MOBA toxicity is a design problem. These players are like this because these games are like this.
If good players wading in among the noobs is such a huge problem, what have you done in the last twenty years to make it stop being a problem? Stopping it from happening is a naive band-aid. A kneejerk response to the symptoms of systemic issues. This game has one hundred and twenty-four characters. Don’t tell me the devs are unfamiliar with tweaking complex systems for macro-scale results. Low-skill games are where you’d expect handicaps or dynamic difficulty applied to all the numbers on either team. An e-sports demigod and a fresh player using DK bongos should be made similarly effective. If that disconnect between action and results frustrates the guy pushing 400 APM… good.
If you need a whole-ass reputation system just to identify people who play badly on purpose, why the fuck do you allow bad play to matter so much? Maybe lashing strangers together for an hour, when half of them will lose, is a potent source of bitter feelings. Maybe a game that punishes people for leaving when they feel bad isn’t a recipe for positivity! But hey, at least they can keep their head down and mind their business, oops nevermind it’s all interdependent teamwork. Well at least four good teammates can make up for one bastard… oh, did you never fix “feeding?”
Rubber banding shit to make skill mismatches still competitive is a dogshit excuse for game design that completely and utterly destroys the integrity of competition.
We are not talking about evenly-matched teams. The integrity of dirt-tier matches is ruined by pros on fresh accounts. People so infatuated with a child’s view of “competition” that nothing matters besides winning. Teamwork? Sportsmanship? Fun? Fuck that, just win win win win win win win.
Skill-based matchmaking is already a judgement call for how well you’re supposed to do. And each long-ass match is rife with ways to judge how well a player is doing - moment to moment - relative to their teammates, their situation, and their character. Measuring and rewarding individual skill is possible even if your team gets utterly destroyed. Or carried by one cheating bastard.
Games can be fun to play for reasons besides ‘did you win.’ Success and growth can be about more than ‘don’t lose.’ This is a game that takes ten people forty-five minutes to play. Reducing it to a binary outcome, as if that’s the only metric for “the integrity of competition,” is the root problem.
Games can be fun to play for reasons besides ‘did you win.’
They’re fun when they’re fair. They’re not fun when they’re not fair. Losing fairly is part of the experience. Losing unfairly isn’t. Winning unfairly isn’t.
Rubber banding isn’t unconditionally horse shit game design in every context because of the end result. It’s because it fundamentally breaks the mechanics of the game. A high skill ceiling isn’t a design flaw. It’s the entire purpose of the game.
Fair games won’t be affected. Evenly-matched teams do not need this.
Anything can become a flaw when it causes awful results. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. MOBAs are all toxic as fuck - that’s no accident. The choices shared by these games, cause the problems shared by these games.
These are systemic problems. They cannot be solved by attacking the symptoms. You have to address the cause.
If you could magically identify smurfs, you could just put them at the level they should be or ban them without putting them in a match. There’s no such thing as rubber banding that only affects cheating.
A meaningful skill gap resulting in a rout is the whole point of a competitive game. It’s the definition of a competitive game. It’s why people are playing. Go play a casual game with a low skill ceiling it that’s what you want to play. Don’t play a game with a high one then demand that they break it.
There is no possible scenario where rubber banding can ever be better than dogshit game design. The core concept is incompatible with sound mechanics. The person playing better is supposed to get better results.
If you could magically identify smurfs, you could just put them at the level they should be or ban them without putting them in a match
That’s what league does. If it detects early on that you’re probably a smurf, you get tossed into smurf queue where you’ll face other experienced players, and it’s pretty reliable. Both times I’ve made new accounts, I’ve almost immediately gotten placed with experienced players, usually before the account graduates beyond bot games
Low-tier matches have a lower skill ceiling. That is what makes them… low-tier. We are only talking about those matches, and we are only talking about when one player is obviously, measurably, operating on a higher level. If a pro joins some newbies and plays like a newbie - there is no problem.
Even so:
Playing better will always get better results. There are no blue shells in DOTA. Winning isn’t random. Making the game slightly more difficult for people demonstrably kicking ass doesn’t have to stop them from kicking ass. Just make their contribution reasonable for a game that is supposed to be a team effort in the minor leagues.
Skill ceiling is a concept completely independent of the players involved. It’s a trait of the game itself.
A lower skill played having the game of their life playing way above and beyond the other players in the match is supposed to see the results that match that. A lower ranked player learning quickly and progressing faster than average is supposed to see results that reflect that. Having a great match and being nerfed because some idiot thinks it’s broken for you to see the success that fair mechanics earn you isn’t a good experience. Having your performances nerfed by rubber banding also keeps you from getting better by not having your successful and unsuccessful actions provide the consistent feedback correct mechanics do. On top of that, it completely destroys the matchmaking mechanics by not having the outcome be the rout it’s supposed to be when one player is significantly better.
Rubber banding is not a valid solution to any problem in any context. It’s proof that you don’t understand anything about games.
Skill ceiling is both meta and mechanics. That’s why new tech raises the ceiling. What people do matters as much as what’s possible. The game doesn’t have to change, for gameplay to change.
And if we’re talking about smurfing, we’re talking about the game being played badly. Naively. By amateurs. Or at best by experienced played who can’t manage to get their shit together.
Detecting when someone’s doing better than the rank of the current match is how ranking works. It’s not some impossible magic trick. It’s a judgement the game already makes, and that decision already affects people. If you do really well - you get moved to a different group, where you are more likely to get your ass kicked.
When ranking works, the only feedback for your skill is that rank. You will still lose half the time. You will get outmaneuvered half the time. Your execution is on-par with everyone else in the match.
… do you think handing one player an effortless victory is how matchmaking is supposed to work? My guy, one player managing a “rout” is the problem smurfing causes. It’s why Valve is handing out bans.
Look, I can see where you’re coming from about the over-emphasis on winning; but it just sound like you’re talking about an entirely different issue to what Valve is trying to address.
Your suggestion, if I understand it correctly, is to have the game automatically make a judgement about every player’s individual skill during the match itself, and apply some buff or penalty if it detects a major discrepancy between players. Is that what you are suggesting?
