Current rating system can't accurately place lowest performing players

[Aviars]

Currently the rating system, as it is now, can't accurately place the players who perform the absolute worst in The Feast. As it stands, to maintain a steady rating in bronze where normally losses only count for -15 and wins +25, you only need around a 38% win-rate. That may seem acceptable, but the main problem is that while people who deserve a 38% win-rate stay around 200 rating, that also means people who have a even LOWER win rate are also 200 rating due to the fact you can't lose rating before hitting 200.

Why is this a problem? It means that it is completely luck based on whether or not the people you are getting actually deserve to be there. When someone as a gold or higher player gets placed with some who is bronze or un-ranked in order to 'balance' the teams, that player can actually belong to the rating they have, or they can be much much worse than that. When you get placed with bronze or un-ranked players, people with a win-rate of 0% to 38% are basically all weighted the same, to the system, there is no difference and this is why people can get so frustrated with the game because these players can either give you a balanced back and forth game like the system was meant to do or you can get someone who knows absolutely nothing about how to play and you lose in the first 2 minutes of the game. I have seen people who have played since the beginning of the season STILL un-ranked. That just isn't right.

Solution? SE needs to change the rating system. They either need to get rid of the free ride to bronze and make it possible to have NEGATIVE rating with additional thresholds such as only getting -10 every loss and so on OR they need to SHIFT rating so the starting point is maybe 1000 with additional rating thresholds so people can actually drop to where they belong. You could make 1200 and below be bronze and have the same difference between silver/gold/plat/diamond as you go up.

I personally like the second option because it won't make people feel bad for technically going negative.

This needs to happen, currently people from 0% win-rate to 38% win-rate are all treated as equal which is not the case. I personally wouldn't have as much beef with people who are un-ranked or bronze if I didn't have to pray and hope that they didn't happen to be one of the the ones who literally cannot win while the other teams un-ranked or bronze happened to be where they belong in relation to their actual rating. It just isn't fair for me or them. I hope SE considers this, because currently, people are only being turned of from playing Feast as time goes on.

Thanks for reading.

[Zojha]

The current rating system cannot accurately place ANYONE because there's too few people playing >_>
Rating only reflects your standing compared to people you played with/against.

To give an extreme example - if only a top team and a mid-class team queue up at the same time, they'll be matched against each other and the top team will gain rating and the mid-class team lose it. The mid-class team might be able to beat all bottom class teams in the same vein, but those never match against each other, because when the mid-class team plays, only the top class team is consistently available. This results in their rating being much lower than it should be. Likewise, the top team's rating will be inflated.

Similar holds for solo queue - if you keep playing with/against the same people, your rating will be less accurate than if you play with/against completely different people all the time, as you have less points of comparison. Which is a big issue with how small the playerbase is.

Honestly? I find the very idea of a rating system pointless under the given circumstances.

[Dimitrii]

If I remember correctly when Feast initially came out it used to be something like multiples of 500 for each rank. As in 500 for bronze, 1000 for silver, 1500 for gold, 2000 for platinum and 2500 for diamond. People then complained about that saying that an abnormally large majority of the population was stuck at bronze/silver, so I don't see your second option being very popular nor lasting unfortunately. I can't remember clearly but I don't think it had that thresh hold preventing loss of points as unranked either initially. Speaking of unranked, these people you claim have been unranked since the season started clearly do not PVP so they don't matter in regards to formulating suggestions to matchmaking imo. It takes 8 wins to get out of unranked, even the shittiest player will get carried to 8 wins if they play enough matches so I'm skeptical that they even PVP at all.

[Aviars]

The current rating system cannot accurately place ANYONE because there's too few people playing >_>

That isn't true. Can you honestly say that someone who has a 5% win rate can be weighted pretty much equally to someone with maybe a 35% win rate in bronze? Can you honestly say that when someone who loses so much yet doesn't drop in rating isn't being placed where they should be? In any other game most matchmaking systems try and place people in a way that nets them a 50% win rate, where their rating stabilizes with their wins and losses. In this game that isn't the case. Someone can lose 100 games in a row in unranked and the way the matchmaking places them does not change simply because they can't lose rating.

A good example of you being wrong is World of Warcraft arena pvp. Everyone there starts at 1500 rating. Their PVP community is probably 100 times larger than ours. But you will still find people managing to get lower than even 1000 or 500 rating. Why is that? If what you say is true then nobody should be lower than 1500 because the WoW community is so huge right?

Anyway it is just common sense that if someone loses that they should have matchmaking somehow compensate that, but since they have a charity window that can cover so many different skill levels, it literally makes it luck on what type of low level player you get, which isn't fair.

