"The best thing that could solve the problem would be if every player has an AI copy of themselves which replaces you when you leave a comp game - It is something TRON suggested in the past. "
This would be the opposite of the “best thing” in my opinion since a bot will simply feed them extra ult charge beyond what they are getting already from you having less teammates to work with and losing almost every fight.
Ill also mention that no one said they had no risk of losing SR. We just enjoyed, at least i did, the original idea. I personally, and not everyone would like that, wouldn’t care at all to join a team in progress as long as i don’t have to join 30 seconds before the end of the match.
It would have to be different then quick play in regard to it being very unacceptable if you had to join in just to see the defeat screen and then losing SR for that. xD
On top of that if you think people joining a game in progress would play worse cause they wouldn’t take it too seriously, with all due respect, i would take a bad player anyday over a blizzard bot that just feeds their brains out and can’t do anything else. Dunno about you. I guess we all have our preferences but i still consider the original posters idea to be a good idea with or without SR loss and at least from my perspective the ONLY viable solution i have seen so far that doesn’t result in it being any worse than it currently is and with a high chance of making it better.
Again agree to disagree but instead of complaining about how it’s a bad idea… how about i dunno… i know it’s crazy… write down a new one? For more options. I know everyone loves to complain. xD
It didn’t offend me but I’m surprised that you don’t see the downsides and state that the idea is a solution or improvement. It’s a matter of perspective. I personally don’t see the point in creating “another QP”.
I was playing nearly fulltime in the last half year and had a lot of leavers in my matches only for a few days a few weeks ago. An ISP might have been fixing something… Most of the time in my OW career I didn’t have leavers in my comp matches. For this reason I dare to assume that a lot of players (myself and the other 11 players - or most of those 11 players) in my matches had no leaver problem.
I can imaging this to be a serious issue for some with a bad PC or software or internet connection but there is a chance that these players aren’t a majority. Blizzard has more statistics to base their decisions on.
If there is a minority of players who leave competitive unintentionally then introducing stronger punishments (e.g.: ban for a season after leaving too many times) would create a better playground for the majority of people. It isn’t rare that in case of a problem there is a vocal minority. But again, Blizzard has more data to make an informed decision.
Those punishments are ridiculous. Even in case of SR loss, the MMR is probably the same (would make no sense to tamper with that). You want to make Competitive more similar to QP which is very well known for its low quality. Filling has the potential to introduce other problems too, not only the ones mentioned here. Just a few additional things that come to my mind: less reliable player statistics, the fact that even in QP people don’t want to be fillers. Many players are asking for the removal of the fill feature or an option to opt out of it.
“It didn’t offend me but I’m surprised that you don’t see the downsides and state that the idea is a solution or improvement”
I respect your point of view but just like you said i don’t see all the negativity that might come out of this you seem to be obsessed with that and unable to see the positive points that this might bring. Also since its a hypothetical situation to begin with since it’s not an implemented change but just an idea for improvement i don’t see how you trying to convince us again and again that it’s a bad idea in anyway enriching the conversation beyond your first statement made.
Let me add some more of your own words that might explain to you these odd reactions we are having to your efforts to educate us. “it’s a matter of perspective” and we surely respect but firmly disagree with yours meaning we have a different perspective that you don’t seem to recognize or respect hehe.
I know just making this comment is adding more useless comments instead of any further suggestions but i just feel like i had to write this since you don’t seem to be getting it.
I love you bro and everything is alright. Chill.
Oh wow that took me a while to understand
I can see that, but the thing is that the chance of having a fair game is in my opinion better than playing half the match with a person missing. If the player that is filling is intentionally obstructing the game, they should be reported as usual. The only other thing that I could think of which would sift out potential bad players for filling a slot, is requiring a minimum endorsement level for the option or some other way to ensure they’ll be on their best behaviour, although I have to admit that that is a little vague.
I’m not debating whether or not those punishments are hard enough, they could be increased for all I care. This is about helping the rest of the team.
Because they have no control over which match they get, unlike with this approach.
I can see their point, it seems like they have put quite some thought into trying to finding a fix for this problem in the past as well, and came to the conclusion that there’s no solution other than increasing punishments.
Also no matter the outcome of this discussion (Which might as well be none given the complexity of the issue), I’m surprised that this got at least a small conversation going and didn’t get drowned in the other posts.