I suspect that the existence of mechanics like that would lead to a lot of angst, regardless of whether it ‘works’. People already have a tendency to blame their team and blame match-making for making them lose. Imagine if they could also blame the game itself for holding them back. … It could be a perfect system that never gets it wrong, and it would still cause a lot of people to get upset. And I don’t see how it could fix the problem of smurfing anyway unless it is a seriously over-zealous system that erases basically any skill advantage.
Also, I don’t think such auto-detection would be reliable. But although we could could discuss the technicalities of what might or might not work… I just don’t think it’s worth pursuing in dota anyway. Perhaps it would be better suited to some other game.
I am describing an autobalance system, in low tiers. Specifically in low tiers. Only in low tiers.
And being “held back” means the game is applauding you. If some newbie genuinely achieves enlightenment and begins playing at a superhuman level, then win or lose, the game is telling them ‘holy shit, well done.’
Which is how ranking already works. I cannot overstress, the game already sets people up to get their asses kicked half the time. It watches how you play, scores your performance, and pits you against people who are going to counteract whatever new tricks you’ve just learned.
This is only a more direct application of that value-above-replacement estimate. In low tiers. Because nobody cares if some top-percentile player wrecks a lobby full of top-decile players.
It sounds like you just don’t like the idea of skill-based or team-based games. Plenty of people do. Its not an excuse to ruin it for others through smurfing, or to take it away from those who do enjoy the games.
Zero respect for any form ‘you just hate [blank]’ in any detailed discussion of [blank].
These are real problems. Valve is making a big show of dealing with them. But over two decades of tweaking and expanding this genre of games, with their absurd number of interconnected systems, nobody seems to have done anything to avert these systemic issues. They just label bad behavior and viciously punish anyone who does it.
It’s a video game. Unless someone is outright hacking, they can only do what the developers allow them to do. This specific genre - this competitive multiplayer game, distinct from all others - is a bottomless well of toxicity. That is no accident. It is an unavoidable consequence of the rules these games have chosen.
Modifying the rules is blase. It’s not some ruinous event; it happens every month. So modifying the rules to avoid the worst aspects of the community seems eminently desirable. Especially if it only applies to the low-stakes, newbie-friendly games where high-tier assholes want to lurch in and ruin it for everyone.
To be crystal clear:
This does not have to affect high-tier play, at all.
There is no reason whatsoever to handicap pros and wannabes playing at their absolute sweatiest.
This is about dirt-league players getting stomped by people committing bannable offenses. The fact anyone even wants to commit those offenses, is a systemic problem. It is shaped by the developers’ decisions, and different decisions would have different outcomes. Every system is perfectly designed to produces its observed results.
If you’re not willing to discuss systemic solutions then you’re not ready to address systemic problems.
Im not sure what you’re advocating then? A simplified “New Player Mode”? That already exists. Unranked mode? That exists too. SBMM? Already present. Or are you saying we need to tie accounts to people’s SSNs or something to prevent smurfing, because even ignoring account sharing, theres no way at all that that would backfire. As long as there are people to bully, someone will go out of their way to try and put others down to make themselves feel better. At least in DotA, they try and address it with fairly in-depth behaviour systems, unlike every other competitive game.
It’d be great if people stopped making up the conversation they’d rather be having. ‘These systemic problems should be balanced out in low-tier games.’ ‘So you hate high-tier play?’ Wrong. ‘You’re against tier rankings?’ Wronger. ‘You want players to submit a blood sample?’ Are you okay?
What I’m advocating is what I wrote. Twice. Namely: automatic handicaps based on the current match, using the grading the game plainly already does.
The SSN suggestion is the polar fucking opposite of what I’m on about - the game shouldn’t need to know who you are, to keep low-tier matches fair. Detecting higher-skilled play is normal. It’s how ranking works. And at low ranks, the skill ceiling is nice and low, so limiting the effectiveness of any individual player based on their performance over an entire half-hour of gameplay seems plenty tractable.
It’s not trivial - but these devs spent twenty years cranking out a metric buttload of characters, and all of those are at least roughly balanced. These people are capable. I worry they’re simply not trying to address these root causes. Possibly in part because suggestions along these lines make people ask ridiculous unrelated questions.
You’re basically suggesting that Valve turn DotA into Heroes of the Storm, a MOBA so lame it lived and died in just 7 years. Meanwhile, DotA has been going strong for nearly 20, despite the fact that anyone that’s ever heard of the game knows that it’s a toxic cesspool. Your “solution” to what you perceive as a problem is to make the game less fun, and that’s why Valve makes money by the truckload and you write sad opinion pieces and attempt to insult people on social media.
One, a game lasting “just” seven years is a fucking bizarre jab.
Two, ‘stop pretending disagreement means I hate your favorite thing’ is not an insult.
Three, if all criticism of an ongoing “toxic cesspool” lasting twenty god-damn years has you sneering in defense of the cesspool, I don’t think the details of that criticism have anything to do with your response.
But sure. How dare anyone point to a problem and say ‘they should fix that.’ I mean, where’s my billion-dollar franchise, right? It makes money so it can’t be wrong.
your meltdown is worse than my melt down. you’re spiraling harder than me. im barely even showing my ass compared to you.
I care about toxicity. So does Valve, apparently. And PC Gamer. The problems with this genre are newsworthy. And it’s been an issue for two straight decades.
But I guess ‘problems have underlying causes which change can address’ is an invitation for everyone to commit the attribution fallacy and attack whatever gurning projection they’d rather be dealing with.
Meanwhile, the game’s still a cesspool - in your own words - and treating the symptoms will not fix that. Maybe they should treat something else.
What you’re describing is not and does not in any way resemble a competitive game. “You hate competitive games” is not an opinion. It’s the only possible conclusion that can be drawn from your continued deluded hate fest on the core defining traits of the genre.
The second you nerf a player for doing “too well” in any context, calling your game competitive isn’t misleading or misrepresentative. It’s a lie. It cannot be described as a competitive game if rubber band mechanics exist at any point in any context. It’s the equivalent using lard in your food then calling it kosher. The instant it’s implemented in any context, using the word competitive turns into fraud.
Sure, why not. I’m a moustache-twirling villain who personally despises your favorite binkie. All the explanations are just a clever ruse to baffle and trick people, so they’ll think problems have causes.
Let’s pretend grading on a curve means everybody gets the same gold star.
Let’s pretend “competitive” means exactly what you think, no more and no less.
