The Ranked-Points System Thread: Page 2

The Ranked-Points System Thread

BLT

Hona I'm gonna guess it's the same on KSF, but a few years back when Resurfed was still a thing in TF2, surf_aircontrol was probably the easiest map basically anyone could complete in a few tries if you knew not to press w in the air. Also, the easy server was constantly on it. Both of these things caused an insane number of completions (maybe even in the tens of thousands?) but many of them were very bad.

A map completion gave almost no points (I think it was around the same as Tempus so let's say 10 for a Tier 1). surf_aircontrol's groups however gave thousands of points because the points scaled with completions.

But since most of the times were super bad, it was incredibly easy to get into group 2 or even 1 with just about no skill. I hadn't even beat a single linear T2 at that point but i grinded for a few hours max and got to group 2 easily by just watching the WR route and which ramps to take. With that I think I got to Veteran rank (but I don't remember the rank progression exactly) while being super bad.

TL;DR If the number of people who can only do extremely easy maps it too high and these players don't eventually become better and group points scale with size, it will get very unbalanced very fast.

Hona

BLT Oh I see, that makes sense. Thanks

MichaelViera

Ark_

I think this is kinda how it works. The groups expand less and less, with more and more completions (remember, if it was exponential it would pass the top10 points!). It's still gonna favor low tier maps. And by the way, the system is not inherently gonna favor low completion maps because the curve falls down, it's gonna favor new maps, yes - but besides, also new maps that are easy. All flat point systems favor new maps. A low tier map's rank 500 is not harder than a high tier's rank 500, just because the low tier map have more registered ranks above. The ranks above don't contribute to the competition of the rank 500, only the ranks below 500 contribute. We need to adjust for tier ... As Untouch knew in 2009, but still didn't make it properly since people complained about 24/7 aircontrol. What I'm saying is like saying rank 500= rank 500. It's the null hypothesis without any doubt.

MichaelViera

Or wait, oops. It's never gonna pass the top10 points because the group points are fixed in all instances. But yeah, my point still stand anyway. It doesn't matter how the groups are going to expand driven by # completions. As long as they are expanding the slightest (without tier adjustment), it's going to discriminate high tier maps compared to low tier maps. When I'm talking about tier adjustment, what I mean is that as # completions increase on high tier maps, they should increase the group spans relatively more than on lower tiers. So # completions should drive the group spans differently for each tier (more weighing as tier is increasing). As far as you want such a group system at all. I don't have any opinion about the group system if it had this edition.

Beetle179

zer0k_z I don't think the points are purely trying to rank people competitively, if so you would just use the placement in the leaderboard, pull an 1/x and call it a day.

that works if there's only one map. but, this system as i designed it IS designed to rank people competitively. whether or not it's good at that is one discussion; whether or not that's what the system SHOULD be doing is another discussion.

my opinion is towards those two discussions are that this system isn't perfect, but it's reasonable; and that yes, the ranked points system should absolutely be striving to rank players competitively based on skill -- otherwise, you just have cosmetic points v2

this is not a slight at anyone posting here (honestly i'm not reading every post, this is a LOT to read) but i'll say what i was saying when this was being worked out a few years ago: if you don't like it, please propose an alternative, as detailed as possible. in my experience, these conversations very quickly become unproductive because everyone wants to poke holes in an admittedly imperfect system, but no one wants to figure out how to actually fix it. concrete, describable algorithms with actual numbers are much, much more valuable than endless bickering about how certain edge cases behave a little weirdly.
(again, this is not a slight at anyone, but a reminder that 3 years ago this discussion got so bloated with non-solutions that in the end, nothing productive was accomplished)

cowboyana

Beetle179 if you don't like it, please propose an alternative, as detailed as possible

there was a discussion a while back in the rj channel in discord about adding an element to the ranking based on your time so you can a) gain points by improving always and b) reward times closer to record. gocnak was interested in it i'm pretty sure - iirc what he was considering was having points based on a time comparison with your time and the top of the current bracket possibly replace the general 'formula points' , or perhaps as some split between them.

i was curious about what that might look like so i made a formula with some good ol arbitrary constants to resemble the overall shape of the 50000/(rank+49) formula while further incentivizing getting times approaching the leader of your current group.

