Before i go in detailed discussion, i just want to make two things clear:
1. I am not saying that ELO should be ditched completely, I am only stating the fact that how ELO is working now in Madden is not satisfactory to the wider community.
(If you go back to my first post on this thread i did say "your pure ELO matching ...")
2. I never said that matchmaking should be based on how long time a player have played the game. I brought this up simply because people who played shorter time or just bought the game very recently would very likely have a lower OVR team, and it will ruin their experience in H2H if they get match with much higher OVR team all the time.
There might be a limited amount of players that meet that criteria, so the search would ultimately expand. Do you expand it by OVR then?
Well
1. as i mentioned earlier i never said that how long time the player has played should be a factor. There might be player who had game longer time but didn't play MUT before. That scenario would be quite complex
2. given how many players have complained that they are low OVR and get matched with high OVR, I would say that there would definitely be more players with lower OVR than you thought and if you can make it a bit fairer matchmaking process I am sure more player with lower OVR will stay active in H2H rather than just quit H2H completely. So the that wouldn't be that "limited amount of players"
3. Even under the current ELO system, you are still not guaranteeing that people get matched with similar skill right? Like you mentioned before, in the afternoon or after a long wait, matchmaking extend the target players and a noob like me could be matched with a multiple time WL Warrior 2 times in a row.
So given the situation if suitable match cannot be find, extending the pool to a certain degree sounds good to me.
Do you think a player that has been playing MUT since the beginning could exploit this by adding a bunch of bronze players to their team, so they can be matched up against lesser experienced players?
1. There are many ways you could counter that, for example, you can count only the highest ovr player for each position and ignore the lower player for each position, so the bronze player won't count. As a programmer myself I don't think this is very hard to implement.
2. In terms of ELO matching, a pro simply need a new account to have a fresh ELO record and now can exploit the matchmaking and matched against less skilled player. I don't suppose anything has been done to stop that ? Every matching mechanism can have the same problem one way or another. The fact that the alternative might have other problems simply is not an excuse for sticking to the existing broken method.
If I was dedicated to MUT at the beginning of the year by grinding solos, challenges, and Weekend League my team OVR wouldn't be an issue
So if a player just bought the game recently and didn't have time to build a team, you just don't care about their experience? Lots of player get the game as thanskgiving or christmas gift. Plus even if someone did bought the game in summer, they might not have time to grind solos all the time. They have other things in lives. You just don't care their experience in H2H cause they are not your targeted customers?
because I would have accrued enough losses to be put in a player pool with others of similar skill level and team OVR
You know that players don't like losses right? Not to say they have to endure "enough losses" to eventually reach that stage? How many active players are lost in that process which you could have kept if their H2H experience are better? To me if you can keep more players in the pool, you eventually make more money than forcing players to buy packs to build a higher OVR team to compete.
Online is competitive and Madden is competitive.
Nothing wrong with online being competitive, but the competitive nature of madden are built on the foundation of the quality of the player card, instead of being built on pure skills. And people can spent money to get way ahead of people who wouldn't or couldn't spent a lot of money in terms of team building. Yet a pure ELO matching in this scenario is simply not ideal because like i said before it is hard to measure a player's skill when team OVR difference matters very much in the game.
Chess is competitive and is perfect for ELO because the white queen will not have more strength or speed than the black queen. MOBA games like Dota is competitive and can use ELO because all player have the same available pools of hero to choose from. Fornite/PUBG /COD/CS:GO can be ELO based because well player won't get imbalanced equipment to give them an advantages all the time, and they usually start with the same money/resource for everyone anyway. In all those cases, a player's skill mattered far more than the pieces/heros they used to play in the game, hence they are a good match with ELO matching.
Yet games like MUT or FUT, should not be naively ELO based, simply because a low skill player with higher OVR team can beat a high skill player with lower OVR team. In here the team OVR plays just as important, if not more, as a player's skill. Not counting in the OVR factor in matchmaking when OVR matters in the actual game are simply wrong. What is even more wrong, is simply citing the fact that "because other games/companies are using it" without actually thinking why it works for them or if it will work for us, when the actual game being played are quite different.