Why should the dirt leagues be “competitive” in your definition?
Why should the lowest rungs of that ladder be as cutthroat and merciless as the upper echelons? It’s fuckin’ little league. We’re talking about people who suck so hard that one guy with a fresh account can demolish them. This is what handicaps are for.
One of the good things valve has been doing recently is cracking down hard on smurfs/alts. I started league last year and was often the only actual new player in the game. Imagine the amount of toxicity I got when people found out there was an actual noob in their new Smurf’s matchmaking.
Bad play doesn’t matter as much if everyone is actually on the same level. If everybody is bad, nobody is.
I’ve seen “competitive” games turn level-headed friends into seething piles of swears. They aren’t having fun, they admit to not having fun, they acknowledge that they hate it… But they keep going because ranks, clout, commitment…
Games should have stakes, but modern ranking systems are designed to addict the exact same way that loot-boxes and other similar mechanics do. They hook and pull in deeper and the only way I’ve seen friends quit is when it gets so bad they go cold turkey. And only then do they look back at months or even years of playing a game, and see nothing but a waste of time and money.
But it works! These systems pull players into the grind like they’re getting paid to play, even when they are hating every second.
I love some of these games, but I only learned to maximise my enjoyment of them once I began playing them casually. And it’s such a pity that my friends who haven’t learned the trick of not taking it so seriously, burn out on them, while I just keep going and having fun. I run out of people to play with on a regular basis because of this.
Just one factor of the design of these systems is that they have you feeling like you have to consistently win, in order to be worth something. And as that is obviously an impossibility, it leads to every loss taking three times more than what a win is able to give.
I mean yeah, there are always going to be people with problems. But the guy I was responding to was leveling complaints like “playing badly shouldn’t impact the outcome”, “it’s bad that a team loses”, and “people should be free to afk whenever”. Like at that point, just play different games, these aren’t your cup of tea.
And for what it’s worth, I personally quite like the stricter competitive nature of many games. I like playing ranked games where everyone is solidly playing to win and competing on skill. Just because some people have a ego problem because of ranks, it doesn’t mean the system should be scrapped.
I love some of these games, but I only learned to maximise my enjoyment of them once I began playing them casually. And its such a pity that my friends who haven’t learned the trick of not taking it so seriously,
There’s a pretty wide gap between playing casually, and grinding to the point of burnout. It’s plenty possible to take the game seriously, such that you care about doing your best and continually improving, without just dedicating your entire life to the grind.
I don’t think the majority of people find that balance. And I think ranking systems are designed to exploit that. Who doesn’t want to boast that people play their game the most? And wouldn’t more playtime also lead to players to spending more?
I’m not agreeing with everything the original comment said, but the idea that we should be designing games to at least not make it worse, is something I resonate with.
I don’t think they hate competitive games, nor do I. The opposite, people who think about how to make things better, even if their ideas are bad, are the ones who have gotten into things deep enough to start seeing the cracks.
We live in an age of vices, it’s not just games, everything around us is demanding we spend our time on things, and all of it is trying its best to keep us from noticing we’re acting on impulse, and taking back control.
That you and me are able to do it, is not a reason to refrain from helping those who can’t.
The fact is, games exploit people in a myriad of ways, and that only a small minority is able to resists is not proof that nothing needs to be done, it’s reason to do more.
Especially when the biggest demographic, by far, is children.
The opposite, people who think about how to make things better, even if their ideas are bad, are the ones who have gotten into things deep enough to start seeing the cracks.
I disagree. Complaints like those in the initial comment I responded to are the most surface level “I saw people complaining about something once” type suggestions possible that entirely miss the whole reason people play one game as opposed to others. Games like league and Dota are, first and foremost, competitive experiences. To suggest that these games would be improved by rubber banding harder than Mario kart demonstrates a significant lack of either understanding or interest in the genre.
If anything, it’s just a prime example of the dunning kreuger effect. He’s not in deep enough to know how much he doesn’t know about the games. It’s like the bronze players complaining that yi has no counterplay. It says more about their lack of understanding than it does about the game.
That you and me are able to do it, is not a reason to refrain from helping those who can’t.
Not everything needs to be shaved at the edges to cater to the lowest common denominator. Shave off the ranked system and general competitive nature, and a lot of players (such as myself) are going to start going to different games that do offer it. Hell, I know at least a dozen people who already moved from league to Dota entirely because of the increasing casualization and focus on making it simpler and easier for bad players.
I can’t imagine anything less fun than playing way better than someone and losing because of trash rubberbanding nonsense to make games more “fun”. Or anything more hollow than getting murdered and “winning” anyways for the same reason.
I agree. In that sense that first comment is completely off the rails.
I’d personally like to see changes like not having the ranking system torpedo your evaluation because of a single underperforming team-mate.
A lot of current systems go hard on negative reinforcement, and spread it around like candy on halloween along with gleefully engaging in collective punishment.
I don’t really care about ranking (or play the kind of leaderboard stuff that uses it) so I can’t comment on implementation. I think it’s genuinely hard to do in team competition environments, though.
I know with certainty it’s extremely hard to do in heavily team based sports like football and basketball, because that I do pay attention to. Maybe MoBAs are closer to baseball where even though it’s a “team” sport, you actually can isolate out parts reliably enough to measure effectively, but I don’t play them to know for sure.
I just find any and all rubber banding (an opt in “skill handicap” casual mode is fine; dynamically changing it mid game just makes everything feel like horseshit) a truly nauseating excuse for terrible design.
I know with certainty it’s extremely hard to do in heavily team based sports like football and basketball, because that I do pay attention to. Maybe MoBAs are closer to baseball where even though it’s a “team” sport, you actually can isolate out parts reliably enough to measure effectively, but I don’t play them to know for sure.
At least for league, I’d say it’s definitely the former. Team play and strategy is a huge component and is extremely difficult to measure. There’s no hard tracking for things like “knew when to run the opposite way so the enemy couldn’t get multiple kills” or “blocked an important spell so the carry didn’t die”. Individual skill is so closely intertwined with team results that separating out the two is only possible in the extreme cases.
I’d personally like to see changes like not having the ranking system torpedo your evaluation because of a single underperforming team-mate.
