Gear Score, and why it needs to be a thing.

I hereby create my first official "salty about matchmaking" thread with the below example:

Average infamy on my team: 3289
Average infamy on enemy team: 3325

36 points of infamy is a great balance, about as well-matched as you can ever hope for at this level. Seems fair, right?



Look at the gear. Specifically, look at the sea of blue on my team, and then look at the other team ...



Graphs? We all love graphs.



You want numbers instead? I got numbers.

Legendary: 2-10
Epic: 9-16
Rare: 24-9
Uncommon: 1-0

Here's some more numbers!

Boats with no Legendary items: 1-5
Boats with 2 or fewer Rare items: 1-4
Boats with Uncommon items: 1-0

The one thing that was in "our favor" was that we had the one Mk6 in the match. Everyone else, Mk5.

So yeah. Gear score sound like a good idea to anyone else?

 

Data carries more weight than opinions, hopefully this thread can inspire people to collect and post some further examples of "infamy balanced, gear is not" and we can derive some manner of algorithm that shows this.

 

Why yes, yes it would. What a strange coincidence ...

I wouldn't say "prevent" but definitely "mitigate" ... infamy would still be factored into it, because you don't want to immediately punish people for getting lucky and unboxing an Epic early, and you can still establish skill tiers within your "gear score" range. Ideally the game tries to make matches on both, but you would have to start with a small window and let it grow over time in order to avoid "Waiting for match ... 90s remaining"

I'm trying to kick some numbers around now to create a "gear score"

 

I didn't feel it quite to be a "bug report/issue" because I also wanted player input (and more tasty data!) from the community at large, so General Discussion it was. Hoping that if we get some solid data here, it's something that I can present nicely to the admins and devs.

and yeah everything seems to end up here

 

You are making one faulty assumption. If everything else would be equal except the other team would have better gear then you would be exactly right. However that is not the case. The players are not equal. Those red team players are on that infamy level *because* of their legendary items. And the green team players are on that level *despite* of their blue items. Give the red team same weapons as you had and they would drop, or give your team legendary weapons and they would rise. This gear information is already included in the infamy because it's the product of your skill and gear.

What we could do is to check that if two players have practically the same infamy so that they are interchangeable then use other variables to do team shuffling to make the battles *seem* more fair. However, that imposes few issues:
1. How big should be the "interchangeablility" spread be? Strictly speaking the current system tries all permutations and picks the best so any spread here creates always less balanced battles infamy wise.
2. How to pick the variables used for the "cosmetic" balancing because there is no single truth and everybody has their own opinion of what is fair. No matter what we'd do, always somebody would think it was done the wrong way.
3. How to be sure that the secondary factors we'd choose don't introduce any subtle but systematic bias into the system, causing some ships, weapons, or anything be favored over something else. With current system which is blind to any other factors than infamy it guarantees that the system has only completely unbiased noise without skewing to favor anything particular.

I'd actually have a task for you and the rest of the community. Out of those 10 players, what would be the most fair and balanced match? Can you come up with a one solution that every one agrees to be the right one?

 

Okay, so I've kicked it around and here's a preliminary concept of "gear score" I'd like to hash out.

Everyone knows about BattleBayItems and the associated spreadsheet, that shows item scaling per level, right?*

So let's make this super-simple and use those values for the gear score. I'm going to make an assumption here, feel free to correct me if you feel I'm completely off the mark:

Most items fitted to ships are at their level cap. ​

The reasoning here is that most people have trouble finding duplicate items more than parts or sugar - so that "Tier II" item is probably a Lv20, the "Tier IV" is probably a Lv40, and if you don't bring that Legendary "Tier 1" up to Lv10 you're wasting a lot of potential. But not everyone is. Notably, if this is an actual algorithm, Rovio will have the individual item levels and can more precisely calculate the gear score. I'm just being simple here for the sake of lazy math.

So breaking it down, we get:

Common: 4, 8, 12, 16, 20
Uncommon: 12, 20, 26, 33, 40
Rare: 18, 28, 37, 47, 57
Epic: 25, 38, 51, 64, 77
Legendary: 65, 74, 82, 91, 100

If we add up the scores for my team, we get:

77 57 57 57 51 57 64 57 = 477
65 64 64 65 64 47 38 = 407
37 37 37 37 33 37 37 = 255
47 47 47 47 38 47 28 = 301
47 47 25 47 47 28 47 = 288​

A total of 1728 and an average of 346 "gear points" per ship.

For the enemy team, we get:

65 64 64 65 64 64 65 = 451
65 65 64 64 47 47 64 = 416
47 65 65 65 64 64 64 = 434
65 47 47 47 38 37 38 = 319
47 38 65 38 38 28 25 = 279​

A total of 1899 and an average of 380 "gear points" per ship.

Whereas the infamy is literally a percentage apart (about 1.1% if you want to split hairs) the average "gear points" per ship is separated by a much more significant 34, or almost 10% (9.8%) - that's not even taking perks into account, or what said gear is. A Legendary Torpedo, Railgun or Sniper Cannon is a lot more match-changing than a vanilla Cannon and a Mortar.

*(You don't? Go there, it'll help you decide if it's better to switch to that Epic you can only push to Lv20, or stick with your Rare Lv40.)

 

Don't mean to trim your post down to nothing, but didn't want to create a bunch more scrollbar; I've hurt it enough already, and this seems to be the core message.

And I agree - Infamy = Gear + Skill, if you assume that all players have the end goal of "I want to attain the highest infamy possible." But as you've seen from having to implement anti-seal-clubbing measures, not everyone is so noble. Perhaps 3000 infamy isn't the best sample area - maybe 2000 or lower in the 1200-1500 area where I see a lot of complaints originate from users in Mk3 ships being put into matches with Mk5s. Skill is absolutely a factor (I'm rocking Uncommons and T3 Blues at 3200 infamy, after all!) but no amount of "skill" can make up for the poor newbies in ships with 2000hp, doing 200 damage a shot, versus ships with 6000hp that do 600 damage a shot.

The phrase "herding cats" comes to mind, but I'm experimenting with some balancing that focuses primarily on the gear with infamy secondary. An assignment system similar to League's champion pick might work - Team A picks one player, Team B picks two, team A picks two, and back and forth (until poor CaffeinatedChris with the 255 gear-score gets picked last) although in this example it yielded a two-fixer vs no-fixer team, which is a whole different set of complaints (ref: your point #2 about cosmetic balancing)

Thanks for the reply. I know matchmaking isn't something that you take lightly, since it's kind of core to the whole experience of the game.

 

what is this strange concept of which you speak?