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Server skill limiting

Zetsumei

Grizzled Veteran
Nov 22, 2005
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Amsterdam, Netherlands
With all the new stat tracking stuff it would be really nice if servers could set a minimum and maximum skill level.

Minimum skill level so say people that like a challenge can play against equally skilled people instead of having another walk in the park.

Maximum skill level so less strong people wont suddenly have someone joining in the server killing everybody for "lolz".

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A game is always the most fun if you play it with people that are about equally skilled, so it remains a challenge yet is not too hard.
Especially in RO where you're dead in 1 shot, you often hear complains from New people "i got killed everytime from nowhere", putting people of the same skill together is just more fun. Just like singleplayer games have a difficulty setting i feel multiplayer games could have one too.

Ideally you'd want all strong people to help the weaker people to truly learn and understand the game better, but the reality isnt ideal. And stronger people just trash on weaker people and weaker people accuse stronger people for cheating.
 
That purely depends on what stats you take and your definition of skill.

If its based upon a point system like now in roost it wouldnt work well indeed.

But taking a Kills/Hour ratio, can show someones ability to kill, it doesnt show if someone is a real teamplayer or not but its shows someone's ability to make kills which is what i generally call skill.
(For respawn games when comparing stats Kills/Hour generally seemed to give a more realistic representation of skill than say a Kill/Death ratio, in the comparing i've done in the past).

Remember its not a ladder ranking for determining the best players, its to cutoff people that fall above or under a certain ratio. The fun of a game comes at having fun by challenging individuals if they are equally able to kill then the game becomes a challenge, and the winner of a match will be who can work the best together rather than who can shoot the best.

In games that utilized a system like this in the past, it worked quite nicely. Its not an untried system.
 
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But that is so flawed. Let's say there is a player named Alexander I. Now, Alexander only plays Lyeskrovy. He has potential, but is a rather shoddy player and commander. There is another player named Ptyor I. He only plays large, open, bolt-action-and-tank maps. Alexander is not nearly as skilled as Ptyor, but he plays one of the most trigger-happy, spray-n-pray maps out there. He gets far more kills per hour. He also dies alot. Ptyor, on the other hand, is an excellent shot and a great tanker, but doesn't make nearly as many kills per hour due to the nature of the maps he plays. He dies far less frequently, is a great player, and a good commander. Now, we have a third player named Alexander Vasili'evich Suvorov. He is the best goddamn commander any game has ever seen, ever. He rarley ever gets any kills, and he never dies. He isn't part of a clan, but he can go into any server and rally every single player in that server to his team, and lead them to victory, 100% of the time, even though his combat skills are only average. Now which player is the best? For this reason, a skill blocking system is fundamentaly flawed.

Also, cookies if you got all the refrences I just made.
 
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If you look at stats of Kills/Hour ratios of RO in the past (which were actually class based so you could easily seperate say tankers from infantry) The top 5 people with the highest Kills/Hour ratio were all rifleman not smgs or mgs.

The idea of such a system is not to be perfectly fair to every individual, class, or say what player is the best, the case is to draw a line somewhere for what people you want and dont want. What that line is, and where it is drawn would be up for selection by the serveradmin. A line could even be drawn by having finished x amount of trainings, or played the game in total for x amount of hours.

It will always cut off some people from playing that you would like to keep, and allow some people to play you would rather not have. But the selection that ends up in the server will for the biggest part be as intended , and thus doing exactly what its supposed to do and making the players in the server generally happy.

Its a system that worked well in the past for other games, where it made public play a lot more interesting competetive and in a nicer atmosphere.
 
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If you type R for example you should be able to see a all players with stats as now in RO, also their "True Skill" or Hero "medal", so you could balance teams on your own. I don't like your idea of good players on one server, not so good player at the others.

Especially in RO where you're dead in 1 shot, you often hear complains from New people "i got killed everytime from nowhere"
Because those people would even complain about their perfect girl or a great dinner. Just because they suck. They always did and they always will. They are... ARCADE GAMERS!!!1
 
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Sorry Zetsukittun i dont agree with you on this.

The only way for anyone to learn and get better is to play with people with more skill.

Do you think Core would have been as successful at ROL if they only played 3sa??? Dont think so.

Yes players can be bad but they must learn from the more experienced players in order to get better.
 
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it's a good idea zets.......noobs should not be playing skilled vets, period. even with the possibility of auto-balance, that's still not enough. something that turned so many away from RO was the learning curve. noobs would come in and get their butts kicked by guys who've been playing the game for 3 years.

i've actually been seeing it a lot this summer. all the new players that got pulled in by the various sales and they're all gone now. it's not so much that the game was too hard for them, or that they didn't have the desire to learn and improve, but there was no motivation to keep them going because they were always going to be so far behind most the players who were vets. the worst is when you see some elitist vets yelling "noob SL throw smoke", "noob sniper kill the mg" or "noobs get in cap". it's the kinda stuff that gets me disappointed because i don't remember it ever being that bad before.

yeah the best way to learn is to play more and against equal and better opponents, but you've got to give noobs some time to get used to the game. i'd say 3 levels should be enough. noobs, experienced, and veteran. noobs can play with noobs and experienced, and experienced can play with experienced and veterans......just never the bottom and top together.
 