At least in terms of league, that isn’t the case. Yeah, everyone complains about losing due to bad teams, but like, yeah? In a match of 10 people, any given person inherently has a minority of the impact on any given match. But statistically, that balances out over time. Better players will have greater positive impacts, and thus win more game and climb. There’s an argument to be made that the old promotion system leaned towards bad games having an outsized impact, but that was kinda the point. They prevented lucky streaks from impacting rank as much and favored consistency. And trust me, I’ve mained adc since season 5. I know the impact of shitty teams first hand.
The mmr system also more or less completely prevents a bad game or two from tanking your rank. As long as your mmr is higher than your rank, you can climb even with like 40% wins since a win will grant more than a loss takes away.
Likewise in Dota, outside of very niche scenarios, and in the first place, people are chosing to play for MMR. I don’t play much league, so I don’t know how it works there, but at least in Dota, you can get a pretty complete experience in the unranked modes complete with (hidden) SBMM.
Yeah, league has separate mmr for ranked and normals, so you always get sbmm no matter what. Main difference is that in ranked, you’re locked in regards to who you can queue with so there isn’t too wide a gap in mmr, whereas norms let’s anyone queue together.
League also doesn’t do ranks directly based on mmr, but rather indirectly through an elo system, where your mmr decides who you play against do it’s always a close to even team, and then the mmr decides how much a win/loss effects your elo. If you’re a high rank player skill wise, your mmr will put you against similarly skilled players, even if you’re still a lower rank, and it will just give you more upwards ranking.
No, you’re just making things up and calling names. Like a rational adult having a sensible conversation?
Toxic and competitive are separate things. I’ll gladly help you understand how, if you can stop having the argument you’d rather be having, and interact with the words I actually wrote.
This design creates toxicity instead of competition, and your hot take is ‘so you hate competition?’ Yeah sure dude, LeBron dominating a junior-high ballgame is what sportsmanship is all about. His team is winning by a lot so they must be super competitive. What a shame we can’t judge individual players. Apparently. Stop measuring assists, all that matters is the almighty W.
If we’re talking about people playing badly… on purpose… walk me through how that’s exemplifying competitive games. Is opposition to that behavior some kind of betrayal? Because if so, you should be furious at Valve, since they’re attacking that behavior in the most blunt-force ways possible.
After all - why should games be enjoyable? Losing should feel bad. It can’t just be less fun, it has to be miserable. That’s motivation! Shaking hands after a game is for cowards! In fact, if you lose a platinum match? Banned for life. Hardcore permadeath rules.
That system will surely encourage healthy competition without making any player scream their lungs out.
This design creates toxicity instead of competition, and your hot take is ‘so you hate competition?’ Yeah sure dude, LeBron dominating a junior-high ballgame is what sportsmanship is all about. His team is winning by a lot so they must be super competitive. What a shame we can’t judge individual players. Apparently. Stop measuring assists, all that matters is the almighty W.
It would be competition, just not fun competition. And the solution we came to for problems like that isn’t lower the nets and remove the need for dribbling, its preventing matchups like that. Thats why SBMM exists and why those who try and smurf around it get banned.
After all - why should games be enjoyable? Losing should feel bad. It can’t just be less fun, it has to be miserable. That’s motivation! Shaking hands after a game is for cowards! In fact, if you lose a platinum match? Banned for life. Hardcore permadeath rules.
Or, you could just shake hands, say GG and move on? Nothing prevents that. Even if you do chose to play ranked over unranked/arcade (a choice the player themselves makes) a lowered MMR is just a different number.
Again: ‘prevent those matchups’ is a naive solution. It’s staring straight at a systemic problem and saying, well, let’s just punish anyone who does it wrong.
It is the difference between warning people about a guy who exploits a bug, and fixing the damn bug.
you could just shake hands, say GG and move on?
I agree, players should feel that way, after a loss.
I mean, your solution seems to be to lower the skill ceiling to the level of the lowest player. That doesn’t fix it either. In the example you gave, we don’t change basketball to account for LeBroun James playing against toddlers. Are you saying we should? Anything like that completely changes the game into something different.
My off-the-cuff proposal was to make low-tier matches play like low-tier matches. A non-event for anyone who belongs there. But for some reason everyone just ignores the part where we’re talking about smurfs entering games with noobs, and insists I must ‘hate competition.’
Any system like that implemented would inherantly either A) change the game fundamentally, B) Still cause smurfs to ruin games, or C) prevent the (relatively) good players from being rewarded for playing well.
Fundamentally, either you change the game very substantially in which case smurfs don’t know how to play, but then you alienate the low tier players who do want to play the same game and encourage people to smurf to try this new gamemode, you make less significant changes but still add a pretty hard skill ceiling, but that prevent good low-tier players from snowballing or being rewarded for playing well, or you make only minor changes in which case the smurf will still take over the game. Theres no in-between. If skill dictates the game, then the person with most skill (the smurf) will win. If skill does not dictate the game, then you lose the fair, balanced competitve aspect that is the draw of these games. That is the case no matter how good the players are. Low tier or not, you don’t just want to be handed a win. You can’t have a game that both is dictated by skill, but also make sure that those with skill are pulled in line with everyone else.
Like, there’s not a whole separate game being proposed here. Some numbers, for some people, in some matches, will just be… less. How to play works exactly the same. It is the same game. And this only needs to affect the people who are already kicking ass.
Their contribution will still be critical to their team’s victory. It just won’t be enough to single-handedly decide the outcome for all nine other players. It will be… less. They can still be the greatest contributor. They can get in-game recognition for every clever decision and make their brain squirt the happy chemicals. They just don’t get as much per-action as the guy who’s figuring out what DoT stands for.
This isn’t high witchcraft, or some kind of paradox. It’s grading on a curve. It’s “handicapping.” A boring and typical adjustment in actual sports, even at higher levels.
And again, it only has to work in the dirt leagues, because the goal is keeping assholes bored. If you play super duper good, and get bumped to a higher rank, and play with other people of that rank… none of this applies. Nothing is different. High-level play between high-ranked players would remain as sweaty as you can imagine. If someone pops enough adderall to see through time, and completely ruins a ranked lobby full of gold players, who gives a shit?
An e-sports demigod and a fresh player using DK bongos should be made similarly effective.
So the distance between the skill floor and skill ceiling of every game should be zero? Ought we have fun by playing Chutes and Ladders and nothing else?
the part everyone’s performatively sneering at. We’re talking about smurfing. We’re talking about matches between newbies. Stop making me underline this. Y’all can read.