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/jzuilhsbik

i think the most controversial parts of something like this are

what beetle was saying about it being cool to have the system be focused solely on improving rank and having clear threshholds to push for.
clunkiness/problems with the time-based point formula itself.

for 1, i used to be in that boat, but i've come around to feeling it's better for competition to incentive improving times even if the pr above yours in the leaderboard feels insurmountable. at least in rj/sj there is a very real phenomenon of players with top 10 times not wanting to improve prs because it seems like too much grinding before seeing any reward by moving up. and also, this system would just be replacing or combined with the formula points, so there would still be big threshholds for breaking wrs/top times or getting to next group from the other parts of rank calculation.

for 2, my formula is certainly bad in a lot of ways as i made it in like 45 minutes and i'm not very good at video games. i don't even know if this is much like what gocnak was considering at all, but i thought i'd throw it out here so people who like numbers or getting angry about numbers could think about what a formula that rewards time improvements could look like

zer0k_z

Beetle179

Just to be clear, I don't hate the current system, I just want to point out the possible flaws and suggest a way to improve it, mainly by using time percentile reward system instead of the formula + group reward when the number of completions is sufficient, to prevent sudden spike of reward that can be abused one way or another.

However, (this might not be the case for surf), I think it is simply not possible to design a decent system that can rank people across different maps.

Techniques required between maps can vary significantly, the person that mastered the most popular tech will get the most points.
It just doesn't make any sense to compare someone who has 10 WR out of the 10 maps they play versus someone who is top 150 in hundred of maps. Completions tend to win the game of points, not skill. But if you design an overly aggressive system towards the top, improvements at lower skill level might often feel insignificant. It's a lose-lose situation either way.

Overall, I think points should be used more like a progression/completion system than a comparison system. Any sort of competitive ranking using points only works well in direct competitions (duels, tournament, etc..) and not in a map leaderboard.

MichaelViera

yeah, the same, i want to point out flaws. i dont hate it either. in my old rank system solution where i used "time a map has been out" variable for measuring competitiveness, i didnt use tier adjustment because that variable dont favor either low or high tier (but it has other issues so i dont supporr myself any longer), but number of completions do favor low tiers, so it needs (so yes, my concerns is solely a competitive rank system, dont worry!)

btw, like zero, i dont support a system that tries to compare people cross maps (but as far as you want that, you have to do it properly) because it is mission impossible in general. yeah, exactly, only works in direct competition.

MichaelViera

We have to get away from the rank system as means to measure people's skill level. Rank systems are possible in direct competition because that ensures that people are 100 % committed within a specified time, to a specific very limited, and well-defined goal (or don't have an excuse that they were not 100 % committed, etc.). Especially with giaaant map pools with thousands of tracks to set records on, rank systems are never going to compare players cross maps.

It's useful for like progression or "being ranked for fun" or having a very rough estimate, yeah. And I'm not against that!!!

We need to give people tools to measure surfers.
This is topwr, topwrcp, topwrb etc. (even though they also revolve around grinding, but not as much as farming points)

I also sent this suggestion https://github.com/momentum-mod/website/issues/478

This is being able to filter the leaderboards and the tops and all stats by what experts find interesting and which they can be encouraged to communicate in a forum/thread with that purpose

Equivalent with topwr, topwrcp etc. there should also be "topgroups": topgroup1, topgroup2, etc. So surfers can put more effort into something rather than farming the lowest groups or farming the formula points (though that may be very ineffective). I would far rather see a player being even listed at topgroup1 than a player being number1 at topgroup5 and having far more points but without having any groups 1.

I do actually like to see the rank system as another tool. Though that is not how it is labeled, that's ok.

There are probably many things.

Ark_

MichaelViera We have to get away from the rank system as means to measure people's skill level.

The rank system isn't a way to measure the skill level of a player, rather it's a way for a player to showoff how good they are. No ranking system shows off the true skill of a player, it just shows how good a player is at gaming the ranking system. All we can hope for from a ranking system is that the set of actions that the system encourages (aka getting points) aligns fairly well with both what we want players to do(namely, play the game a lot and interact with all aspects of it) and what players want to do (playing the game, getting good times, and most importantly having fun).

As long as the system vaguely rewards more skilled play over less skilled play; better and more dedicated players will tend to get more points, and will in general act as a rough analog to player skill. You are correct that a ranking system based on points isn't really that great at showing true skill, and most records or other most top10's or other real statistic is better and more objective, but that doesn't matter, because the point of ranked points is to create a fun meta game around rank points that keeps players playing the game an improving, everything else is secondary.

MichaelViera

Ark_
Yeah, I agree on everything

MichaelViera

Gocnak

Tier is f(number of completions) everything else held constant. Completions is not even directly related to comptetion level, but is directly related to tier. I might get time to write a long message in yesterday about how conceptually flawed the group system is.

The only way to use number of completions is by assuming that heterogenous groups of people enter the map pool (and then adjust for tier). If the first is not the case, the number of completions are wrong in all instances anyway, and then you don't need to adjust for tier because it will be wrong in all instances xD

This is not a stable system. That's why I tag you. I would never put this out with that group system. Nothing elsr about the rank system is conceptually flawed or anything. I like improvement of time points, but whether the system had it or not, it wouldnt make it less or more conceptually right.

