It feels to me like summing/averaging the ELO of a team to do matchmaking is:
a) just a hack to fit a square peg (team based matchmaking) into a round hole (individual matchmaking)
b) losing a lot of information about how intra-team dynamics would affect the result (as in player A and B play well together, better than their individual ELOs summed; but A and C play poorly together, worse than their individual ELOs summed)
If you have individual ELOs, you could pre-seed the ranking using averages and then let the algorithm take over.
The Elo[a] rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess or esports. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system#:~:text=Th....
I'd love for there to be a multidimensional player skill vector (aka "embedding") that encapsulates more information as well as a more nonlinear model to go on top of it.
For example, in many games, a team usually needs a support player, but a single number isn't enough to capture that for the purposes of matchmaking.
I love the idea to use per-player embedding and to add a nonlinear model on top. I think it may improve the model dramatically, but I'm afraid that the model may be overfitting strongly as we have only 35 games in the historical for now. Anyway - I think I'll try this out.
Moneyball is a good movie that dramatizes the dawning of this science.
Fantasy Football is a game version that's become popular for online gamblers.
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I've seen a paper or two floating around on the subject. But I've forgotten the names of them by now and I dunno any good references unfortunately.
Hope you find something in your search!
We were always giddy when we got matched with a clan, especially if they were a mouthy crew.
it is not perfect but close enough that it didn't matter tbh, I mean multiple company do it for good reason
So, in sports, even if your team losses there will be players who will leave the season as All stars, or even MVPs (or vice versa, you are on a championship team but not critical at all to the team). Team esports truly is live or die by the win, and somewhat destroys the expression of players who may be league-wide top defenders/attackers/support. It’s not tracked or acknowledged.
It’s very brutal.
We need to track and factor in “advanced stats” like many sports do to some degree. You are not your ELO, but really your assists-per-game, rebounds-per-game, PPG, RBI, YPG, etc.
Match making would sort of fall into place more organically in that case possibly, since you can easily look at a team and see it needs more scoring, or more defense, versus … needs more winners or losers.
In the last few weeks the League of Legends Worlds Finals took place. One of the teams who made it to Round of 4 was GenG. Their midlaner is widely considered to be among the best in the world, and their team has dominated their region. Despite that, he hasn't won a single worlds. The team that won has the most legendary league player because when he shows up to worlds, he locks in and wins by any means necessary. T1 was the fourth seed in their region, and they were one game away from not even qualifying to worlds. But once they made it to worlds they locked in and won the whole thing.
I think one of the key issues with matchmaking in team based games is that they encourage solo queue instead of forming groups of reliable regulars. Having a regular group of people to play with also reduces toxicity and it lets you have clearer expectations of your allies. The power of friendship is undefeated in team based games.
Once I wisened up and lost the illusion of "fun", I just haven't found any appeal in such games anymore. What kind of a human being am I if my entertainment of all things is drawn from misery? Fuck that, there's enough misery in life without fucking games making it worse.
Team and group PVP games are great because winning (or losing) is just a matter-of-fact consequence, we're there for the experience of playing together as a team and it's hell of a lot of fun for both winners and losers.
I've been playing fighting games a lot recently, which is a pure skill-based 1v1 genre, and going up against people better than me who beat me is fun, not miserable. Obviously the ideal outcome is to win, but getting stomped by 6-time Marvel vs Capcom 2 world champion Justin Wong doesn't make me miserable, it makes me want to improve.
I'm not saying it's for everyone, I have friends who tilt off easily at every loss and yeah they shouldn't play ranked at least, but as long as your attitude is "you win or you learn" you won't be miserable.
But I've also seen a lot of players that could not cope with losing - maybe overly competitive, maybe a bit immature etc. etc.
Fighting games cannot be compared to LoL in any way shape or form, they are shorter individual competitions where the only real excuse you have is internal.
WAR in baseball (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wins_Above_Replacement) has been a pretty successful attempt at this.
But it's besides the point, because the goal of a matchmaking ranking system (like Elo) is not to measure a player's skill but to pair player in such a way that there's a roughly even chance of either team winning.