For clarity, “low skill games” doesn’t refer to video or board games that require little skill (e.g. Chutes and Ladders, Tic Tac Toe, etc.) but rather individual matches between low-skill players in games where there is a distance between skill floor and ceiling?
MOBA toxicity is a design problem. These players are like this because these games are like this.
If good players wading in among the noobs is such a huge problem, what have you done in the last twenty years to make it stop being a problem? Stopping it from happening is a naive band-aid. A kneejerk response to the symptoms of systemic issues. This game has one hundred and twenty-four characters. Don’t tell me the devs are unfamiliar with tweaking complex systems for macro-scale results. Low-skill games are where you’d expect handicaps or dynamic difficulty applied to all the numbers on either team. An e-sports demigod and a fresh player using DK bongos should be made similarly effective. If that disconnect between action and results frustrates the guy pushing 400 APM… good.
If you need a whole-ass reputation system just to identify people who play badly on purpose, why the fuck do you allow bad play to matter so much? Maybe lashing strangers together for an hour, when half of them will lose, is a potent source of bitter feelings. Maybe a game that punishes people for leaving when they feel bad isn’t a recipe for positivity! But hey, at least they can keep their head down and mind their business, oops nevermind it’s all interdependent teamwork. Well at least four good teammates can make up for one bastard… oh, did you never fix “feeding?”
Whoops.
Fuck all of this.
Rubber banding shit to make skill mismatches still competitive is a dogshit excuse for game design that completely and utterly destroys the integrity of competition.
Evenly-matched teams won’t need any.
We are not talking about evenly-matched teams. The integrity of dirt-tier matches is ruined by pros on fresh accounts. People so infatuated with a child’s view of “competition” that nothing matters besides winning. Teamwork? Sportsmanship? Fun? Fuck that, just win win win win win win win.
Skill-based matchmaking is already a judgement call for how well you’re supposed to do. And each long-ass match is rife with ways to judge how well a player is doing - moment to moment - relative to their teammates, their situation, and their character. Measuring and rewarding individual skill is possible even if your team gets utterly destroyed. Or carried by one cheating bastard.
Games can be fun to play for reasons besides ‘did you win.’ Success and growth can be about more than ‘don’t lose.’ This is a game that takes ten people forty-five minutes to play. Reducing it to a binary outcome, as if that’s the only metric for “the integrity of competition,” is the root problem.
They’re fun when they’re fair. They’re not fun when they’re not fair. Losing fairly is part of the experience. Losing unfairly isn’t. Winning unfairly isn’t.
Rubber banding isn’t unconditionally horse shit game design in every context because of the end result. It’s because it fundamentally breaks the mechanics of the game. A high skill ceiling isn’t a design flaw. It’s the entire purpose of the game.
Smurfed games aren’t fair.
Fair games won’t be affected. Evenly-matched teams do not need this.
Anything can become a flaw when it causes awful results. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. MOBAs are all toxic as fuck - that’s no accident. The choices shared by these games, cause the problems shared by these games.
These are systemic problems. They cannot be solved by attacking the symptoms. You have to address the cause.
If you could magically identify smurfs, you could just put them at the level they should be or ban them without putting them in a match. There’s no such thing as rubber banding that only affects cheating.
A meaningful skill gap resulting in a rout is the whole point of a competitive game. It’s the definition of a competitive game. It’s why people are playing. Go play a casual game with a low skill ceiling it that’s what you want to play. Don’t play a game with a high one then demand that they break it.
There is no possible scenario where rubber banding can ever be better than dogshit game design. The core concept is incompatible with sound mechanics. The person playing better is supposed to get better results.
That’s what league does. If it detects early on that you’re probably a smurf, you get tossed into smurf queue where you’ll face other experienced players, and it’s pretty reliable. Both times I’ve made new accounts, I’ve almost immediately gotten placed with experienced players, usually before the account graduates beyond bot games
Low-tier matches have a lower skill ceiling. That is what makes them… low-tier. We are only talking about those matches, and we are only talking about when one player is obviously, measurably, operating on a higher level. If a pro joins some newbies and plays like a newbie - there is no problem.
Even so:
Playing better will always get better results. There are no blue shells in DOTA. Winning isn’t random. Making the game slightly more difficult for people demonstrably kicking ass doesn’t have to stop them from kicking ass. Just make their contribution reasonable for a game that is supposed to be a team effort in the minor leagues.
Skill ceiling is a concept completely independent of the players involved. It’s a trait of the game itself.
A lower skill played having the game of their life playing way above and beyond the other players in the match is supposed to see the results that match that. A lower ranked player learning quickly and progressing faster than average is supposed to see results that reflect that. Having a great match and being nerfed because some idiot thinks it’s broken for you to see the success that fair mechanics earn you isn’t a good experience. Having your performances nerfed by rubber banding also keeps you from getting better by not having your successful and unsuccessful actions provide the consistent feedback correct mechanics do. On top of that, it completely destroys the matchmaking mechanics by not having the outcome be the rout it’s supposed to be when one player is significantly better.
Rubber banding is not a valid solution to any problem in any context. It’s proof that you don’t understand anything about games.
Skill ceiling is both meta and mechanics. That’s why new tech raises the ceiling. What people do matters as much as what’s possible. The game doesn’t have to change, for gameplay to change.
And if we’re talking about smurfing, we’re talking about the game being played badly. Naively. By amateurs. Or at best by experienced played who can’t manage to get their shit together.
Detecting when someone’s doing better than the rank of the current match is how ranking works. It’s not some impossible magic trick. It’s a judgement the game already makes, and that decision already affects people. If you do really well - you get moved to a different group, where you are more likely to get your ass kicked.
When ranking works, the only feedback for your skill is that rank. You will still lose half the time. You will get outmaneuvered half the time. Your execution is on-par with everyone else in the match.
… do you think handing one player an effortless victory is how matchmaking is supposed to work? My guy, one player managing a “rout” is the problem smurfing causes. It’s why Valve is handing out bans.
Look, I can see where you’re coming from about the over-emphasis on winning; but it just sound like you’re talking about an entirely different issue to what Valve is trying to address.
