What if matchmaking is blind

Unknown · July 2014

Phantron, what you suggest exactly what you say: replacing a strategy game with random blind bets. Let's just leave it to roulette and slot machines and other games like that. Instead of trying to turn MPQ to one.

Looking at what you attack, picking a fit team is not a BAD thing, it is the actual thinking and strategy element. Also it is the thing leading to fun victory. What is the fun value of sending random guys to unknown battle? Then fighting suboptimally, picking lot of damage or losing? Who really wants to do that beyond the first handful of tries?

We would need MORE relevant choices and moves not less along your proposal. Which makes the roster mostly irrelevant let alone the whole concept of diversity.

MtG is too different to apply in this manner for compare and even there the fixed nature is mitigated by having the sideboard and best-of-3 structure, you may lose the first game but win the match after learning how to tune. Why you think the no-sideboard formats never took root?

Also you very well know how to create actual viable diversity: by balancing out character powers. So each of them is good at something instead of having 70% as utter **** not even worth having. And adding all the things that allow team synergy at least ability to adjust effective levels or influence the color handling in some other way. We have what, 45 characters? That is 14k potential teams. Multiple thousands of those could be viable instead of a handful. And you could have hundreds of good choices to attack any of them instead of the single uber team or one of three.

NOT blinding is the thing that leads there.

Unknown · July 2014

We don't need to look at some mythical balanced world to see that diversity still won't happen. Explain to me why The Hood, despite being one of the most powerful defensive characters in the game, is still not seen very much at the top. This is because The Hood, despite his power, is very easily dealt with when you can see him on the opposing team. He utterly dominates guys with high cost moves, like Thor and Fury, to the point where a fight like Thor + Fury versus The Hood + anyone is almost unimaginable that it'd ever start without boosts (and he's even strong against AP boosts). It basically boils down to the following choices:

1. Are you comfortable with Magneto on defense, because Magneto can beat anyone at the cost of being average on defense.
2. Do you have the right personnel to have a Daken based team (Daken beats The Hood, but generally needs Sentry to be competitive against other teams).

This isn't diversity. This is still an either-or proposition. You either use Magneto or you do not. You either have the right guys to support Daken or you do not. And if the answer is no to both questions you just hit the skip button. There's no meta game to learn about The Hood. Ignoring the max boosts cases, all that happens is a team with Daken and Magneto will always attack The Hood and a team without those two should always skip. Since I've never heard of anyone going bankrupt from skipping, it's not like the guy running Fury + Thor has to adjust their game. All it means is they hit skip more often unless everyone else is running The Hood now.

Unknown · July 2014

If only for every strong character there was a viable counter, instead the counter to a strong character is a stronger character.

Saying that really makes me want a character that can negate/shield powers or 'counterspell' or reflect powers. cStorm and hulk do things when they get hit but how cool would it be to have someone who could take a world rupture and make it fizzle doing nothing, or someone who could survive a call the storm and if they have the AP return a full strength CtS back at the enemy team. Why have power creep when you can have specific types of powers that can deal with the overpowered and use it against them.

plugging for a third power for loki,
Disguise: Loki drops an illusion tile on the board and the next power targeting loki affects a random member of the enemy team instead, consuming all illusion tiles. More covers = more tiles = harder to remove to be able to hit that sly bastard in the face

Unknown · July 2014

Cryptobrancus wrote:

If only for every strong character there was a viable counter, instead the counter to a strong character is a stronger character.