When there is leaver in my team, I know that change of losing is much higher than change of winning but that doesn´t stop me trying my best even if own team is just afking. Yeah I will lose SR when losing but I´m confident that I will get it all back next few games. There are not so many leavers at least in my games. I might be lucky, but who knows.
And if you think you are doomed to loose game because of leaver, just think that loosing will take way less time 5v6 and faster you get to new match.
I think you haven’t understood it correctly. Imagine an AI which learns through neural network and your playstyle how to play. In an ideal scenario, that AI would be a copy of you and you wouldn’t notice that the leaver got replaced.
Right now, however, such an AI is impossible to make.
I do like the Idea of backfilling but it has its problems. How do you deal with the backfill? A compensation for the backfill for losing would either result in less serious players or SR inflation because your SR gain/loss ratio as a backfill is better than as a non-backfill. This would make competitive even worse because SR would lose its value.
This:
If you want to read the full concept, it’s on this thread.
Also, there are already other threads with other Ideas so it’s not worth repeating the obvious ones.
Other Ideas for solving the problem by other people:
Compensation for leaver’s team
Backfilling
AI replaces
Freezing a player
All of them had flaws. Some were exploitable (Compensation for leaver’s team, Backfilling, AI replaces); Some feel unfair (freezing a player); Some are plainly impossible (decent AI replaces)
This Idea has been posted before so it’s nothing new.
To cut it short, there are (currently) no solutions that remedy the leaver problem. They just worsen it.
Even my Idea of fair-throwing is possibly a bad one because you either are never able to execute it or it will cause toxicity because your teammates think you want to lose.
That’s cool, but imagine if there was a good chance you’d get a sixth player
back. That would encourage players to hold on even more.
True, but if a player filling the game would lose less SR and gain less SR it shouldn’t affect the value of it. Obviously finding the right values for that isn’t easy, but I’m sure there’d be a way to get a formula that’s fair.
Also filling games is not guaranteed. Everyone has the choice to opt into it and use the feature, but whether or not you end up filling when you enable it is still up to the matchmaking system, meaning that everyone has an equal chance of using the system. So even if it would offer an easier way of gaining SR, no one is guaranteed to fill a match or join a normal one.
But then we would have another problem: How to make backfilling intriguing? If they gain and lose less SR in general, it would be not worth backfilling, especially because your chances of losing is higher (many leavers leave if the game seems one-sided).
A “backfill” option is obviously a good idea. However, we are still stuck with the problem of making backfilling intriguing without making it broken. Changing the SR distribution is definitely the wrong answer. How else can you convince a player to backfill?
This is the main problem that puts the idea to a standstill: How do you deal with the backfill without breaking the system and how do you convince the player to backfill in the first place?
Stronger punishments would remove most of the problematic/disconnecting players. That would be quite a solid solution and a lot of help for the rest of the team too. Having reliable team members who don’t disconnect (or do so extremely rarely) is a much better help than sending in random fillers in the middle of the match.
I’m not obsessed with anything but I prefer proposals that list both the pros and cons. A proposal that says that “X is good because it is good for me” isn’t serious. A modification quite often has very serious positive and negative side effects (double edged sword) and in that case the “good solution” is the one that favours most of the players/accounts. Usually there is no free lunch.
These features have already been implemented in QP and we can see them in action. The filling feature in QP is hated by a lot of players (you can find a lot of threads about it on this forum). I don’t see how pushing Comp in the direction of the low quality QP zoo could be a good idea.
If there is a majority of players without technical issues then I’m pretty sure that most of them want to make Comp more serious, not less serious. If they are a majority then stronger punishments would make the playerbase more clean and reliable.
But again, this is something for Blizzard to decide and they have more info.
There is not that much leavers that losing one game would be great tragedy. There is people dropping out because of DC but most of the time they will manage to get back in match. And by the way, 5v6 is still winnable in most cases from bronze to diamond.
Most of leavers choose to leave when enemy is playing strong and own team is struggling. They just give up. When this happens in QP you might get someone who literally change the direction and we end up winning. That is great in QP. But in comp it will be more unfair to that team who has clear advantage from the beginning than lost game for already losing team with additional leaver. That is my opinion based on games I have played.