Your suggestion, if I understand it correctly, is to have the game automatically make a judgement about every player’s individual skill during the match itself, and apply some buff or penalty if it detects a major discrepancy between players. Is that what you are suggesting?
I suspect that the existence of mechanics like that would lead to a lot of angst, regardless of whether it ‘works’. People already have a tendency to blame their team and blame match-making for making them lose. Imagine if they could also blame the game itself for holding them back. … It could be a perfect system that never gets it wrong, and it would still cause a lot of people to get upset. And I don’t see how it could fix the problem of smurfing anyway unless it is a seriously over-zealous system that erases basically any skill advantage.
Also, I don’t think such auto-detection would be reliable. But although we could could discuss the technicalities of what might or might not work… I just don’t think it’s worth pursuing in dota anyway. Perhaps it would be better suited to some other game.
… in low tiers.
I am describing an autobalance system, in low tiers. Specifically in low tiers. Only in low tiers.
And being “held back” means the game is applauding you. If some newbie genuinely achieves enlightenment and begins playing at a superhuman level, then win or lose, the game is telling them ‘holy shit, well done.’
Which is how ranking already works. I cannot overstress, the game already sets people up to get their asses kicked half the time. It watches how you play, scores your performance, and pits you against people who are going to counteract whatever new tricks you’ve just learned.
This is only a more direct application of that value-above-replacement estimate. In low tiers. Because nobody cares if some top-percentile player wrecks a lobby full of top-decile players.
It sounds like you just don’t like the idea of skill-based or team-based games. Plenty of people do. Its not an excuse to ruin it for others through smurfing, or to take it away from those who do enjoy the games.
Zero respect for any form ‘you just hate [blank]’ in any detailed discussion of [blank].
These are real problems. Valve is making a big show of dealing with them. But over two decades of tweaking and expanding this genre of games, with their absurd number of interconnected systems, nobody seems to have done anything to avert these systemic issues. They just label bad behavior and viciously punish anyone who does it.
It’s a video game. Unless someone is outright hacking, they can only do what the developers allow them to do. This specific genre - this competitive multiplayer game, distinct from all others - is a bottomless well of toxicity. That is no accident. It is an unavoidable consequence of the rules these games have chosen.
Modifying the rules is blase. It’s not some ruinous event; it happens every month. So modifying the rules to avoid the worst aspects of the community seems eminently desirable. Especially if it only applies to the low-stakes, newbie-friendly games where high-tier assholes want to lurch in and ruin it for everyone.
To be crystal clear:
This does not have to affect high-tier play, at all.
There is no reason whatsoever to handicap pros and wannabes playing at their absolute sweatiest.
This is about dirt-league players getting stomped by people committing bannable offenses. The fact anyone even wants to commit those offenses, is a systemic problem. It is shaped by the developers’ decisions, and different decisions would have different outcomes. Every system is perfectly designed to produces its observed results.
If you’re not willing to discuss systemic solutions then you’re not ready to address systemic problems.
Im not sure what you’re advocating then? A simplified “New Player Mode”? That already exists. Unranked mode? That exists too. SBMM? Already present. Or are you saying we need to tie accounts to people’s SSNs or something to prevent smurfing, because even ignoring account sharing, theres no way at all that that would backfire. As long as there are people to bully, someone will go out of their way to try and put others down to make themselves feel better. At least in DotA, they try and address it with fairly in-depth behaviour systems, unlike every other competitive game.
It’d be great if people stopped making up the conversation they’d rather be having. ‘These systemic problems should be balanced out in low-tier games.’ ‘So you hate high-tier play?’ Wrong. ‘You’re against tier rankings?’ Wronger. ‘You want players to submit a blood sample?’ Are you okay?
What I’m advocating is what I wrote. Twice. Namely: automatic handicaps based on the current match, using the grading the game plainly already does.
The SSN suggestion is the polar fucking opposite of what I’m on about - the game shouldn’t need to know who you are, to keep low-tier matches fair. Detecting higher-skilled play is normal. It’s how ranking works. And at low ranks, the skill ceiling is nice and low, so limiting the effectiveness of any individual player based on their performance over an entire half-hour of gameplay seems plenty tractable.
It’s not trivial - but these devs spent twenty years cranking out a metric buttload of characters, and all of those are at least roughly balanced. These people are capable. I worry they’re simply not trying to address these root causes. Possibly in part because suggestions along these lines make people ask ridiculous unrelated questions.
You’re basically suggesting that Valve turn DotA into Heroes of the Storm, a MOBA so lame it lived and died in just 7 years. Meanwhile, DotA has been going strong for nearly 20, despite the fact that anyone that’s ever heard of the game knows that it’s a toxic cesspool. Your “solution” to what you perceive as a problem is to make the game less fun, and that’s why Valve makes money by the truckload and you write sad opinion pieces and attempt to insult people on social media.
One, a game lasting “just” seven years is a fucking bizarre jab.
Two, ‘stop pretending disagreement means I hate your favorite thing’ is not an insult.
Three, if all criticism of an ongoing “toxic cesspool” lasting twenty god-damn years has you sneering in defense of the cesspool, I don’t think the details of that criticism have anything to do with your response.
But sure. How dare anyone point to a problem and say ‘they should fix that.’ I mean, where’s my billion-dollar franchise, right? It makes money so it can’t be wrong.
gg go next
I haven’t touched DotA since 2014. I couldn’t care less what happens to it. But you clearly do. Just in a way that nobody cares about.
@dril:
I care about toxicity. So does Valve, apparently. And PC Gamer. The problems with this genre are newsworthy. And it’s been an issue for two straight decades.
But I guess ‘problems have underlying causes which change can address’ is an invitation for everyone to commit the attribution fallacy and attack whatever gurning projection they’d rather be dealing with.
Meanwhile, the game’s still a cesspool - in your own words - and treating the symptoms will not fix that. Maybe they should treat something else.
What you’re describing is not and does not in any way resemble a competitive game. “You hate competitive games” is not an opinion. It’s the only possible conclusion that can be drawn from your continued deluded hate fest on the core defining traits of the genre.
The second you nerf a player for doing “too well” in any context, calling your game competitive isn’t misleading or misrepresentative. It’s a lie. It cannot be described as a competitive game if rubber band mechanics exist at any point in any context. It’s the equivalent using lard in your food then calling it kosher. The instant it’s implemented in any context, using the word competitive turns into fraud.
