especially if the MMR is going to be manipulated in this fashion.

Unknown

That's insane! I've never seen that. I've been attacked by those teams but never got matched up with one. Your right you have no rite to see those teams as you have no rite to show up on their que. It does seam as though they have made it that way to suck HP and iso from players. Something is definitely broken and need to be fixed. I'm sorry to hear about your experience. That really sucks

Unknown

I must have spent a few thousand ISOs skipping 3pts teams trying to find a decent team. Anyway I got you (reckless) in a node, I hope you are shielded for good.

Unknown

I think whatever changes they made to MMR made it glitchy. On the last tournament I shieldhopped a lot the last couple of hours, but never got a single attack since I first shielded. I got hit a bunch of times at 700 points before I shielded, but once i started shieldhopping my way up to 1050, never got attacked again. That can't be right.

reckless442

laoahpeh wrote:

I must have spent a few thousand ISOs skipping 3pts teams trying to find a decent team. Anyway I got you (reckless) in a node, I hope you are shielded for good.

I'll probably do a quick fight between shields when they expire, but I'm pretty much done with the simulator.

Spoit

Impulse wrote:

I think whatever changes they made to MMR made it glitchy. On the last tournament I shieldhopped a lot the last couple of hours, but never got a single attack since I first shielded. I got hit a bunch of times at 700 points before I shielded, but once i started shieldhopping my way up to 1050, never got attacked again. That can't be right.

Yeah, that's definitely glitchy, Everyone else I saw got hit at least once within 5 minutes of unshielding

Unknown

reckless442 wrote:

Normally, I am okay with that cost. However, in the SHIELD simulator, as I was trying to reach 3000 points, all of sudden, I began getting matched with teams that I had no business seeing.

Ah, you just reached the old bug, the one (IIRC) made debut in first elite event, then supposedly fixed but resurfaced in the next in similar form just later -- and maybe in some other similar circumstances too. Getting to really high points and in a desert with too many shielded people their algo just fails and the "extend search" part was never really fixed outside words. It may even get you seed teams still unless they flagged them for a specific check. O,O

Infrared

Maybe MMR is represented by an unsigned integer and it got so high that it wrapped around to 1?

Unknown

I feel like their MMR formula was written to be "good enough" for the majority of the playerbase and extreme outliers break the formula. There is no reason for them to risk breaking the formula for everyone else in order to appease the 100 or so people at 4 sigma or wherever it breaks. edit: there is no substantial reason

vudu3

I'm having the exact opposite experience in SHIELD Simulator. I'm currently around 2300 points and keep getting hit for 15 points by 3x 141 teams. I hit them back for 30+ points each time. I occasionally get hit by a team with less points than me but for every one of those there are 5+ attacks that net me points after I retaliate.

Unknown

I have entered this magical 1* realm in Lightning Rounds when scoring past 560. I just do not discuss it because only five other people regularly score that high and they probably already know about it.

Unknown

I don't think it's really a bug because I can certainly imagine anyone who ought to be worth decent points to someone with 3000 SHIELD training is indeed shielded at all times, so the game just says, "Well I don't know who to match you with but Kicksthatkick is available', and really at 3000, Kicksthatkick is no worse than a random guy with 2000. You probably would prefer Kicksthatkick if given a choice here.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I don't think it's really a bug because I can certainly imagine anyone who ought to be worth decent points to someone with 3000 SHIELD training is indeed shielded at all times, so the game just says, "Well I don't know who to match you with but Kicksthatkick is available', and really at 3000, Kicksthatkick is no worse than a random guy with 2000. You probably would prefer Kicksthatkick if given a choice here.

If you are going to see 1-5 point matches you most certainly want the seed teams! they are not going to retaliate for -50. I ran into this same bug last night as reckless. I was climbing up to around 2700 seeing 20-35 point matches (pretty much the same people over and over) then randomly it all just switched to 2-5 point matches of real people. I skipped for a couple hundred iso and it never got better. I just quit for the night and woke up to -384 in attacks. Luckily my top 5 in season looks to be pretty much locked in but It is pretty annoying to have this happen. Especially when you have to waste iso on it.

Unknown

I took a quick trip north of 500 in the Lightning Rounds because

1) I had the time to spare, and
2) I can.

Anyway, I took a picture of the little guppies swimming around Lake Newbgone.





Nice little snacks, but I wouldn't want to munch on them at the top of Shield Training.

Unknown

Infrared wrote:

Maybe MMR is represented by an unsigned integer and it got so high that it wrapped around to 1?

I am thinking that it has something to do with this... or something similar. I think they use real numbers so they might be using half precision instead of single. Similar idea.