But after all, number of leavers is still quit small. And if you belong to rank where you are right now, those few lost games with leaver doesn´t affect your SR too much.
I’ve seen this suggestion somewhere on the forums but it wasn’t mine. In my experience AI substitution is generally poor. AIs are relatively difficult to make strategically smart and quite easy to make mechanically very good (I know this because of my experience in the games industry).
However I think having good AI in the game could solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. (Learning heros, relaxing for a certain kind of smurfs, better quality VS AI matches for PvE players, etc…).
The best AIs I’ve seen (CS, StarCraft) are based on extremely simple logic that I could teach anyone without any math or AI background. Complex algorithms, neural networks and fancy stuff can be useful in some situations (like recognising handwritten text) but most games are better off using much more primitive methods. Not to mention that neural networks and fancy stuff like that are less predictable and can affect production/deadlines/bugfixes negatively.
I’ve checked the reply and I’ve accidentally mistaken you with someone else.
Sorry
The fact that such an AI development would slow down the game development in general is something I haven’t considered. I already had high doubts for that idea anyway, especially due to the fact that you can’t communicate with them properly, due to their lack of communication and, as you said, strategic thinking.
No one likes it in QP but most people accept it because QP is simply a children’s playground where most matches aren’t serious.
Another possible problem with backfill: The SR/MMR spread is much stricter in case of Competitive especially at higher ranks where the available player pool is much smaller at the same time. This has the potential to make a refill on time very difficult especially at higher ranks.
It is sometimes difficult to find out why a neural network gives a specific output to a specific input. It’s difficult to debug or fix and you have less specialist who have a clue. This can be a huge issue when you have a deadline. In comparison bare bones logic (if X happens then trigger action Y) is understood by most developers and usually more than enough to provide very enjoyable gaming experience. In fact, too smart AI or too random AI can be annoying. Most PvE players prefer strategically more or less predictable AI with fine-tunable mechanical skills. However, in an FPS game a fix number of preprogrammed strategies can also be implemented fairly easily but it’s more work than giving good mechanical skills. In fact, in case of mechanical skills you aren’t working on making the AI better, you are working on making it dumber! It’s easy to create a 100% headshotting AI but more code/work to create a less than 100% (or customisable or situation dependent) hit rate.
Yeah, this is one of 2 problems for backfilling in comp: How do you make it intruiging? After all, if there’s no real reward, why else do you want to backfill?
That itself isn’t very problematic because disregarding the mentioned problems, it would be better to get a backfill a few times than getting none at all. However, this is the last problem that needs to be tackled.
Oh right, understanding the functionality of a procedurally generated AI is extremely difficult. This is also why, for example, no one actually knows how the Youtube algorithm works.
As long as there are players there will be leavers, no amount of cooldowns and punishments will completely remove them. I do agree though that we have no data on it and therefore I don’t want to assume that leavers are an absolute deal breaker and that this would be the best way to do it.
The matchmaking system aims for a 50:50 chance so there should never be a “more unfair” case.
The players would get the chance to join a shorter game in which they have more to gain than to lose. I know you said that changing the SR distribution shouldn’t be an option, but as I said using the option doesn’t guarantee anything.
This way, while the option would allow for gaining a little bit easier way of gaining SR (more SR per time spent/less SR lost), no one has any guarantee using it. The matchmaking system would decide this, meaning that no one would constantly fill games and gain SR easier than others.
I guess at the end the first step would be to try and punish players more (maybe harder punishments in higher ranks) and see if that helps, but that would require Blizzard to look into this and I don’t know where their priorities are at right now.
I think decreasing the number of leavers with stronger punishments is much more solid with less negative side effects.
For me leavers aren’t an issue in gold/plat and with stronger and stronger punishments their numbers could be forced very close to zero. If something happens rarely then a fix that can introduce a lot of problems doesn’t seem to be useful.
Thank you very much FatBlueDragon for your thoughtful and long response i really appreciate your politeness and patience.
I just wanted to mention that we are in this discussion talking here and not somewhere else where a comment was made and all i tried to say, without offending you in anyway, that if you had an idea HERE please add it instead of shooting down what is already being said without an alternative. That’s all.
But yeah again you wrote beautifully and i enjoyed reading your reply. Have a wonderful day my friend <3 even if we disagree on this.