Sure, why not. I’m a moustache-twirling villain who personally despises your favorite binkie. All the explanations are just a clever ruse to baffle and trick people, so they’ll think problems have causes.
Let’s pretend grading on a curve means everybody gets the same gold star.
Let’s pretend “competitive” means exactly what you think, no more and no less.
Why should the dirt leagues be “competitive” in your definition?
Why should the lowest rungs of that ladder be as cutthroat and merciless as the upper echelons? It’s fuckin’ little league. We’re talking about people who suck so hard that one guy with a fresh account can demolish them. This is what handicaps are for.
Removed by mod
One of the good things valve has been doing recently is cracking down hard on smurfs/alts. I started league last year and was often the only actual new player in the game. Imagine the amount of toxicity I got when people found out there was an actual noob in their new Smurf’s matchmaking.
Bad play doesn’t matter as much if everyone is actually on the same level. If everybody is bad, nobody is.
Sounds like you just hate the idea of competitive games
I’ve seen “competitive” games turn level-headed friends into seething piles of swears. They aren’t having fun, they admit to not having fun, they acknowledge that they hate it… But they keep going because ranks, clout, commitment…
Games should have stakes, but modern ranking systems are designed to addict the exact same way that loot-boxes and other similar mechanics do. They hook and pull in deeper and the only way I’ve seen friends quit is when it gets so bad they go cold turkey. And only then do they look back at months or even years of playing a game, and see nothing but a waste of time and money.
But it works! These systems pull players into the grind like they’re getting paid to play, even when they are hating every second.
I love some of these games, but I only learned to maximise my enjoyment of them once I began playing them casually. And it’s such a pity that my friends who haven’t learned the trick of not taking it so seriously, burn out on them, while I just keep going and having fun. I run out of people to play with on a regular basis because of this.
Just one factor of the design of these systems is that they have you feeling like you have to consistently win, in order to be worth something. And as that is obviously an impossibility, it leads to every loss taking three times more than what a win is able to give.
I mean yeah, there are always going to be people with problems. But the guy I was responding to was leveling complaints like “playing badly shouldn’t impact the outcome”, “it’s bad that a team loses”, and “people should be free to afk whenever”. Like at that point, just play different games, these aren’t your cup of tea.
And for what it’s worth, I personally quite like the stricter competitive nature of many games. I like playing ranked games where everyone is solidly playing to win and competing on skill. Just because some people have a ego problem because of ranks, it doesn’t mean the system should be scrapped.
There’s a pretty wide gap between playing casually, and grinding to the point of burnout. It’s plenty possible to take the game seriously, such that you care about doing your best and continually improving, without just dedicating your entire life to the grind.
I don’t think the majority of people find that balance. And I think ranking systems are designed to exploit that. Who doesn’t want to boast that people play their game the most? And wouldn’t more playtime also lead to players to spending more?
I’m not agreeing with everything the original comment said, but the idea that we should be designing games to at least not make it worse, is something I resonate with.
I don’t think they hate competitive games, nor do I. The opposite, people who think about how to make things better, even if their ideas are bad, are the ones who have gotten into things deep enough to start seeing the cracks.
We live in an age of vices, it’s not just games, everything around us is demanding we spend our time on things, and all of it is trying its best to keep us from noticing we’re acting on impulse, and taking back control.
That you and me are able to do it, is not a reason to refrain from helping those who can’t.
The fact is, games exploit people in a myriad of ways, and that only a small minority is able to resists is not proof that nothing needs to be done, it’s reason to do more.
Especially when the biggest demographic, by far, is children.
I disagree. Complaints like those in the initial comment I responded to are the most surface level “I saw people complaining about something once” type suggestions possible that entirely miss the whole reason people play one game as opposed to others. Games like league and Dota are, first and foremost, competitive experiences. To suggest that these games would be improved by rubber banding harder than Mario kart demonstrates a significant lack of either understanding or interest in the genre.
If anything, it’s just a prime example of the dunning kreuger effect. He’s not in deep enough to know how much he doesn’t know about the games. It’s like the bronze players complaining that yi has no counterplay. It says more about their lack of understanding than it does about the game.
Not everything needs to be shaved at the edges to cater to the lowest common denominator. Shave off the ranked system and general competitive nature, and a lot of players (such as myself) are going to start going to different games that do offer it. Hell, I know at least a dozen people who already moved from league to Dota entirely because of the increasing casualization and focus on making it simpler and easier for bad players.
I can’t imagine anything less fun than playing way better than someone and losing because of trash rubberbanding nonsense to make games more “fun”. Or anything more hollow than getting murdered and “winning” anyways for the same reason.
I agree. In that sense that first comment is completely off the rails.
I’d personally like to see changes like not having the ranking system torpedo your evaluation because of a single underperforming team-mate.
A lot of current systems go hard on negative reinforcement, and spread it around like candy on halloween along with gleefully engaging in collective punishment.
I don’t really care about ranking (or play the kind of leaderboard stuff that uses it) so I can’t comment on implementation. I think it’s genuinely hard to do in team competition environments, though.
I know with certainty it’s extremely hard to do in heavily team based sports like football and basketball, because that I do pay attention to. Maybe MoBAs are closer to baseball where even though it’s a “team” sport, you actually can isolate out parts reliably enough to measure effectively, but I don’t play them to know for sure.
I just find any and all rubber banding (an opt in “skill handicap” casual mode is fine; dynamically changing it mid game just makes everything feel like horseshit) a truly nauseating excuse for terrible design.
At least for league, I’d say it’s definitely the former. Team play and strategy is a huge component and is extremely difficult to measure. There’s no hard tracking for things like “knew when to run the opposite way so the enemy couldn’t get multiple kills” or “blocked an important spell so the carry didn’t die”. Individual skill is so closely intertwined with team results that separating out the two is only possible in the extreme cases.
At least in terms of league, that isn’t the case. Yeah, everyone complains about losing due to bad teams, but like, yeah? In a match of 10 people, any given person inherently has a minority of the impact on any given match. But statistically, that balances out over time. Better players will have greater positive impacts, and thus win more game and climb. There’s an argument to be made that the old promotion system leaned towards bad games having an outsized impact, but that was kinda the point. They prevented lucky streaks from impacting rank as much and favored consistency. And trust me, I’ve mained adc since season 5. I know the impact of shitty teams first hand.