Saying that really makes me want a character that can negate/shield powers or 'counterspell' or reflect powers. cStorm and hulk do things when they get hit but how cool would it be to have someone who could take a world rupture and make it fizzle doing nothing, or someone who could survive a call the storm and if they have the AP return a full strength CtS back at the enemy team. Why have power creep when you can have specific types of powers that can deal with the overpowered and use it against them.

plugging for a third power for loki,
Disguise: Loki drops an illusion tile on the board and the next power targeting loki affects a random member of the enemy team instead, consuming all illusion tiles. More covers = more tiles = harder to remove to be able to hit that sly bastard in the face

But countering itself doesn't add diversity. Let's say C Storm unconditionally wins over Sentry when Storm is on defense, and when your Sentry is on defense you actually have to play the game. Well, we know everyone loses most of their defensive games already, so you're probably not that worried about accruing extra defensive losses versus Storm. You can no longer attack any team with Storm, but even half of the teams play Storm that just means you skip maybe twice as much. There's no reason for you to give up Sentry because you're not especially vulnerable on defense even in this rather bizarre world because you already lose at least 90% of your defensive games anyway against another maxed roster. On offense, your options are more limited but as long as you're not shield hopping, that just means more skips. For shield hopping, you're free to actually change your team in this bzarre Storm autowin Sentry world since you'd be protected by a shield later after you're done.

So even in this one way autowin world, someone who is currently using Sentry have no compelling reason to change his plan because the worst case scenario is that he pays more for his skips and he switches to a different team for the duration of shield hopping. And since Storm still sucks against almost everyone else, you probably won't even see very many Storm to begin with.

Thanos · July 2014

What if they just dropped the points structure altogether and scoring was instead based on the number of matches won. Progression rewards could be awarded say after 3 wins, 5 wins, 8 wins and so on. Placement rewards would also be based on total matches won. To keep this from just being a grind fest they could give you a certain number of health packs and that's all you get for the event. This would encourage roster diversity cause you need to spread the damage around and would also be a step towards D3's desire for a "higher level of play" cause instead of having to win a match as fast as possible you could take your time and think out your moves. One of the things i hate now is always feeling rushed to finish a match asap and often times I'll miss match 5's or other more optimal moves cause I'm trying to win as quickly as possible. I get a lot more satisfaction from taking my time and studying the board to find moves that'll result in multiple matches or cascades. In fact some of my most exciting moments were when i was one move away from being wiped out and i had to find a move that would result in two matches to take the win. Of course this would also require D3 to tighten up their match making system so your not facing overly powerful or under leveled opponents.

Unknown · July 2014

Thanos wrote:

What if they just dropped the points structure altogether and scoring was instead based on the number of matches won. Progression rewards could be awarded say after 3 wins, 5 wins, 8 wins and so on. Placement rewards would also be based on total matches won. To keep this from just being a grind fest they could give you a certain number of health packs and that's all you get for the event. This would encourage roster diversity cause you need to spread the damage around and would also be a step towards D3's desire for a "higher level of play" cause instead of having to win a match as fast as possible you could take your time and think out your moves. One of the things i hate now is always feeling rushed to finish a match asap and often times I'll miss match 5's or other more optimal moves cause I'm trying to win as quickly as possible. I get a lot more satisfaction from taking my time and studying the board to find moves that'll result in multiple matches or cascades. In fact some of my most exciting moments were when i was one move away from being wiped out and i had to find a move that would result in two matches to take the win. Of course this would also require D3 to tighten up their match making system so your not facing overly powerful or under leveled opponents.

That'd probably be closer to Hearthstone's Arena. Something like you start with your roster at full health and progression reward based on the number of wins you have before you're wiped out with no way to recover health at all. It'd have to be some kind of 'buy-in' I'd think.

Unknown · July 2014

I wonder if we had this if it's be a viable strategy to gain points quickly and then tanking and watching other people give you their points.

I think we're also overlooking basic human psychology here too.
1. People don't like to lose.
2. People don't like to retreat.

Skipping seems instead tactical. Instead of picking a fight and losing, you're choosing to fight someone else.
There's no money maker in this, and it isn't something most of the player base is crying out for. Instead, we'd be introducing psychological pain, for what looks to be negligible gain.

Unknown · July 2014

Phantron wrote:

Explain to me why The Hood, despite being one of the most powerful defensive characters in the game, is still not seen very much at the top. This is because The Hood, despite his power, is very easily dealt with when you can see him on the opposing team. He utterly dominates guys with high cost moves, like Thor and Fury, to the point where a fight like Thor + Fury versus The Hood + anyone is almost unimaginable that it'd ever start without boosts (and he's even strong against AP boosts).

