Losing More, Gaining Less?

I haven't kept track of enough matches to claim a real trend, but does it seem to anyone else that they're consistently losing more infamy on a loss than they're gaining on a win? I thought they removed granular infamy, but I'm still feeling it with a few freak outliers: a 22-infamy win and a 27-infamy loss.

 

Can you share the battle logs for the +22 and -27? That usually happens when you have a much higher ranked player on your team. Also, if you are above 3500 then that player can sometimes be you, but otherwise it’s probably just luck.

Though it could also ‘possibly’ be that having more game modes is reducing the player pool, so higher ranked players are being pushed into lower ranked games more that you are used to.

 

You were right, but in a different way than you thought. Check this out.



Thanks for clearing up the infamy thing, I'll have to pay more attention to team ranks. But man, this game is really messed up.

 

LOL

That’s gotta be one of the weirdest teams I’ve seen. Though it looks like the lower guys have a high captain level, so it makes sense they are there, what doesn’t make sense is them costing you -27 when they win.

Either people are fighting at their ‘assumed’ infamy, or they are not. This mixing and matching of rules is definitely ‘messed up’

@Ash KOT

 

captain level represents anything ? i am playing this game for 3 months and reached captain level 30 . my friends playing it for long but they are on similar captain level . but they got t4 t5 epics i don't .

 

Simple: they spent lots of cash. It took me 11 months to get my first T4 Epic. It took me 18 months to get my first T5 Epic. Most NML players have spent a fair amount of cash to get there.

 

It might mean something for matchmaking. With the old ship mk system, there were limits on how low someone could get matched, based on their gear. For example, mk6 would usually get matched in Ace 3. This happened regardless of their infamy, so a mk6 could sink all the way down to 200 infamy, and would still get matched against Ace 3.

Admittedly, I don’t know if that is still in place with the new system, but it might explain why guys with less than 500 infamy are getting matached against 1400 players. Since they would both qualify as mk7s under the old system.

What I’m saying, is that if matchmaking views those guys as 1200-1400 infamy for matchmaking, then it should also view them as 1200-1400 for calculating infamy.

It is pretty unfair to say, on one hand, that “these guys are too powerful for 500 infamy games”, and then, with the other hand, punish their opponents with -27, for losing to a 500 infamy player.

 

Big losses and small wins! One of my favorite subjects!

When you have 3 wins and 2 losses and still go down 10 infamy..

 

That's truly messed up!

 

Good or bad, it's how the system works at high infamy.

 

Ouch, seems like a totally different level. One day I'll get there lol

 

And then, with those calculations, you'll drop right back out of high Infamy.

 

Yep! I can swing 400 in a day if my heads not right as it is lmao....

 

Exactly, this right here. On near-max level ships and using legendary weapons, apparently the game doesn't factor in gear level when awarding infamy. You should have more upvotes and the devs should be taking this more seriously, this is a really big issue.

Not to bring up ye olde infamy tankers, but is there still a reward penalty if you're too far below your max infamy? Because it feels like the system is punishing both the tankers AND their opponents.

 

Infamy is a measure of how "good" you are (a combination of skill and gear), so if you're facing someone with awesome items, then they're probably not that great of a player, and it should be an even playing field with your greater skill + lesser gear vs their lesser skill + greater gear. Derankers kind of mess this up because their visible infamy (300) obviously doesn't match how "good" they should be (3000 for example), that's why the matchmaker tries to correct this and you can see 3000 infamy games with 300 infamy players in them sometimes.

Stuff like gaining +18 infamy and losing -30 infamy happens when the matchmaker can't find opponents to balance out the teams' average infamy. Since the matchmaker knows it's not an even game and the higher average infamy team is "supposed" to win, it's accounted for by rewarding a lot of infamy for defeating better opponents, or not taking away as much by losing to much better opponents. It's not a perfect system but it's the best you can do when you still want to find games for really high infamy players, where the other alternative is to increase queue times which Rovio is trying to avoid for a mobile game.

 

So we trade short queue times for fairness? That's not the best they can do.

They should just remove the compensator and make it a strict 24, win or lose. This would slow down the gains of low level players being matched higher, but with so many tankers mixed in... Either that, or go in the opposite direction and make drastically mismatched games account for little infamy, less than 10, regardless of the outcome. We know BB isn't necessarily a skill-based game, so I don't know why we have an infamy system that assumes it is.

 

Say you design a game and want fair matchups, you wait until enough evenly-matched players connect. If that isn't an option (like in a mobile game where people don't want to sit around for half an hour to find a match that lasts 5 minutes), you're forced to have uneven teams. The current system works with what's available and provides infamy accordingly:
- if you're expected to win and you win, you don't gain that much infamy
- if you're expected to win and you lose, you lose lots of infamy
- if you're expected to lose and you win, you gain lots of infamy
- if you're expected to lose and you lose, you don't lose that much infamy
- if the teams are relatively even, both sides gain/lose 24 infamy

If you make it so it's just a set amount gained/lost, someone is getting screwed with the amount of infamy they're gaining/losing (usually the team with the infamy disadvantage).

Every other "competitive" game with a number rating like BB uses a system like this one. You can make it a bit more accurate by accounting for personal performance and giving everyone their own infamy gain/loss (like Rovio tried to do) but then the trouble comes from what factors decide how well you do, and how could players exploit that (like when Speeders ran around with the flag in CTF instead of capping for more coins, etc)

 

The problem, though, is that infamy isn't equal to power, so screwing the team with the infamy advantage isn't a better solution. The system works in theory, but the kind of game Battle Bay is just means that everyone is getting screwed somehow. If gear power wasn't an issue, the system would be perfect, but it is, so we can't afford to just ignore it with blind "this team should win/lose" antics based on rank alone.

Other games that use a similar system either don't have as drastic differences in gear power or they are equally as "successful", but I'm just guessing.

 

Are you referring to team-based competitive games? The challenge has always been the issue with teams; the simple fact that every player is only 10% of the participants in a match, and as such match balancing is the key factor to a match result, far more so than individual performance.