This is nudged so as to not be in your face obvious, but the skew is definetly applied.
At the beginning it was terrible. But after a year or two, it was pretty good fine tuned!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115665
https://mattmazzola.medium.com/implementing-the-elo-rating-s...
Let me give you couple of examples: (a) foosball - you have a bunch of players who play both singles and doubles. What if you have two great defenders playing together in a team loosing to much weaker, but better suited for their positions, opponents? (b) counterstrike vs apex vs overwatch (or, to some extent dota) - what if you have a game where you can be easily carried by your team just by not sucking too much? In counterstrike one weak teammate (either lacking skill or a headset) can cost whole team a game, but in overwatch you can pick a supporting class and just chill at the back waiting for the rest of your team to win the game for you. (c) chemistry - you probably seen that at work as well, sometimes there's a synergy between two players that only occurs in that particular setup or it can be simply a matter of playstyle. (d) variants - in billiards you have different games that look similar but for some reason some players shine in one variant and can't get through in others.
Also Microsoft’s TrueSkill
- the amount of people in queue
- how long it's been since you last played
- total games played
- player reports
- how many cosmetics you bought (maybe)
The strength of ELO is how much it gives, for so little cost. One number representing everything. It doesn't perfectly explain the beautiful variety of nature, sure, but it's the most efficient possible abstraction. A single point value that captures 70% of what you need to know about relative skill.
Blizzard does it. Especially in overwatch.
It's called engagement matchmaking
This isn't even a match-fixing because while outcome is predicted, nothing beyond matching "weak" team against "strong" team is done to ensure that outcome.
I mean, it's shitty that blizzard decides that you had enough fun crushing it and now it's someone else's get that dopamine. However, on other hand, it's nice if you're on the otherside sometimes. I will admit that sometimes it matched us against team that was so weak it wasn't even funny.
The important thing to note, when the numbers look odd-number, removing players to join-in into the event, placing the limits!
Normal orders based on name, country of origin (sometimes these individuals travel far!), time of entering tournament (sometimes people late!), then getting it to play as well as possible sometimes based on how it looks… you want some kind of catch measure, to catch 2-players early on that would play normally in the final, having 1 going home early onwards. Is this a hack? Yes and No. Losing information happens when you don't apply planning, (1-day planning then more when possible?).
Event organisers, they like encourage the "good games" happening, when problems arise, it looks bad on every people there, the result OK, however this affects more. It is the event happening on time, people leaving at right times, everyone is OK, that people consider the "friend" aspect of tournaments, the professional points of view; this is "sportsmanship" online towards the real eSports victory.
Meanwhile the electronic groups have different "matchmaking" systems, I have even heard it is more matchmaker, it cannot be 100% perfect, however, people always try hard doing good.
> The Shapley value is a solution concept in cooperative game theory. It was named in honor of Lloyd Shapley, who introduced it in 1951 and won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for it in 2012. To each cooperative game it assigns a unique distribution (among the players) of a total surplus generated by the coalition of all players. The Shapley value is characterized by a collection of desirable properties.
This is pretty much the whole article lede on Wikipedia but I have no idea what I just read. What's a total surplus in a cooperative game here, like how much wood your team has gathered in AoE? How does it help to "assign" that, wouldn't that rather be the result of a game? Can someone dumb this down?
In chess, you only need a chessboard, which is cheap, and a table. In collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, it is even simpler as people bring their own cards, so all you need is the table. For a LAN party, people usually bring their own computer and they have a spot for the entire event, so having everyone play at the same time is trivial.
Reading the analysis section, this is how it compares to a knock-out tournament:
> Assuming no drawn games, determining a clear winner [requires] the same number of rounds as that of a knockout tournament [...] Compared to a knockout tournament, a Swiss system has the advantage of not eliminating anyone [and] that the final ranking gives some indication of the relative strengths of all contestants, not just of the tournament winner. [However,] sometimes a player has such a great lead that by the last round they are assured of winning the tournament [such that it] does not always end with the exciting climax
https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/chess/discussion/107
There are plenty of rating systems out there that perform better than Elo.