Err, here you start by stating a contradiction (may we just invoke Wizard's rule#9?) then twist it and gets confused and ask why. Maybe you see Hood so rarely on top because he's just NOT THAT strong as a defensive character after all. Especially when that title would require him NOT getting beaten so quite easily. What was the case well before Daken intro.

Hood is probably a good defensive character against ** rosters and might be posted in that range too, but on top his scares are just urban legend, especially with the low health. (Now he got good benefit.) Or true only against mediocre, clueless players who are probably not on the top very much. AP boost addicts and brute forces playing the same thing no matter what. Why would he stop even the big spenders in track when to steal he requires so many tiles on the board? That are not there as soon as you start picking them up for your power? Against hood you just use a non-rainbow team or restrict to collect few colors. Or use the small spenders. Or damage boosts. Or other tricks. It's not 1on1 battle. Sure you will need to pay more than usual attention to the colors on board and in your stock and leave AP boosts at home except those you use on first turn.

Other reasons to see him less might be just less covers out there in still active players, or simply not fitting in the offense strategy. (I still try to think reasons to not go against hood but pick a 9k+ HP guy with some more hurting abilities...)

And about roster diversity you just ignored the IF part with creating the usable characters and just reverted to the current state that without the act of course allows only the few choices. Sure, without breaking the eggs there will not be an omlette. That's what I said too, if you have only a handful of choices it's not something we call diversity. regardless on how you chose from that overrestricted pool. We must start by being happy to chose from many characters and teams. Only after that it makes sense to start designing the rest of the tournament structure.

squirrel1120 · July 2014

Getting thrown in blindly to matches would not be fun... not at all really, imo, and definitely not under the MMR hell situation. Retreating and/or tanking are the most boring things a person can do in the game, and this suggests making it a very regular part of the game. No thanks.

I don't understand why the game was ever set up like it is to keep the strong beating up on the weak, which keeps the people with character rich rosters getting richer, and the folks trying to get into that arena down. Why can't the game read through your roster when joining an event, determine an average and total for your characters, and place you directly into a bracket with relevant opponents? Even seed teams should match a person's roster. Fight in your weight class, because otherwise there's no challenge anyway. I just fought a lightning round up to 250 (first time in ages as the token hardly seemed worth it after a while), and all the teams I fought for the first 10 battles were seed teams. A. Wolvie and baby daken ate up every one with no real fear of loss. I thought I was lucky at first, but honestly it was just boring tile matching, making sure to tag a yellow every so often to regen back up. The last half dozen matches were in my weight class, and the only ones remotely interesting.

How nice would it be if everyone in your bracket was on equal footing? Where the top of the bracket for a 2* group might very well be one where someone has a few 3*'s that are just starting to break the power curve so their match dmg and abilities are *just* starting to surpass the average 2*, but yet aren't so powerful that anyone else in the bracket that drew them wouldn't have a shot at them. If not that, how about removing the system where we are encouraged to pray on the weak? Match points become some factor of the character's level, then affected by a multiplier for the difficulty of who was being attacked. You just started a pvp, have an aweful big roster, and want to climb to the top. 3 nodes to chose from. Attack the 1*'s for 1 point? attack 2*'s for 3 points? Attack the 3*'s for 25? Maybe you'd have people playing 25 matches with no effort instead of one in their own weight class, but the time hardly seems worth the effort. Then i think I would remove the ability to take points from a team far below his attacker. The max'd 166's get the point, but the losing defender doesn't get it deducted whenever the attacker is xx levels over the defender. Still, I think I'd prefer segregation by weight class...

... and put those p2w fellas in their own arena to duke it out... but that's probably just me. hehe.

*Maybe* i'd miss getting matchups with 8k HP hulks making that transition and easily defeating them most of the time with OBW & thor/ares... but then again, they just take too long.

