So the purpose of balancing is to see all civilizations in one big tournament?
IMO, successful balancing means that any civ has a chance against any other civ at the same skill level
3 Likes
Indeed, but obviously if we see civs picked all the times, and others picked NEVER, it should tell something about their viability.
1 Like
And what chance does lithuanians have in empire wars? They arent even picked. At all.
Koreans. Vietnamese. Byzantines. Civs that normally not rven seeing much play are seeing play. Lithuanians? Nope.
Eben in the duo tournament lithuanians only saw play once.
So youâre going to tell me thatâs balanced?
1 Like
Italians never gtecpi ked either so are Portuguese and many others?
Itâs the same few s tier civs over and over, start with nerfong those and lith might see play without even any buffs (thought propably not bevausw without the food bonus they got no eco, and the relic bonus needs time to setup and isnât empire wars suitable even thout faster spears and skims should be amazing in the settinf)
1 Like
Yeah why we donât see lith? Donât they get the 150 free food? That should be an insane bonus in these settings, just being able to spam more units or getting upgrades earlier should be so strong.
BTW: Just looked at the results, in the last swiss stage round NOT A SINGLE player could make the jump into the ko stage which wasnâ't in before. A plea to the RBW team: Pleas change the modus! You donât give the players ranked low good chances to get in if you match them with others that are ranked low! The Buchholz system will push them down again if they win against players which are ranked low! Please change that system for future events! Villese and Slam had a extremely little chance and were complety depending on results of other players, they didnât had it in their own hands. And thatâs just wrong.
Just look at the buchholz scores, the top 7 players have an average bs of 9 whilst the low 7 have an average of 7. optimally everybody should have a bs of 8 to make it âfairâ.
No they donât in this mode, which is probably the reason why they are not favoured.
Not sure if itâs the way to go to balance around empire wars as well tbh. So yeah, some civs have less screentime but if you balance them around this mode as well itâs getting complicated.
3 Likes
no. they donât get the food bonus.
But eth get their free res⊠Sometimes itâs hard to understand why certain boni are applied and others donât.
I mean of course they would be immediately a top tier civ with that bonus, but a bit consistency would be nice to have.
But thatâs exactly the point of the swiss system with Buchholz rating if I am not mistaken. Since this group-stage is NOT all vs all it tries to take into account against whom you have played. The better your opponents performed overall the higher is your score. Put in other words: The Buchholz rating tries to express how âdifficultâ the tournament was for each player. If player P1 played against the players who achieved places 1 to 4 then it is assumend that his/her tournament was tougher than for player P2 who played against the 4 last placed players. So, if both players P1 and P2 won 2 matches each, then the performance of P1 is considered to be better. The system does so by assigning P1 a higher Buchholz rating in the way it is right now.
If in the end everyone had a Buchholz rating of 8 then you would not need it at all. Then you could simply use match-wins and the ratio of games-won / games-lost to order the players. But then, using the above mentioned example, it may happen that an âunfairâ scenario occurs in which player P2 gets placed higher than P1 although (s)he had âeasierâ opponents.
BTW: Assume each participant has a 50% chance of winning against each other participant. So, if after 4 rounds each player won 2 and lost 2 matches, then the Buchholz rating is indeed equal for each player.
tl:dr In my opinion the swiss system makes only sense in combination with a rating that tries to take into accounta against whom each player has played like Buchholz does it right now.
Youâre right.
Iâve played quite a lot of competitive tournaments (not age of empires) using that swiss system and itâs exactly as you said. The more stronger your opponents are, the more rating you get for the same amount of W/L.
We had rating as % instead of plain points, but because tournaments were large usually (50+ people) and the swiss rounds usually were 6+, so whole numbers wouldnât have sufficed.
Iâm not talking about that. Iâm talking about the matchmaking. IF we use the buchholz score, it should at least try to match all participants with a representative group of the other participants. Then, AFTERWARDS the Buchholz score can compensate for opponents which turned out retrospectively stronger or weaker than assumed. IF we match players of the bottom half of the table with other players of the bottom half the average buchholz score of these players will steadily decline., holding them in the range of their current position. The buchholz score itself is fine, but the matchmaking in conjunction with that scoring system leads to the observed behaviour: Not a single of the 9-14 th ranked players from day 3 got in the playoffs. Villese and Slam won their matches, but because their buchholz is so bad, they would have needed a lot of help from the results of other participants to get in.
