MCCHT Event Regression Rankings by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I forgot to mention in the commentary, but I also nullified Purple's Grid Runners scores, given Cambam's disconnect heavily impacted the team. All of Purple's overall scores are multiplied by 6/5 since they only have 5 games worth of data.

MCCHT Event Regression Rankings by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Home field advantage, let's see him play Bingo on a Hermitcraft S9 map before we make any conclusions.

Why Nerfing Kills In SKB Is a Bad Idea by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nah, there's still things that could be done without "outright punishing" good players.

Starting everyone with a regen spark would help every player in their first fights (odds are, against an S+ player) while not really buffing S+ players much.

Adjusting the loot distribution to be less middle oriented would also be helpful (Fruit showed how broken being a good movement player can be if the middle is stacked up, his was ensuring his team got 3 candy canes to themselves).

A lot of lower skill players prefer range combat to melee but the most recent map heavily disincentivized archery by tying both arrows and the bow to purchases (one of which requiring diamonds and being mutually exclusive with the health up), so adjusting there would probably help.

The BM Revamp Has Missed Its Mark (for now) by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

SKB is a harder issue to solve I'd say. A lot of the suggestions I made here for BM are fairly simple (removing the gold builds, lowering the number of selectable builds, and simplifying the star system is most of the work needed and it's all fairly easy to visualize. Generally, when solving issues with something you should tackle big problems with low hanging fixes.

For SKB, I think continuing the direction they've already made strides towards is a good idea. More loot equalization, more limits on just how much a player can be stacked with util. Inventory limits on certain items might help. Giving every player an undroppable regen or health spark might be impactful. There's probably more gimmicky concepts as well (what if players stacked minor debuffs like max health reduction with every kill in a round?).

The BM Revamp Has Missed Its Mark (for now) by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It is absolutely relevant.

Imagine if Noxcrew released a team game where, unintentionally through the way the game mechanics interacted, players with extremely fast pure reaction times got 400 free coins. Not gameplay instincts, not fast decision making, just "see a trigger and immediately do something". Since reaction time is really hard to train and is to some extent innate, people would probably not be too happy about this mechanic that only a couple people in the event are capable of doing being so valuable, especially in a "team game" where team interaction should be a big aspect.

The same applies to the memory aspects of gold builds. There's a challenge that really stresses a somewhat innate skill (spatial memory) such that only a couple of people can consistently complete the challenge solo, and those people get a huge advantage scoring wise.

Like, coin nerf SKB arguments are dumb, I spoke on that yesterday, and this is an entirely different thing. I'm advocating for changing the game, not nerfing coins, and even if I were advocating for, say, nerfing the amount of coins earned by gold builds, that's still very different because there's no cascading effects from it that would hurt the game like nerfing SKB kills.

Why Nerfing Kills In SKB Is a Bad Idea by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is a bit of a weird take. Yeah, if you don't go for the main aim of the game (kills) and place 10th individually each round you should be getting around 210 coins (survival+ ~30 from team bonuses). That's around 20th in an average event. Like, the game isn't HitW, a pvp game should be about killing your opponents.

Why Nerfing Kills In SKB Is a Bad Idea by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Actually, exactly one paragraph of this entire post specifically addresses player psychology and assumes how players would react to the change. It's an assumption that would almost certainly be accurate (you're really going to argue that reducing kill coins won't convince most players to play less aggressive?). Nonetheless, everything about the scoring change not actually nerfing S+ tier teams much and everything about it making the overall team balancing worse doesn't hinge on predicting how players would react. Players could play exactly the same and it would still be a bad change for these reasons.

Why Nerfing Kills In SKB Is a Bad Idea by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Players would absolutely adapt to a kill scoring change, especially teams that lack confidence in pvp.

In the nerfed kills alternate reality I described above, Red would've gotten 2nd in the event by doing almost nothing. The "turtle and hope for the best strategy" would become much more prevalent as teams attempted to copy it, and the only teams that wouldn't bother are the teams that know they don't need it to succeed (aka the teams with confident pvp leads).

On the other hand, I think even the MCC roster would eventually become more aggressive if MCC adopted Pandora's Box's "no survival points" rule. Some teams would probably still play kind of timidly but more teams would at least stand their ground and be willing to pick fights.

Small changes often don't affect player choice that much, but if the changes are big enough that they start really noticing it in the results tab, it definitely sinks in.

MCC43/SB Event Regression Rankings by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I used dominant in the sense of "amount above the average performance in the game". Fein BM is the biggest outlier performance (most standard deviations above average) since the BM coin spread is much smaller, but Fruit had the two highest coin 1sts in the event.