IMO, balance all the characters to become viable AND change the system away from

Unknown · July 2014

I don't really care that much about opposing rosters but that's because I'm at the roster stage of lots of maxed 3* characters. I tend to pick targets strictly by the points they are worth. Maybe if there's like 3 minutes left before an event finishes I'll try not to pick a team with max Hulk....

If you hid the amount of points a team is worth it all becomes a joke. It's already annoying enough that you often have to skip a half dozen or a dozen people before finding someone worth over 25 points, and that's when you're still below 500 points let alone above that.

If you're on the 2*/3* cusp it can be vitally important to how long you can play whether or not you can avoid hitting teams which are going to do a lot of damage or wipe you.

Finally, this would also require taking away the ability to see other players' rosters as otherwise you could take a pretty good guess by checking the roster what you're likely to be facing.

If the absolute top end wants to pay to win by spending a ridiculous amount of time and money on collusive shield hopping, good luck to 'em. I don't see why the rest of the game needs to be warped to stop them.

Also this would neuter the deterrence factor that some characters have on defence and take away even that bit of variation from team choices.

Tharos · July 2014

Another way of balancing the scoring system, and fitting very well in your "random opponent system", is to have some king of "character or team MMR" instead of "player MMR".
This 'character MMR' reflects the "power" of this character, every time it is played by any player. Thus, tanking will have no effect: you may suicide your LThor many times trying to trick the system, the thousands of players winning games with him tells the opposite.
The scoring will be based on this character MMR, not on placement: if you beat a strong team with a low team, you will win a lot. But if you lose against a bigger team, you will not lose a lot.

Pros:
- Even lower roster will have a chance to compete, thus you can play with lower characters if you like them, you will still have a chance!
- Tanking will be useless
- No point lost on retiatations: you only way to lose points is to lose a game you started (and you will lose much more often than now!)

Cons:
- As losing will be part of the game, much more than now, we must no longer be punished twice for losing (points loss + character dead is too much)
- Characters are stronger depending of their teammates. A "Team MMR" is preferable that a "character MMR", but harder to define (although the TrueSkill algorithm can do it perfectly)

Pros & Cons at the same time, depending on your preference:
- Not being able to chose your opponent is a must with this system
- Shields income for demiurge will be replaced by Health Pack income (shields will be useless, while health packs will be more meaningful: to earn more points, you need to play more)
- It is ok to lose a game! (same as Starcraft/Hearthstone/a lot of games, where you lose about half of your game)

tl,dr: See what a lot of other pvp games are doing: they are rewarding your play results, not your ability to pick your opponent.

Unknown · July 2014

I would like to see an adjustment to the points won and lost in PvP, based on team strength. A character would be worth 1-10 points based on covers and levels and each character would have a multiplier (1x for 1*, 2x for 2*, etc).

For example:
A lvl 166 Patch would be 30 points (10 x 3)
A 7 cover lvl89 Hulk would be 18 points (6 x 3)
A lvl 94 Ares would be 20 points (10 x 2)
A lvl 50 IM35 would be 10 points (10 x 1)
A 1 cover lvl40 Psylocke would be 3 points (1 x 3)

Scores would be totaled for each team and used to adjust points won and lost in a battle. For example, a transition player with 400 points has a score of 500 in PvP. A max player with 800 points has a score of 200 in PvP. Currently, they would be able to win ~40 points, based on these adjustments it would be closer to 20. And if both players had 500 points in PvE, the transition player could win 25 attacking, but the max player would only be able to win 12.

This would produce roster diversity, as everyone would have to use every viable combination in order to compete.

This would be similar to Clash of Clans, where attacking someone 1 level below you results in 90% of available loot, someone 2 levels below 50%, someone 3 levels below 25%.

Spoit · July 2014

Zhirrzh wrote:

I don't really care that much about opposing rosters but that's because I'm at the roster stage of lots of maxed 3* characters. I tend to pick targets strictly by the points they are worth. Maybe if there's like 3 minutes left before an event finishes I'll try not to pick a team with max Hulk....

