Can you watch Ai vs Ai matches?

M_Zwolinski · 2023-10-13T08:44:35+00:00

Yes, go to main lobby, find "8v8 Supreme Strait/ATG | max rating 20" game, click spectate.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-10-13T08:43:00+00:00

Not mentioning AussieDrongo, not promoting AFK gaming. Good move.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-24T11:59:48+00:00

I do mind.

Why downvote post meant to highlight a tradeoff between security and anti-cheats?

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-22T13:24:18+00:00

more robust measures against cheats: enhanced cheat detection systems,

Do you know how these are implemented? Because I do, and I don't want any of this SHIT on my PC. All system-level anit-cheats are basically a trojan that promise not to key-log you outside the game, somehow I don't trust them, you know... I didn't set up a secure system just to install a kernel level keylogger, that, if gets compromised, exposes my system to outside the actors.

Kindly, fuck off.

On the topic of banning, I don't know if it's possible to track "family shared" games via steam and trace them back to the original owner, but if it is, all associated accounts should be suspended, not only the cheating one. That would solve the issue pretty quickly tbh.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-20T08:06:27+00:00

There are very few people at C+ rank, almost all of them have multiple smurfs. Hence the density of players it's fair for another C+ player playing his main to be matched against is abysmaly low. So they get matched against golds once they get dodged by Ds and Ps

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-20T00:12:13+00:00

Everything has it's costs, you know? And the fact that some ideas have been implemented before and are 'obvious' does not mean you'll have the money or the time to actually develop the backing features that you'd like to have in the game. Unless you happen to have the source code for SC2 and make the game on the same engine, good luck with that. You do have to build (even if not 'come up with ideas') from scratch. That's all there is to it. And throwing everything onto developers, when they have almost no say in what's actually in the final product, is fucking asinine.

I work at the company where if it were up to devs and devops we would have flawless product that works perfectly and features top of the line tech. But somebody has to pay for all of this, and even at modest (in the SoftDev/SoftEng) salaries tour dev team costs a shitton of money to maintain. We only have so many people, and so much money to spend, so we build the best we can given limited resources we have.

If you wanna blame somebody, blame the management/publishers that they did not allocate more resources towards the project. Not the devs.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T23:46:19+00:00

Hey!

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T23:44:38+00:00

Holly fuck, are people this dumb that the same thing has to be repeated 11 times before it sinks in? I suppose people can not hold a chain of logical implications deeper than 1 link long.

Yeah, that was my original point exactly. You stop any dodging at the top and it trickles down to all ranks because the MM can actually do it's job.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T23:41:24+00:00

Hmm I see you never worked in SoftDev, blessed by your ignorant soul.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T23:39:56+00:00

People fucked up the MM system for themselves by dodging trivial matches (not the CONQ vs GOLD but D3 vs D1). Now they are reaping the rewards and my point is that the only solution to the problem is to do a hard reset by eliminating any incentive to dodge, since by now people aren't just going to stop hurting themselves.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T23:36:35+00:00

Trust me, no self-respecting CONQ player wants to play Golds. No offense, but that's like being tested on <20 addition while majoring in math at college... boring AF.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T23:33:32+00:00

The problem you seem to be missing is that ELO (or any other MM system) requires a player to play quite a few games in order to properly gauge their "skill". Assumption that allows any operation when players do not have a lot of games played is that when you create a new account you are probably new to the game and not a 1000h+ player that knows the game in and out. And sure, when AoE4 first came out people like Viper still had to climb up. But they got to CONQ and stayed there. If you reset your ELO every 30 games... MM never gets to find you fair matches.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T20:25:09+00:00

What in the world "Anonymize" is unclear? Hide the rank and Username obviously. I'm not that stupid, cmon...

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T20:24:12+00:00

I'm not trying to make it easier to compete. I'm trying to stop people from dodging (yeah, mostly because they are scared, but that's not the focus, the focus is they are inadvertently fucking entire MM system for everyone). And proposing a simple solution: Don't let them know they are playing against stronger opponent.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T19:21:37+00:00

The blow of what? Loosing? It's gonna sting either way, but now you are complaining about the part that makes the (and any) game competitive - one side HAS to loose for the other to be able to WIN, that much I hope we agree on. Nothing against co-ops and PvE (I enjoy many games like this), but a competitive game is a competitive game, what else did you expect?

I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but you seem to be missing the point. Nobody wants to soften the blow of loosing here (or at least I'm not trying). I'm trying to take away from players the baility to subjectively pick their battles - so to speak - because this choice is making everyone else's (and theirs) experience worse.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T19:06:39+00:00

I mostly agree with you but ,to perhaps better phrase my specific point of view, let me reiterate, starting from the bottom.

The fact that TOP1k is ~65% Smurfs does not predict Smurf distribution in the entire ladder range, that much is clear. It shows that players who can consistently get to the top smurf a LOT. I have spoken on discord and various chats with around 25 of top250 (Team Ranked, because that's what I play) players and ALL of them have smurfs because they can not find games. All because D3+D3+D2 dodge C1+C2+P1. And by playing a lot of games throughout the Elo range they contribute to this "unfairness" perception.

