JPB wrote:Race balancing...
@dode74 Thanks for answering. I was always wondering about that.
It never occurred to me as I consider BB teams as imbalanced by default. It's just a feature of the system really. So I never paid much heed to it. But what you describe is indeed what would happen (and does), I'm not arguing it. Thanks, and wow, that's another mess.
I agree that they are unbalanced by default. Part of the issue is the environment of matchmaking and peoples' expectations within it. People want different things from where they play. Scheduled leagues are seen as a generally "balanced" environment because of roughly equal opportunity of development (games played per team), although even over long terms that becomes skewed and can be seen as a problem (you tend to get a top tier of the "winningest" teams who have to run a gauntlet of a second tier of nasty bash, who can't themselves quite get to the top tier often, to get there). Matchmaking has the issue of lack of equality in any sense other than TV, and equal TVs are not equal teams. Population sizes mean you won't often get exactly even TVs (particularly at higher TV), and unequal TVs with inducements making up the difference only increases the variance.
There is a solution to creating even matches, and it's called TVPlus (cue the pitchforks). You basically take the record of the team (wins - losses) and add 50TV for each win and subtract 50TV for each loss. You then match on that basis.
We know it's better than TV alone at making more even matches, because we've tested both systems in the same environment. We even did it without telling people that they had TV matching for a season, and nobody noticed any difference. So if nobody notices TV matching being "better" (as many people claimed), and we have real data suggesting matches are more even under TVPlus, TVPlus has to be an objective improvement.
The TVPlus which has been implemented is only a partial solution, though. The full solution would make every match a 50:50 challenge. Explanation
here. tl;dr is that you then award inducements based on TVPlus rather than TV, uncap the inducement numbers (so 0-n wizards), and make it a rez league. You then lose win% as a measure of ranking and use the (wins - losses) score instead. This is a step too far for some people, though, and has met with resistance. There's no real objection to it, though, outside "it's too different".
Edit: don't want to turn this into a TVPlus thread, just explain it - feel free to PM me or start a different thread for discussion if you'd like.