The mmr system also more or less completely prevents a bad game or two from tanking your rank. As long as your mmr is higher than your rank, you can climb even with like 40% wins since a win will grant more than a loss takes away.
Likewise in Dota, outside of very niche scenarios, and in the first place, people are chosing to play for MMR. I don’t play much league, so I don’t know how it works there, but at least in Dota, you can get a pretty complete experience in the unranked modes complete with (hidden) SBMM.
Yeah, league has separate mmr for ranked and normals, so you always get sbmm no matter what. Main difference is that in ranked, you’re locked in regards to who you can queue with so there isn’t too wide a gap in mmr, whereas norms let’s anyone queue together.
League also doesn’t do ranks directly based on mmr, but rather indirectly through an elo system, where your mmr decides who you play against do it’s always a close to even team, and then the mmr decides how much a win/loss effects your elo. If you’re a high rank player skill wise, your mmr will put you against similarly skilled players, even if you’re still a lower rank, and it will just give you more upwards ranking.
You lead a rich inner life.
Bub, I’m not the one throwing a fit like a toddler because online games can be competitive
No, you’re just making things up and calling names. Like a rational adult having a sensible conversation?
Toxic and competitive are separate things. I’ll gladly help you understand how, if you can stop having the argument you’d rather be having, and interact with the words I actually wrote.
Thanks for demonstrating the problem.
This design creates toxicity instead of competition, and your hot take is ‘so you hate competition?’ Yeah sure dude, LeBron dominating a junior-high ballgame is what sportsmanship is all about. His team is winning by a lot so they must be super competitive. What a shame we can’t judge individual players. Apparently. Stop measuring assists, all that matters is the almighty W.
If we’re talking about people playing badly… on purpose… walk me through how that’s exemplifying competitive games. Is opposition to that behavior some kind of betrayal? Because if so, you should be furious at Valve, since they’re attacking that behavior in the most blunt-force ways possible.
After all - why should games be enjoyable? Losing should feel bad. It can’t just be less fun, it has to be miserable. That’s motivation! Shaking hands after a game is for cowards! In fact, if you lose a platinum match? Banned for life. Hardcore permadeath rules.
That system will surely encourage healthy competition without making any player scream their lungs out.
It would be competition, just not fun competition. And the solution we came to for problems like that isn’t lower the nets and remove the need for dribbling, its preventing matchups like that. Thats why SBMM exists and why those who try and smurf around it get banned.
Or, you could just shake hands, say GG and move on? Nothing prevents that. Even if you do chose to play ranked over unranked/arcade (a choice the player themselves makes) a lowered MMR is just a different number.
Again: ‘prevent those matchups’ is a naive solution. It’s staring straight at a systemic problem and saying, well, let’s just punish anyone who does it wrong.
It is the difference between warning people about a guy who exploits a bug, and fixing the damn bug.
I agree, players should feel that way, after a loss.
But they don’t.
I wonder why.
I mean, your solution seems to be to lower the skill ceiling to the level of the lowest player. That doesn’t fix it either. In the example you gave, we don’t change basketball to account for LeBroun James playing against toddlers. Are you saying we should? Anything like that completely changes the game into something different.
… in low-tier matches.
My off-the-cuff proposal was to make low-tier matches play like low-tier matches. A non-event for anyone who belongs there. But for some reason everyone just ignores the part where we’re talking about smurfs entering games with noobs, and insists I must ‘hate competition.’
Any system like that implemented would inherantly either A) change the game fundamentally, B) Still cause smurfs to ruin games, or C) prevent the (relatively) good players from being rewarded for playing well.
Fundamentally, either you change the game very substantially in which case smurfs don’t know how to play, but then you alienate the low tier players who do want to play the same game and encourage people to smurf to try this new gamemode, you make less significant changes but still add a pretty hard skill ceiling, but that prevent good low-tier players from snowballing or being rewarded for playing well, or you make only minor changes in which case the smurf will still take over the game. Theres no in-between. If skill dictates the game, then the person with most skill (the smurf) will win. If skill does not dictate the game, then you lose the fair, balanced competitve aspect that is the draw of these games. That is the case no matter how good the players are. Low tier or not, you don’t just want to be handed a win. You can’t have a game that both is dictated by skill, but also make sure that those with skill are pulled in line with everyone else.
Are you unfamiliar with the concept of “less?”
Like, there’s not a whole separate game being proposed here. Some numbers, for some people, in some matches, will just be… less. How to play works exactly the same. It is the same game. And this only needs to affect the people who are already kicking ass.
Their contribution will still be critical to their team’s victory. It just won’t be enough to single-handedly decide the outcome for all nine other players. It will be… less. They can still be the greatest contributor. They can get in-game recognition for every clever decision and make their brain squirt the happy chemicals. They just don’t get as much per-action as the guy who’s figuring out what DoT stands for.
This isn’t high witchcraft, or some kind of paradox. It’s grading on a curve. It’s “handicapping.” A boring and typical adjustment in actual sports, even at higher levels.
And again, it only has to work in the dirt leagues, because the goal is keeping assholes bored. If you play super duper good, and get bumped to a higher rank, and play with other people of that rank… none of this applies. Nothing is different. High-level play between high-ranked players would remain as sweaty as you can imagine. If someone pops enough adderall to see through time, and completely ruins a ranked lobby full of gold players, who gives a shit?
Yeah, figures you’re just incapable of having a decent discussion
Three counts of no argument. Just empty bait. No evidence you even read what you’re responding to.
Troll harder.
So the distance between the skill floor and skill ceiling of every game should be zero? Ought we have fun by playing Chutes and Ladders and nothing else?
> Low-skill games are where you’d expect
the part everyone’s performatively sneering at. We’re talking about smurfing. We’re talking about matches between newbies. Stop making me underline this. Y’all can read.
For clarity, “low skill games” doesn’t refer to video or board games that require little skill (e.g. Chutes and Ladders, Tic Tac Toe, etc.) but rather individual matches between low-skill players in games where there is a distance between skill floor and ceiling?
Yes.
The kind of matches where smurfing is relevant.
Smurfing, the topic explicitly referenced by “if good players wading in among the noobs is such a huge problem.”
Removed by mod