Hey friends, as a member of the progression team working on skill based rank I wanted to jump on and thank everyone for participating. We got a lot of value out of this test and it's great so many of you engaged with the system.
Based of player feedback there are definitely a few things we're going to take a look at for next time. Keep sharing your feedback :)
Will be slapping a 1-rating in-game after I return from work. Here is my final skill rating (Squad FPP) and my OP.GG stats.
There are several major flaws with this current Skill Rating algorithm:
- From the beginning, it only measured individual placement and kills, and it completely discounted any measure of teamwork. Squad mode is very much a team game, and if the whole squad doesn't maintain its cohesion, then it's bound to falter when it comes to scoring high placement or high kill counts.
- At the very least, reward all team member's with placement points based on the team's final placement.
- Incorporate Assists into the calculation. Many argue that Damage should be included instead, but it's too easy to pad the stat without getting into meaningful combat, and besides, after observing several OP.GG profiles, I found that KDA seems closely aligned with Average Damage per Round anyway. As a guideline, I designed a Skill Rating system with Damage included one month ago, and if I were to replace Damage with Kills+Assists, point gains would look like this:
- PLACEMENT points are rewarded to all TEAM members based on the whole TEAM'S final placement.
- KILL points are rewarded to all TEAM members based on the whole TEAM'S total kill count.
- BONUS points are rewarded to the INDIVIDUAL based on how many KILLS and ASSISTS that the INDIVIDUAL has scored.
- It seemed designed for a skill-based matchmaking environment, but it was implemented into random matchmaking anyway.
- In SBMM, only GOD-LIKE players/teams can achieve close to 2 K/D and 20% Squad win-rate, and reach well beyond 4000+ Skill Rating within 100 games.
- In Random MM, 2 K/D and 20% Squad win-rate is FAR EASIER to achieve if you're above average. It skews the results of this system heavily, and I wouldn't be surprised if something like 10% of the playerbase ended up in Master because of this (which is a horrible distribution of Skill Rating).
- It doesn't penalize bad matches hard enough. Even with early deaths with 0-1 kills in the Master rank, it felt like I was losing no more than 20 points per match. Ultimately, I felt like I could easily grind my way to Master without being a top-tier player.
- If people are to deserve higher skill rating, then they should be expected to perform exceptionally well in every game, earning above-average placement and kill counts, even if it's to break even. The punishment for bad matches needs to be stronger to incentivize people to do better.
- My skill rating system incorporates strong penalties by introducing a "Skill Rating Entry Fee" for every match, which gets higher and higher for every skill bracket.
- It seemed to reward kills WAY more strongly than placement. I'm aware that the current algorithm was designed with the SUPER point system as a base, and that pro teams in esports tend to earn ~64% of their points as Kill points, but you may have overtuned the Kill point reward. Perhaps this is because of the corrections being made based on the average skill of the lobby (as Brian Corrigan mentioned in the recent Winner Winner Podcast).
- I would not make ANY corrections to Kill points. It's inherently flawed because, in a battle royale game, not every fight is a fair fight. You have just as many instances of long, isolated battles as there are instances of third-partying, and people getting sprayed down without a chance to fire back.
- Instead, keep the Kill point rewards static (as well as the upcoming Assist point rewards), being as proportional to the SUPER point rewards as possible, and trust that skill-based matchmaking will implicitly enable fair Kill/Assist point rewards for everyone in a match.
- Do the same thing for Placement points, if it's not like that already.
Overall, it's wonderful that PUBG is planning to give us this system, but unfortunately this was just FAR from good. Assists need to be factored in. Bad matches need to be more punishing. Kill point rewards need to be normalized. Most importantly, the developers need to incorporate skill-based matchmaking to get any kind of meaningful data out of this system in the future.
Ty for the gold /u/thedorkishguy :)
Nice to know people are thinking about the future. I can confidently say I lot of the points you brought up here are on our team's list of things to work on going forward.
Bringing this to PUBG Labs earlier on in development allows us to work with you folks to create a system that feels like it has meaning. We agree that every game should feel important and under performing should feel penalizing.
As most of us in office are squad players, we also understand that teamwork should be encouraged and rewarded.
I look forward to sharing more about future tests and changes in the coming months.
Thank you for listening! The MadGlory studio has been doing a great job with its transparency lately (even if it doesn't gain that much attention). I, and others, would really appreciate hearing more from you guys regularly.
<3
A lot of us read reddit with regularity and our big fans of our community in general. I'm hoping in the future we can start putting some names and faces to the work you guys see out of MG more often.
For me personally, it's my goal to spend some time responding to more feedback this year. I know you guys love this game as much as we do and we've seen a lot of cool things from our fans as a result of that passion.
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