If you hid the amount of points a team is worth it all becomes a joke. It's already annoying enough that you often have to skip a half dozen or a dozen people before finding someone worth over 25 points, and that's when you're still below 500 points let alone above that.

If you're on the 2*/3* cusp it can be vitally important to how long you can play whether or not you can avoid hitting teams which are going to do a lot of damage or wipe you.

Finally, this would also require taking away the ability to see other players' rosters as otherwise you could take a pretty good guess by checking the roster what you're likely to be facing.

If the absolute top end wants to pay to win by spending a ridiculous amount of time and money on collusive shield hopping, good luck to 'em. I don't see why the rest of the game needs to be warped to stop them.

Also this would neuter the deterrence factor that some characters have on defence and take away even that bit of variation from team choices.

Exactly. Until they make the MMR not be so miserly, even suggesting this is a completely terrible idea, bound to give you 10 points for a win, with a guaranteed 40 point loss.

Once again, Phantron is chasing phantom problems, with questionable solutions in search of a real problem. Based on the nichest of situations that not even 1% of the hardcore people, much less the total population, would face

Unknown · July 2014

Tharos wrote:

tl,dr: See what a lot of other pvp games are doing: they are rewarding your play results, not your ability to pick your opponent.

Wild guess: in those games whoever with better skill wins (or has the real edge). Wilder guess: there PVP actually means THAT.

In MPQ the winner is whoever ATTACKS. (barring rare accidents). Because the game is rigged that way. And because PVP is not vs people but an artificial stupidity kept that way by design. (meaninig: so the attacker actually wins. as losing to AI sucks, and leads to people not hooked and not buying stuff).

It's the thousands run on tweaking the matchmaking and exactly this many times people drag in examples from real-PVP, skill-influenced games. Please understand that most of those principles can not be applied to this ai-mediated form of fight. I mean without working very badly.

Unknown · July 2014

Tharos wrote:

Another way of balancing the scoring system, and fitting very well in your "random opponent system", is to have some king of "character or team MMR" instead of "player MMR".
This 'character MMR' reflects the "power" of this character, every time it is played by any player. Thus, tanking will have no effect: you may suicide your LThor many times trying to trick the system, the thousands of players winning games with him tells the opposite.
The scoring will be based on this character MMR, not on placement: if you beat a strong team with a low team, you will win a lot. But if you lose against a bigger team, you will not lose a lot.

Pros:
- Even lower roster will have a chance to compete, thus you can play with lower characters if you like them, you will still have a chance!
- Tanking will be useless
- No point lost on retiatations: you only way to lose points is to lose a game you started (and you will lose much more often than now!)

Cons:
- As losing will be part of the game, much more than now, we must no longer be punished twice for losing (points loss + character dead is too much)
- Characters are stronger depending of their teammates. A "Team MMR" is preferable that a "character MMR", but harder to define (although the TrueSkill algorithm can do it perfectly)

Pros & Cons at the same time, depending on your preference:
- Not being able to chose your opponent is a must with this system
- Shields income for demiurge will be replaced by Health Pack income (shields will be useless, while health packs will be more meaningful: to earn more points, you need to play more)
- It is ok to lose a game! (same as Starcraft/Hearthstone/a lot of games, where you lose about half of your game)

tl,dr: See what a lot of other pvp games are doing: they are rewarding your play results, not your ability to pick your opponent.

It'd make more sense to dynamically adjust the levels of characters based on a 'character MMR'. That is, a victory by a Sentry/Daken/featured team counts as a win for the hypothetical Sentry and Daken player, and they'll be given a MMR rating based on that. Conversely if you lost a game with them then that counts as a loss for them. This will obviously also be weighted by the MMR of the defending player so that winning against a strong player counts more. Then, the lowest MMR characters will be given a level adjustment relative to other characters of the same * tier. This wouldn't require blind matchmaking. New players without the best characters will have higher level characters to compensate, and if Daredevil turns out to be too good in this scheme there's nothing stopping any established player from using him too. As people start winning more games with Daredevil his MMR will increase and he'll lose his buff.

