Death to the winner in Off Topic

ID:3137
 
Aug 14 2005, 7:21 pm
Some exciting new features in this week's update:

New stuff:
- Server champions! On Member servers, your number of wins are now tracked for that server, and a list is kept of the top 50 winners. The Server Champion is listed in the world status for the server. There is a stat panel list of the top 50 winners and their number of wins.

We're eventually likely to hold a World Championship or some such with the top players, leading to prizes...so get on that list!

- Deathmatch mode now provides prizes for dropping another robot's power supply on your base. You can choose between increasing your power by five or fabricating two modules.

- Hydrated Air now applies the module damage before the push damage. (Richiebob)

Bugs:
- A player with restrained movement (such as Magnetic Restraints) was pushable...now they take damage instead of moving when pushed.

- After using teleport, you'd keep getting the teleport sound when clicking around during that turn. (Sorry I lost track of who first reported this.)

In the next week I'll finally get to the other sounds that were submitted, and Guy is back from vacation and working on art.
#1 Aug 14 2005, 10:07 pm
Might I suggest that your wins, loses and total games are also recorded?

For example, I'm going away for a week. For sake of argument, let's say I'm one of the best ever LRS players and I never lose a match. Then along comes Jon88, worst player ever and totally not admired by Elation at all (...for sake of argument, honest!) and plays for a full week. He loses 70% of all the games he plays, but he still cranks up a high win amount!

Then I come back and I don't get a high ranking, despite playing a few games and winning every single one.

But that's just me. I think it should be based on percentage of wins, or better yet how many wins compared to loses...or something. It'd be nice to display all that data too: "So Leftley's won 5, but lost 3, eh?".

You'd have to think of a way to deter cheaters too- who would get another member together on a quiet night and spam kill eachother to get a high rating.
#2 Aug 14 2005, 10:14 pm
Yea, that's true. But he also implemented it on the members servers only. The members are less likely to cheat.
#3 Aug 14 2005, 10:23 pm
Are you implying that people who have money to spend are less likely to be cheating, lying little toerags?

(I agree with you. ;) But uh, there should be some sort of system in place anyway)
#4 Aug 14 2005, 10:25 pm
No, I'm not implying that. Just look at corperations.

There should be some sort of system. But people that fork out money for an interent community are less likely to ruin games they support.
#5 Aug 14 2005, 10:57 pm
I'm interested in ideas on what all we should track. There's no doubt that there's room for gaming the system, though being Members-only does reduce that to some degree, simply because it makes it harder to multi-key.

When we do a World Championship, we'll moderate all games involved in that, so we can detect any problems.
#6 Aug 14 2005, 10:59 pm
A system to prevent people from cheating is logging games. If certain people play together way too often and lose a lot you could go in and secretly watch them. Or ban them from playing together.
#7 Aug 15 2005, 3:57 am
I've had some experience with ranking systems like these. Problem is, it's hard to find a statistic to rank by; you can't rank by overall wins, because then you disadvantage the good but occasional players in favour of the person who plays 300 games and wins 50. You can't rank by percentage, because then Joe Newbie who logs in, plays and wins one game, and leaves (unlikely in LRS, I'll admit - one game and you're hooked =)) will rank above long-time players who've lost a few games in their time.

I had long discussions with Lummox about this - search Design Philosophy on the developer forums if you're interested. We came up with a workable system after a while that seemed fair on paper. Better yet, it was relatively resistant to being gamed as Elation describes.
#8 Aug 15 2005, 9:06 am
You could take the percentage, overall wins, and overall losses, then average them together. Instead of having a count they could have a score.
#9 Aug 18 2005, 6:01 pm
what about
wins-losses or wins*2-losses

Although it should be possible to reset your score in case you get irreparably in the hole heh.

Also playing against 3 players should count as 3 wins (but only 1 loss) because of added difficulty. It's knida like everyone who plays putting in 1 point. Your competing for those 2,3, or 4 points (really 2, 3, and 4 and getting your point back).
#10 Aug 19 2005, 1:53 pm
Elation:
Then I come back and I don't get a high ranking, despite playing a few games and winning every single one.

Shoulda played more :P

I think if you incorperate losses at all it'd be a bad idea, because then Elation who plays "few games and winning every single one" can outrank Jon88 who wins 193 games and loses 592.

If you keep it the way you have it, it'll work fine. The bad players will take longer to get their wins, and the good players will get their wins quickly. The only reason a good player who won 50 games with 0 losses would end up at the bottom would be if he doesn't play the game much, so it'd be his own darn fault for losing to LordBob513 who won 51 games with 172 losses. See?

You could, though, do it this way:
Record the number of wins from 2, 3, and 4 player games.
Figure them in separately for the ranking, like for winning a 2 player game you get 1 point, for winning a 3 player game you get 2 points, and for winning a 4 player game you get three points.
Then you'd get this stat panel:

#) Player (2 wins, 3 wins, 4 wins) points
1) LordBob518 (0, 0, 3) 9
2) Cowdude (2,1,1) 7
3) Cowdude7 (0,2,1) 7
4) Squickles (5,0,0) 5
5) Deadron (1,0,1) 4
6) SomeOne (1,0,0) 1 (silly newbie)

4-player games take much longer than 2-player games, so people who sit in a 2 player game for 20 rounds one night can easilly top the charts unless its handled some way similar to this.

I still don't think the losses should be figured in though, because its really not needed.
#11 Aug 22 2005, 11:06 pm
The only reason a good player who won 50 games with 0 losses would end up at the bottom would be if he doesn't play the game much, so it'd be his own darn fault

I really don't like that. In an ideal ranking system, quality of play should be more important than quantity. You seem to be advocating that quantity is more important; I very much disagree. =)