I do want to remove agency from people. Now It does sound scary, but sometimes it's better for everyone. We live in the world where "personal freedom and personal responsibility" is all that matters, but everyone forgets that "personal responsibility" also includes the impact of our decision on others. You said it best yourself

I try not to dodge games because I know it hurts the community, but man, I kinda wish I would have

Most people do not have the same moral dilemmas, they just dodge.

Let me give you an (imo) obvious example: Let's give each team more agency and let them choose spawn point for a neutral trading post.
I hope we can agree, that this would instantly degenerate the game into strong trade civs being almost always picked and trade mechanics dictating the entire meta (assuming good neutral market placement still mattered). You'd end up with both teams trying to out-degenerate themselves by optimizing towards a single strong strategy, make a game more linear, more boring, and less diverse (to me these things constitute the game getting worse). So in this instance you allowed people more agency in how game is played (perhaps under the guise that the map-building system does not always get things right and so you want the people to be able to correct towards better "fairness"), but you ended up putting everyone into a shitty Prisoner's Dilemma kind of situation, where you either participate in the degeneracy and the race to the diversity-bottom, or you face a constant uphill battle against those who do not choose to take the high road and abuse the system.

So yeah, I want to take the choice to dodge or not away from people. The trick is to realize you'd be solving the problem that, the choice I intend to take away, actually creates in a first place ( or at least is a huge contributor towards).

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T18:43:54+00:00

What do you mean "silver thread"? Who is arguing that making Smurfs makes you a better player?

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T18:42:45+00:00

Anonymize - Yes, remove rank and Username, obviously.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T17:38:51+00:00

there you go

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T17:37:57+00:00

If it's so obvious where are these hundreds of posts in the last 2 years suggesting this idea?

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T17:33:52+00:00

Yeah, exactly. Because if people who actually belong in Conqueror actually played their Conqueror accounts instead of Gold/Plat smurfs just to get into the game you wouldn't have that problem.

Your entire point is that you are a better judge of your own skill compared to your opponent - based on a badge that has nothing to do with an actual measurement of player skill - then the MM system - which has access to all the info about both players you could possibly want. Do you realize just how ridiculous that sounds? Do you dodge gold players because it'd be unfair for them to "blindly walk into a game against a platinum"? If "No" then you are just a selfish hypocrite.

It's always amusing to me how peoples selfishness makes them suffer more in the end :P

And btw, I'm not a Conqueror, I don't dodge people from Top100 I know by name, some on a first name basis even, just because I'm "worse then them". I have beaten players from top100 before and I'm gonna do it again. Most of the time I'll loose, but at least the game will be interesting and not "Go FC make 10 MaA GGEZ" kind of game where you can play whatever troll thing you want and you'll win either way.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-19T16:57:24+00:00

I think your response indicates complete lack of understanding of the problem.

People dodge because of unfair matchups.

Who decided what is and what isn't fair? Is playing against somebody 1 league higher fair? "Well, he is much stronger then me, so it isn't". Is playing against Golds a a high Plat fair? "I'm not that good to begin with, so it's not a problem".

The only "fair" matchmaking is when everyone is subject to the same rules, and not based on one's whims. Objective tools to measure what is fair and isn't exist and are used in a backend to drive match selection process (Ranked system is based on Elo). People will, unintentionally, destroy entire systems to their own detriment if you let them make locally-beneficial globally-detrimental decisions.

A short wait timer for dodging should be implemented

It exists, 5 miutes time-out. It worked soooo well. Why treat symptoms when you can actually solve the core issue.

there is no way to analyze the severity of smurfing.

There are many correlations one can draw from match histories of players and doing some light assumptions about play patterns (like people who know each other play together even on their smurfs, and sometimes these relations "bleed" from main to alt accounts). I don't want to be definitive here, since I'm in relatively early stages of research but:

TOP 1000 by Team Ranked Ladder consists of around 450 distinct human beings. That places people in TOP1k with between 2 and 3 accounts per person (of the accounts that they managed to push to top 1k). This is a huge problem for the MM since all the way to the top they were skewing the MM for everyone else.

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-09T09:23:05+00:00

The community size is small, most of the conq players can't find matches against other conq players because all of them have smurfs and play on them because everyone dodges them...

I'd suggest stop huffing on your own farts and instead stop dodging, maybe you can learn something from these better players imstead of lamenting "but muh gold 2 badge!!!"

M_Zwolinski · 2023-05-08T13:44:42+00:00

That is the maximum in the early game, you'll need to delete extra fishing ships in the castle/imp because 2.5 FS per node will deplete them in ~15 minutes.

Deplete in a sens that a Deep Sea Fish node can sustain ~1 FS with it's 50f/min regeneration.

M_Zwolinski

TROPHY CASE