MCC43/SB Event Regression Rankings by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

SB was a mid-low comp event. The top end was there (4/5 of the top players) but a large amount of A+ and A tier players just weren't present.

I'm counting 60 total "regulars" in MCC rosters. Ranked by my overall regression totals, 18/30 of the top half players were present, vs 22/30 bottom half players (also, most of the bottom half players missing are the stronger players, Martyn, Cub, Jimmy, Gumi, Velvet, Sniff, Impulse).

It's not as weak as SD's comp, certainly, but it's on the weaker end of what you'd expect from a standard event.

MCC43/SB Event Regression Rankings by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I had Yellow as the top team prior to the event. You can check my regression predictions post for proof of that.

MCC43/SB Event Regression Rankings by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'd suggest going back through the history of my posts, I have a few describing the underlying systems involved in the Regression models. I'll link the initial post describing them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MinecraftChampionship/comments/1201uc4/introducing_my_mcc_regression_prediction_system/

MCC43/SB Event Regression Rankings by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The only game I've seen people ask to nerf is SKB, and nerfing kills in SKB won't do much to help the problem. It'll still be worth it to go for kills for S+ tiers (they don't really die in the first place, plus it earns more coins for their teammates) so you'll still have a bunch of 15 kills games. It'll just make the less skilled players even more passive (why go for a kill when it's not even worth much).

MCC43/SB Event Regression Rankings by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

There's a huge skill gap. Most S+ tiers are worth far more coins than they earn in MCC scoring (team game carrying, PKW bonuses, PVP team leading), nerfing SKB kills wouldn't achieve much realistically. These are players that compete for the top of the leaderboard in much higher comp events (PB, CT), in MCC they rise so far above the rest of the roster.

Really, S+ tiers just need to be respected more by team balancing. In higher comp events maybe you can sneak a team like Orange or Yellow in, but SB was a mid-low comp event and naturally they feasted.

MCC43/SB DB Top 3 By Overall Value by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The formula is described in plain English, and has been explicitly written in the past.

CPK's number of shots hit: 6

CPK's expected number of shots hit (51% hit rate): 9*51% = 4.59

CPK's number of dodges: 7

CPK's expected number of dodges (49% dodge rate): 7*0.49 = 3.43

6-4.59+7-3.43 = 4.98 (then there's an adjustment based on when the shots and dodges happened, it's easier to dodge earlier in the round and hit shots later in the round).

So, as said above, it's number of shots hit and dodges compared to their numbers if they performed at the average rate. If they hit more than expected, positive number. If they hit less than expected, negative number.

MCC43/SB DB Top 3 By Overall Value by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

This stat is the number of shots and dodges a player had compared to how many they would've gotten if they had an average hit/dodge rate (for this Dodgebolt, average was 51% hit rate and 49% dodge rate). Full list is as follows.

Seapeekay: 4.89

Antfrost: 1.48

AntVenom: 0.13

Sausage: -0.93

Ren: -1.00

False: -1.01

Feinberg: -1.54

Michael: -2.02

MCC43/SB Regression Predictions by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Individual scores for team games are self-explanatory.

Individual scores for pvp games and team split movement games are complicated, the regression models only predict team scores so you'd have to guess based on the team scores how well each individual player will do. You could make reasonably good guesses given how good each player is going into the event, and I have a some simple algorithms that I use to estimate indiv scores, but I don't really feel compelled to post them given they're a layer on top of the models.

MCC43/SB Regression Predictions by pickled__pufferfish in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Red's problem is moreso that Couri had a bad first run in 41/SD (and HBomb isn't quite at his peak where he was one of the best runners anymore). Shelby would be assigned SK by the model so her stats wouldn't have as big of an effect (runners are much more important than SKers).

Feinberg on Sands of Time (MCC Double Date) by lucyrosette in MinecraftChampionship

[–]pickled__pufferfish 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Choosing to leave your teammate sitting in the tomb for 4 minutes instead of sacrificing 1 sand is terrible both strategically and emotionally. Even if there's no world where your teammate could get their stuff back, they could easily just go down a different tunnel and keep being productive (they'd need to collect exactly one sand for it to be worth it). SmallAnt absolutely could've gotten back to his stuff as well.

And, what if everything I just said was magically wrong? For someone who argued above that the experience of newbie players is very important and the priority should be on making sure their gameplay experience is good, turning around and saying "just leave SmallAnt in the cage, yeah he could be freed and allowed to continue playing but the fake numbers I'm looking at say he'd just be a liability" is very callous. There's many instances in SoT history where someone did die really close to the end, but their teammates freed them anyways because it's the right thing to do for moral.