If I remember correctly when Feast initially came out it used to be something like multiples of 500 for each rank. As in 500 for bronze, 1000 for silver, 1500 for gold, 2000 for platinum and 2500 for diamond. People then complained about that saying that an abnormally large majority of the population was stuck at bronze/silver, so I don't see your second option being very popular nor lasting unfortunately. I can't remember clearly but I don't think it had that thresh hold preventing loss of points as unranked either initially. Speaking of unranked, these people you claim have been unranked since the season started clearly do not PVP so they don't matter in regards to formulating suggestions to matchmaking imo. It takes 8 wins to get out of unranked, even the shittiest player will get carried to 8 wins if they play enough matches so I'm skeptical that they even PVP at all.

Neither option literally does nothing to change how many people are in silver+. I don't know where you get that idea from. It only makes it possible for people who are currently unranked or sub below 38% win rate to actually drop rating. So you are just wrong there. Again I should clarify my second option has people START at 1000 and allow people to fluctuate from there with bronze being 0-1500, silver 1500-1900 and so on. No other difference in silver plus.

Also, yes there are people that literally do not have what it takes to win with where they are placed. And yes they do pvp, idk why you are making a assumption that they don't when I clearly say that they have been playing since the beginning. That means I still see them PLAYING PVP. And I just got to say, if these players can't actually go negative or w.e, then not even the best players can carry them, it might as well be a 3v4.

[Dimitrii]

Again I should clarify my second option has people START at 1000 and allow people to fluctuate from there with bronze being 0-1500, silver 1500-1900 and so on. No other difference in silver plus.

I see. This part I misunderstood as I didn't gleam from it initially that you would have everyone start at 1000. I mistakenly assumed we would start at zero like we currently do. I guess with the wide range in bronze you are hoping that they match up the rank points better in match making but that's supposedly what they are doing now anyway. I still prefer that they tighten up the brackets to be 1 tier up and 1 down for the purpose of matchmaking instead to eliminate unranked/bronze from appearing in Gold and higher matches altogether.

Hyperbole about bad players

What i meant was that you are over exaggerating claiming there are people consistently and actively playing since the season start unable to get out of unranked.

[Aviars]

What i meant was that you are over exaggerating claiming there are people consistently and actively playing since the season start unable to get out of unranked.

I wasn't exaggerating, there are some people who have been actively playing at least a modest amount and still are unranked. I would name them but I don't want to call them out.

[Praesul]

I wasn't exaggerating, there are some people who have been actively playing at least a modest amount and still are unranked. I would name them but I don't want to call them out.

There's a player on Balmung, who I will not name, that has been unranked since the beginning of this season, they have many games under their belt, I know because I've been matched with them plenty of times, and they are STILL unranked.

Every time they queue up they basically kill queue times on Aether once word gets out, because no one wants to deal with them.

[Koltik]

What i meant was that you are over exaggerating claiming there are people consistently and actively playing since the season start unable to get out of unranked.

He honestly is not exaggerating. It's really sad, but there are actually players who have played since the start of S1 and are still unranked.

[Zojha]

That isn't true.

It is. Let's say two exactly equally skilled people people queue at different times, one at off hours where only hardcore PvP players (still) play and the other during peak time where there are also several newbies and moderate players around to be matched with. The latter wins more games than the prior, despite being equally skilled, simply because the matchmaker could also offer them enemies not way out of their league.

So both people are equally skilled, yet both have different rating. Accuracy much? This is actually precisely the fact why wintrading and other such practices work - if you only got matched with the trading group once in a blue moon, it wouldn't have a big influence on your rating and the rating would still be largely valid. Since you get matched with them all the time, the influence of that one group is huge, which makes the practice work- and profitable and the rating very inaccurate. And the same goes for legitimate players that are just better/worse.

Rating can never be accurate without a vast pool of players. That's just a statistical fact, just as you cannot accurately determine a ranking without a large amount of games. A person having a 100% winrate over 2 games isn't necessarily more skilled than one with a 75% winrate over 200. And a person having 0% winrate against the top 10 isn't necessarily worse than a one having a 30% winrate against the bottom 10. With a large playerbase, that's a non-issue, you just don't match people with people way outside their league up or downward. With the playerbase as small as it is, to the point you frequently recognize your enemies by name, that is a big issue that distorts all ratings in the system.

[Aviars]

It is.

Your explanation can still apply to large populations of people as well. Queing on during primetime or downtime still applies to large populations of players. I mean people have been wintrading in WoW and still do, player population doesn't change that.

Anyway, you still have failed to address how people not losing rating for when they lose isn't causing a problem. You probably haven't because you can't really say it's wrong.