AP Gains’ solution to GAC matchmaking…

"PeachyPeachSWGOH;c-2342840" wrote:

"Kathark;c-2342815" wrote:

Ok perhaps the Yankees metaphor breaks down. Let’s get finer with our gradations. To a little league team the functional difference between the local high school team and the Yankees is moot. If my OP is 2x better equipped or 100x is irrelevant, my chance of winning if they play is 0. My solution works in either case though. I maintain that the only way the high school team ends up in my pool is sandbagging. Kick out the sandbaggers. I looked at the top 10 of my division and they actually have rosters that look like mine. This means there are a bunch of overpowered players bumming around the little leagues, playing now and again but mostly forfeiting, floating around the middle of the pack. Boot them. Let the rest of us play against our peers.

It's easy to come up with a concept for a fix. The hard part is to come up with some quantified criteria and a complete algorithm that would cause as few side effects as possible.

For example, it's easy to say "well my opponent has 3m GP and 2 GLs on me, so they are obviously overpowered and we should never have been matched." But how do you teach a program to decide that a roster is "overpowered" compared to others around it? You would have to come up with some kind of quantified rules. Once you start doing that, you'll soon realize that we are back in the match-by-gp hell, where people will always find new grounds to complain no matter how deep your algorithm looks into their rosters - "we have the same GP but my opponent has 1 more GL!", "we have the same number of GLs but my opponent has JMK which beats my SLKR!", so on so forth.

It's also easy to say "let's boot the sandbaggers," but what exactly is the pattern for a sandbagger? Plays one match and forfeits every other two? Or gives up one whole event but plays the next one? And what exactly does "boot" do here? Ban them? You can't ban people just because they didn't play all the GAC matches. Prevent them from signing up for the next match? Well that's just the same effect as them forfeiting. Reduce their rewards? That's kind of what the current system already does.

So glad you asked. It would probably take me a while with the data to come up with an acceptable rubric for comparing rosters. (I know ppl will always complain). Once you have a system, the key is that divisions are decided, not by “skill” rating (or any other metric that takes your performance into account) but by adjacent roster. Then within a division you have a skill rating over the course of the entire season and can rise or fall within your division. The next time you enter a GA season you are re-divisioned based entirely on your roster, not your “skill” from last season. So if I decide to spend $1000 between seasons I automatically get bumped up to compete with similarly equipped players. Or if I take months of f2p to get to that level of roster the it takes months to get re-divisioned.

As for forfeit penalties I suggest a limit of 2 forfeit losses per season. Clearly life might prevent you from playing once. If you lose by forfeit twice or more in a season you lose all the season rewards, get banned from the next season, and your account gets flagged. Maybe after 3 flags you get banned forever, just spitballing. But if the re-divisioning was by roster, and something like the original floor suggestion went into effect then I think it would go a long way to preventing sandbaggers in the first place. It’s not like they are automatically enrolled. You want to play great. If you just want to sit in the lowest level and collect the pity crystals then don’t sign up.

This is all very top of my head. I just wish I didn’t have to face truly unwinnable matches so often. Ah well. Back to my lowly carbonite dungeon.