Unknown · July 2014

papa07 wrote:

I would like to see an adjustment to the points won and lost in PvP, based on team strength. A character would be worth 1-10 points based on covers and levels and each character would have a multiplier (1x for 1*, 2x for 2*, etc).

For example:
A lvl 166 Patch would be 30 points (10 x 3)
A 7 cover lvl89 Hulk would be 18 points (6 x 3)
A lvl 94 Ares would be 20 points (10 x 2)
A lvl 50 IM35 would be 10 points (10 x 1)
A 1 cover lvl40 Psylocke would be 3 points (1 x 3)

Scores would be totaled for each team and used to adjust points won and lost in a battle. For example, a transition player with 400 points has a score of 500 in PvP. A max player with 800 points has a score of 200 in PvP. Currently, they would be able to win ~40 points, based on these adjustments it would be closer to 20. And if both players had 500 points in PvE, the transition player could win 25 attacking, but the max player would only be able to win 12.

This would produce roster diversity, as everyone would have to use every viable combination in order to compete.

This would be similar to Clash of Clans, where attacking someone 1 level below you results in 90% of available loot, someone 2 levels below 50%, someone 3 levels below 25%.

Couldn't you then tank with level 1's and lose next to no points in losses? This system wouldn't make a distinction between people with starting rosters who worked hard for rank vs normal players.

Phantron wrote:

It'd make more sense to dynamically adjust the levels of characters based on a 'character MMR'. That is, a victory by a Sentry/Daken/featured team counts as a win for the hypothetical Sentry and Daken player, and they'll be given a MMR rating based on that. Conversely if you lost a game with them then that counts as a loss for them. This will obviously also be weighted by the MMR of the defending player so that winning against a strong player counts more. Then, the lowest MMR characters will be given a level adjustment relative to other characters of the same * tier. This wouldn't require blind matchmaking. New players without the best characters will have higher level characters to compensate, and if Daredevil turns out to be too good in this scheme there's nothing stopping any established player from using him too. As people start winning more games with Daredevil his MMR will increase and he'll lose his buff.

It would be neat to have a tourney with a secondary scoring where you score based on the number of times you win with weak characters. Every time you win, each character in your team scores a point globally. The character with the least wins wins (would have to exclude 4* due to rarity?), and the players with the most wins with that character get the prizes. I doubt it'll ever happen though, due to complexity, and any number of other reasons.

Unknown · July 2014

daibar wrote:

Couldn't you then tank with level 1's and lose next to no points in losses? This system wouldn't make a distinction between people with starting rosters who worked hard for rank vs normal players.

Points would be based on total roster, not just the three characters fighting.

Unknown · July 2014

papa07 wrote:

daibar wrote:

Couldn't you then tank with level 1's and lose next to no points in losses? This system wouldn't make a distinction between people with starting rosters who worked hard for rank vs normal players.

Points would be based on total roster, not just the three characters fighting.

That'd penalize people who have full rosters. Full rosters = more money.

babinro · July 2014

-1

I think one of the better long term aspects of this game is how certain characters can counter other characters.

For example, I know I'll want to use Hood in a match against an opposing Hood.
OBW's blue can counter Sentry's Green.
Loki counters Patch.

Viability of the above examples aside, you can see how your match choices might change based on the matches offered.
It adds a fun layer or strategy that would be killed by RNG matches.

That said...an AI controlled alliance mbr should gain NO BENEFIT when attacked by an alliance ally. If you tank a shielded ally then they gain 0 pts for being in your alliance. You still lose pts for a loss though. If you kill an alliance mbr whose unshielded then they lose points as normal and you gain points as normal. This eliminates all potential abuse within the same alliance.

What if matchmaking is blind

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