And this was predictable as these players with already not the highest buchholz were matched with players which would give them only 1 additional buchholz score. They should have matched them with players with 2-3 wins, so they would have harder matchups, but IF they win they at least would have had a realistic chance to get in.
Thatâs right. But the key part is that Buchholz, shall compensate for UNINTENTIONAL matchmaking differences. Not for intentional It shall compensate for the randomness in there - but the matchmatking in rbw5 intentionally matches players with different overall opponents. In conjuction with the used matchmaking system buchholz will be unequally distributed over the table with players of high performance having high buchholz and the other way around.
It actually also doesnât help really to separate player ranks to make it like this. Whilst the overall deviation of the buchholz with that matchmaking will be higher than with random matchmaking, the LOCAL deviation will be smaller, as there is a rank-depending distribution which shouldnât be the case for the buchholz to compensate, as Buchholz should only compensate local matchmaking discrepancies.
I donât criicize Buchholz. I criticize the matchmaking method.
I know the swiss system from table tennis. There are tournaments that use this system. The target is to match players with skill levels as equal as possible. The skill level of the player can vary pretty much. But with the swiss system they managed that the matches become more and more balanced the more rounds have been played. And from my experience this works pretty well.
However, there the whole tournament is held based on the swiss system instead of using it as qualifying-stage for a subsequent KO-system (at least I donât know example where it was otherwise). So, there the focus is on determining the top 3 players.
Using it as qualifying-stage I can understand your point. As a player being at the bottom of the score board I do not care about getting matched against equally skilled opponents. If the only chance to advance to the next stage is by playing against the best player, then I want to do so.
1 Like
I think itâs about dark age bonus if iâm not mistaken. Donât think mayans and chinese get their extra vils either.
1 Like
Just not seeing your favorite civ in a tournament of this magnitude does not necessarily make Lithuanians bad in general.
Italians, Portuguese, Mongols, Malians, Malays and Celts have not been seen either and I have not seen that you have commented on them (I even think Lithuanians are better than the previous ones in EW)
The Mayans, Chinese, Celts and Goths lost their Dark bonus because the game mode starts in Feudal
If you move the bonus of the Lithuanians of Age you nerf them in RM
I thought you were more objective about it but it seems you just want to see your favorite civ get played by the pros in tournaments
I think the problem is that balance has been so focus in RM (rank) that all the bonus starts to kick in in Feudal (for most of the civs) to avoid the early rush -the Lithuanian meta has not been early rush but IMO they are one of the civ that could do it with no problem with +150 food-
Wait until the bans increase and the sets are Bo5 or Bo7 and we will see if your Lithuanians are seen or not; itâs too early (absurd) to shout:
âBuff the Lithuanians +150 food in Feudal as wellâ CâMON
1 Like
All of those saw use multiple times in empire wars duo. Lithuanians meanwhile saw use once in that tournament. So yes. They need love. Not as badly as lithuanians though when it comes to ew
Should still get something. Itâs literally rhe only eco bonus they have. And are clearly complete crap without it.
Iâm sorry. Have you seen me say rhey should get the 150 food back? Stop exaggerating my point.
Even here I specifically say SOME. and NOT THE ENTIRE THING.
Not all and not much.
For example, italians and portoghese appeared basically only on water maps, maybe portos on some land maps too.
But I get it. Itâs annoying to see always the same civs, and this is especially exacerbate in this RBW tournament.
There is more than a third (maybe even half) of the civs that has never been even drafted, and others that have been consistently banned from almost every game.
And turks, teutons, japanese, persians, slavs. All civs that I know that are never been drafted in this tournament.
And yet itâs not like Iâm sitting here asking to buff lithuanians back to their rbw1 levels, like alpha grossly insinuates. Iâm asking for them to at least get some of it back though
I think the best (and perhaps simplest) way to approach this problem is the draft system of the tournament (the balance overall is very good at the moment in the Ranked point of view)
We do not see either the âtopâ civs because they are banned or the âworstâ civs because they are not picked
The Two Pools tournament was great because it forces players to play lower tier civs
True. Itâs also worth considering that the draft in this tournament is mostly due to the maps used, at least in my opinion, that restrict the number of viable civs.