Even if there was no group system, it would neither be conceptual right or wrong. But that particular group system is a conceptual flaw and is NOT stable.

Ark_

MichaelViera Tier is f(number of completions) everything else held constant.

This isn't true in general. Tier is a function of the difficulty of a map, and completions only roughly follow tier, outside of the obvious outliers like aircontrol and other popular easy maps, which have completions by people who beat the map then quit playing entirely, within any difficulty bracket the better and more popular maps tend to get played more, and therefore beaten more, and not necessarily the easiest. Obviously if you were to plot them you would end up with something resembling a normal distribution, but the popular maps would be clear outliers.

That said, the only thing completions effect is how many people get group points, which really is a reasonable way to assign group points. Your idea that two actions of similar difficulty should give the same reward just doesn't hold up, as even if beating a hard map and getting a really good time on an easy map are the same absolute difficultly, they don't hold the same prestige. People will always view a "good" time better than a "bad" time, regardless of how hard the map is. Beating other people is always seen as more impressive than just doing a thing, and even though that makes it hard to make a ranking system based on objective skill, it doesn't make it hard to produce a system that's fun to play, which is much more important in a video game. If this was some serious sporting system your arguments would probably have more pull to them, but as it is you are just complaining about a video game doing something you don't like.

MichaelViera

Everything else held constant.

Completions only roughly follow tier??? Wtf??? Why do you think x5 rise only has been done one time? Because it is the most difficult trick ever. Why do you think setting x5 rise time record (zee's also had time records) is not the absolute easiest, even though it appears as only one man can do it? Getting top10 time record on x5 rise is harder than any other top10 lol. If completions were related to competition 1:1, x5 rise time record should be the easiest record ever, lmfao.

Actually beating as many people as possible by being the only one completing is exactly the OBJECTIVE OF TRICKSURF. So clearly there you can get prestige in that manner.

"within any difficulty bracket"
What do you mean? Yeah within any tier map, the maps that are more beaten are not easier, they are probably more popular/contested, that's because you hold tier constant.

They don't hold the same prestige, though they are equally difficult???? the only way it even makes sense to speak of difficulty is relative difficulty (and yes, you do beat people merely by that they can't beat the map), so the difficulty is inherently related to prestige lol.

This debate has completely died to groupthinking. @Gocnak , ask people outside Momentum! Ask people far outside Momentum. I will only strengthen the group-thinking if I continue and I can't waste more time on this.

Edit: Have to leave now. It destroys my study life (which is ofc. only my own fault). I will temporarily leave Momentum Discord etc. so I can stop thinking about it.

Edit2: I don't even know why you want to make an exception for aircontrol because aircontrol is actually very competitive. LINEAR t1 maps tend to be more competitive because linear t1 maps have an inherent connection to short length, and there is more about this that I won't delve into because this debate is not mature enough for that at all, but hopefully it will be in 10 years. also very high tier maps tend to be more competitive actually which I won't delve into as well.

Gocnak

I should probably note that trick(surf) won't have rank points, but will have leaderboards for time and average speed. Talking with the community, Tricksurf had "points" but the values were meaningless compared to actually just completing the tricks. Completion was held in a higher regard than getting good times on tricks. Tricks will still offer cosmetic XP for completion, though.

MichaelViera

(fair enough, but it has no impact on my argument).
you could just exchange my argument with the most difficult bonus e.g.

ask clever people outside Momentum.

Gocnak

@Gocnak , ask people outside Momentum! Ask people far outside Momentum. I will only strengthen the group-thinking if I continue and I can't waste more time on this

The problem that arises is that the communities I would reach out to that would have an idea of how to go about this would be the speedrunning communities I've taken part in. The issue here is that the only measure of skill there is just purely time. There's no point system with regards to a game's speedrun.com leaderboards, mostly because it'd be like looking at designing a rank system for only one map, which in Momentum's context will be complete and utter tunnel vision. At that point there is no purpose to have an overarching system like this rank points one, because there's only one thing being measured: completion for one category of one game. Compare it to Momentum's thousands of maps across tens of different, pretty unique gamemodes. We have to drive one's improvement across it all, ergo this rank points system on top of a leaderboard that already pretty clearly defines who's "better" than you.

The goal of this rank points system is (or at least, should be) to motivate improvement. Someone's total rank points for a gamemode is just a measure of how consistently good they are at the mode, as one with higher overall points has consistently set higher overall ranks in the leaderboards. It is also the only dynamic system we have, as you can lose points as people beat you and bump you out of groups. If that happens, go back and set a better time, you can do better. Ideally, in the vast competitive world of free-to-play platforming like Momentum will be, you shouldn't set one time on a map and be comfortable if it wasn't the best you could possibly do. Someone will beat your time -> you have less gamemode rank points -> an intrinsic value to go "get those points back" and improve your time.

