Lower the starting Elo?

Right.
I had only 1v1 in mind

according to the title it is about lowering the starting elo
it has been explained in several places that this would have no long term effect as people’s elo would decrease by the same amount.
I also question what’s so bad about playing against or with a new player, and why OP perceives himself to be better than them

It’s around 800 mate

Stop spreading false news

Go open some alt accounts and you would know

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I think you are trolling here…
The Elo system is literally designed around that 1000 start for everybody.
Cause it wants the average player to have 1k elo…
I don’t even understand WHY they wanted it this way, but it’s how the rating system is designed.

I think there wouldn’t be anything wrong with either a slow general average elo gain or a variable start. But the elo system is literally designed around that 1k start for everybody.
If we don’t start with 1k, we should use a different ranking system.

Sounds as if you have experience with that…

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One concept could be every time a higher ranked player or team wins to reduce the elo loss of the losers.
And vice versa if the lower ranked player or team wins to increase the loss of the losers.

This would passively also reduce the efficiency of pushing or throwing games intentionally.

But the main effect is that over time it would build up a small general elo gain.
This would shift the distribution to the right side of the starting elo, as higher ranked ´players generally win more often vs lower ranked players (therefore the ranking difference).

Then two things can happen when new players join the game.
Either they lose most of their games against the generally slightly higher ranked opponents (as the distribution is slightly shifted matchmaking will pair them more often with slightly higher ranked players). This would cause a further increase in the average elo.
Or they win most of the games. In this case the playerbase would slightly lose elo again.

This means new players would stabilize the system until a point is reached where the new players have a win rate that is representative for their elo.
When this point is reached we have the optimal distribution and the shown elos/ratings are absolutely representative and not relatively like currently.

The thing is ofc to find the right values for the elo gains and losses.
Too low and the average gains are too marginal over time. Too high and we might get elo inflation again.
Also for the stabilizing effect there is the necessary need for a constant stream of new players.

It occurred to me, that for such an old game, as awesome as it is, what I’m wanting may not be possible, for economic reasons. New players need a player base, within their range, to compete with. And if the new player base is in low numbers, the devs will want to match them with players with a slightly higher tier of experience, just to keep the matchmaking times within reason. I think that’s what I’m experiencing. What the devs may not have considered is that, in team games (which I’ve said I prefer) some players may never get out of the newb category, despite having a much better grasp of the game.

Wouldn’t the problem the OP points out be better solved by restricting Ranked TGs to players who already have an established Ranked 1v1 ELO?

That could be viewed as somewhat draconian, and it wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but it’d somewhat reduce the number of team games that are spoiled by people with an inaccurate TG ELO.

It would be quite interesting if:

  • ranked TG was only accessible to players established 1v1 ELO (at least 5 games?)
  • every premade team got assigned a team ELO value starting at the average 1v1 ELO from the premade players, instead of using one ELO per player. So everytime people play premade in a new team, the team ELO is independent from their ELO when they play alone or with other teamates.

Starting with a lower ELO should be possible if every other player gets a minor additional ELO increase or decrease (1 ELO more or less per win/loss) as long as the average ELO is not 1000.
I think it may be nice for newer players to:

  • let a couple of AIs play in ranked
  • let new ranked players start around the ELO of the best AI they managed to beat. Maybe with an option “we noticed you played skirmishes against AI. You will start at the level of the AI (700 in your case) instead of the players average (1000 ELO) ?”

This is, if players below 1000 ELO dont mind an occasionnal game against AI of their level instead of a player.

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Agree! All my friends who are beginners are about 500ELO naturally, but when we play team games it the game assumes they are 1000 rate :frowning:

The thing is, the starting Elo was already changed with the launch of DE as on HD and Voobly, it was 1600 but obviously lacked matchmaking.

yes. i do. to prove a point. i cant complain about something if i cant prove exactly how bad it is

unlike so many people that either “its fine” or simply parrot what someone else has erroneously said

this is how better systems do it. and is the obvious conclusion if the devs actually cared

but the system is so screwed up there’s so many things they need to fix, but they wont, because they get their money and they keep the pros(sponsors) and conservatives happy

there are huge issues with this. iirc there were about 4000+ more players who were active on the team ladder than the 1v1 ladder. So you would be locking people out of team games who might have been playing them for ages…
another issue is that the barrier to entry for team games is way lower, playing some games against the AI with friends and then trying out a team ladder is way less daunting than 1v1.

I like this idea. Firstly I was always curious how well AI would do on the ladder, secondly it would open the option of letting people make their own AIs and have them compete.
This might still lead to a small shift in elo, but I think it would be minor and not undermine the integrity of the current ratings.

this could be an option “up to X in 100 games can be against AI”. Only give an AI opponent if there are no real players available for matching

this wouldn’t work for people who barely play 1v1.
say someone has played very few 1v1s so is still pretty close to 1000 elo. if they are a good team player they are smurfing hard with this, and their elo never changes, if they are a weak player they never get equally weak opponents.

I think that premades and single queue should maybe just be separate queues

At least the first 10 games could have a bigger K-factor to find your Elo faster
As far as I know the standard K-factor is set to 32, what about the first 10 games set it to 64?

i think that’s already the case, no? If not i agree with it

Been suggested at least 2 years ago. Maybe more?

The issue isn’t the fix that’s needed. The issue is that Devs need to actually care. They don’t. so it hasn’t been fixed.

It’s still amazing how consistently people are oblivious to smurfs and what will enable them

You don’t start at 1000 elo. Your initial matches are currently closer to 800. The whole system is warped AF.

Even while placing your elo doesn’t correspond to the elo of your opponents. There’s inflation in both directions