On the other hand, the goal of the cosmetic XP system is to reward the efforts going into actually playing the entire game, but it doesn't say much about one's skill because you can grind one map for it. Whereas with rank points, you could grind a map all you want, but if you don't improve your rank, then yeah you don't get anything in return for it with regards to rank points. This ties in with what was mentioned before about a 5 hour improvement to a 9 hour PB. This is ranked points we're talking about. If you didn't improve your rank, you don't get any change of rank points, but you will definitely get cosmetic XP for the effort.

zer0k_z

Gocnak The goal of this rank points system is (or at least, should be) to motivate improvement.

Gocnak This ties in with what was mentioned before about a 5 hour improvement to a 9 hour PB. This is ranked points we're talking about. If you didn't improve your rank, you don't get any change of rank points, but you will definitely get cosmetic XP for the effort.

It isn't exactly motivating to give 0 point for a decent improvement, don't you think? Of course this example might be too extreme, but imagine a 5 minute improvement to an one hour run on a very hard map instead. This kind of things happens a lot in harder maps (again, from a kz perspective).

Take a look at this leaderboard of a KZ map for example. This map is tier 6, one tier away from the hardest tier: https://kzprofile.com/maps.html?map=kz_pendulum&mode=kz_timer&run=tp

The last column is the points awarded to the player.

You can see that #56 is faster than #57 by a small margin, so the point difference is small. But #57 is much faster than #56, therefore the point difference is bigger! Also notice no matter how small the margin is, the faster guy always gets more points (see #60 and #61).

Now if you use your current system, the point gap between all of these people would be more or less the same. The point difference between #58 and #59 would basically be the same as #59 and #60, even though their time gap is 120 times bigger than the latter! The demotivating part comes when you are #58, you can improve your run by a 19 minutes and get exactly 0 point as a reward, after 2.5 hours of tirelessly grinding! I don't think that is fair or motivating.

Again, I'm not asking for a total remake of the system, I just want it to not base solely on rank.

879m

zer0k_z The demotivating part comes when you are #58, you can improve your run by a 19 minutes and get exactly 0 point as a reward, after 2.5 hours of tirelessly grinding! I don't think that is fair or motivating.

A 20min improve on a multiple hour time isn't a big improve though. I know there's some fucked up maps (and don't know a lot about kz maps) but if you don't significantly decrease your time (i'm talking hours) then you haven't gotten much better. If you were failing for hours on your last completion, you might just get slightly luckier and complete a hard section quicker on a rerun while still being just as bad.

In rj/sj, the general attitude towards multi-hour completions (with very few exceptions) is that whoever gets them was barely good enough to beat the map and get their completion. These players should go and get better by playing other maps for a while. Then when they eventually return to the hard map they will improve their time by a lot.

The improve in that kz situation is actually worth the pittance it gives imo.

MichaelViera

same. none of us want a total remake ........... i have no opinions about groups or anything, or whether a rank system should motivate or not, whether it should try to be accurate or not, make groups , don't make groups, make a steep system, make a flat system, make time based, make anything, make whatever you want (or i do have some light opinions, but they are irrelevant) but don't try to use # completions as driver for competitiveness without adjusting for tier xdddddddddddddd it's a 2+2=5 error. and a rank system with such an error should never see the light of public.

MichaelViera

879m
"A 20min improve on a multiple hour time isn't a big improve though"
In that argument, you appear to acknowledge that minutes say something about improving, but 20mins is just too little of a marginal on a multiple-hour time. So you assume there is some magic arbitrary baseline where the (relative) marginal gets too little, and first, if you go over this baseline, it matters? Wuuuut. If it is very little, then it rewards with very little ofc. There is something called continuous.

People seem to don't understand the term "everything else being equal".

Everything else being equal, when you improve a run, it is because you have improved; become better at the map. There can be exceptions, but the exceptions (about being lucky, unlucky etc.) are equally likely to happen on both runs. You even acknowledge this yourself "you haven't gotten too much better", again working with this weird arbitrary baseline.

Why should they go to other maps and become better? Everything else held equal, all maps are equally good means to become better ......

Especially multiple hour completions can correlate with haven't learned the map properly (or playing a lengthy map where you tend to spent long time to climb the learning curve), and when you haven't learned a map properly, you are at your lower point on the learning curve where the slope value is very large, thus MORE than anything suggesting that in your next run, you will perm the run better objectively .......

By the way, I have no opinion about this. I just look at arguments that work and that don't work

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