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it's a good idea zets.......noobs should not be playing skilled vets, period.


Being a "vet" does not make you better. Infact I know many players that have been playing a long time, even since mod, that cant play for poop.

I think the hardest thing would be judging someones skill . . . skill is not simply how many kills you make but whom you kill and at what point . . if sniper only takes down mg and sniper he is doing his job imo but only 2 kills every so ofter wheras an smg monkey can pew pew pew a ppsh and make 4 kills in 3 seconds.

It would be too hard to judge as even K/D ratio does not mean anything in a game like RO.

I only read half you post btw. Walls of text arnt cool on a rainy morning at work :p

EDIT: Read other half of post while drinking coffee . . I dont agree with them needing a "start" in RO2 . . Single player should suffice for that (not like the "practice" mode in Roost which was fffuuuuuu)
 
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Playing RO for the first time can be a frustrating experience, but I think that new players would learn best by going up against skilled players. If new players constantly play against those of the same skill level, they'll have an understanding of how the game handles compared to other shooters, but they'll have no experience of merciless combat.
 
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My idea was not having some limits on by default, rather as a server option. Most of the time playing mixed can be fun, but at times i prefer to play on a server with people more alike to my skill. its not only for newer players, but for older players as well that want to play some games without being teamnaded or shot in the back, or having a squadleader/mg/sniper that simply cannot kill a single person auto forfeitting any chance for your teams victory.

Not all people want to really get more skill either, some just want to play and have fun, some have just old reflexes or bad eyesight and cannot hit anything. There would always be servers without any limits, but some servers that could be custom fitted to new players could greatly increase their fun from time to time, for some breathing space.

But again the reason i promote Kills/Hour ratio so much is because i saw and compared stats in the mod. In the mod every player pretty much knew every player and their skill as well, thats why it was possible to compare different settings like kill/death ratio etc. And Kills/Hour really got closest to my personal thought of the best players (note they didnt only kill but actually helped the team cap as well etc). The amount of kills/hour of smgs soldiers is not as high as you might think as a lot of time is lost returning to the fight after you died, where generally snipers and rifleman die much less frequent. It evened out pretty much atleast in the mod. Sadly the stats page is gone, and no stats page showing any worthy info was ever created for ro, so people could see what i mean.

But as there seems to be a general concensus that most people don't like it, i guess this discussion is over. And this suggestion like so many can die its natural death ^^.
 
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Instead of limiting which servers people can join, why not just use the stats to show the average skill level of a server?

Servers could appear in different colors depending on skill level

Green = low skill
yellow = medium skill
red = high skill

That way players can decide for themselves who they want to play against.
 
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If you look at stats of Kills/Hour ratios of RO in the past (which were actually class based so you could easily seperate say tankers from infantry) The top 5 people with the highest Kills/Hour ratio were all rifleman not smgs or mgs.

The idea of such a system is not to be perfectly fair to every individual, class, or say what player is the best, the case is to draw a line somewhere for what people you want and dont want. What that line is, and where it is drawn would be up for selection by the serveradmin. A line could even be drawn by having finished x amount of trainings, or played the game in total for x amount of hours.

It will always cut off some people from playing that you would like to keep, and allow some people to play you would rather not have. But the selection that ends up in the server will for the biggest part be as intended , and thus doing exactly what its supposed to do and making the players in the server generally happy.

Its a system that worked well in the past for other games, where it made public play a lot more interesting competetive and in a nicer atmosphere.

And where can you get these ratios, per say? On average, anyone who plays Lyeskrovy will get more kills and more deaths than someone who plays Arad. See where I'm going with this? IMO this is a terrible idea because there is no reliable way to track every single indivdual factor that relates to skill.
 
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I don't like the idea because as stated in this thread stats =/= skills. The thing is there is no numerical method that you can calculate "how good" or experienced somebody is.

This would only benefit lonely COD'esque rambo guys with automatic guns who get lots of kills, rather than tactical gamers. Not really a good idea.

I can only see this being useful on strictly newbie servers, but then again you need a bunch of experienced players in the mix to help/give an example to them.
 
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wow i really hope they dont do what ur suggesting (no offense) the freedom would almost not exist at that point not only that everyone here has freinds on steam that are better at certain games than them but in hos because of that they wouldnt be able to play together? and for the people who are saying " yea noobs shouldnt be able to play with pros" i have a **** load of old cal members and also from other leagues from various games and in games that im a noob (like in brand new games that my cal freinds have that they want me to get, when i first get the game i will suck and they will dominate, so with this mentality i cant play with my freinds? that is so stupid i cant even begin to explain. only of my steam buddies who was cal got good BY playing with pros for a long time so... honestly common sense!!!!
 
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Agreed with what my core mates said.
Beside it's totally fun to "buzz saw" noobs with the mg :D


#1 reason why the turnover rate for RO sucks and there aren't as many players as there could be. elitism and bullies wanting to pick on the new inexperienced players because they are having fun. do you also enjoy beating up on blind people in wheelchairs? :p

everybody is new to the game at some point. throwing somebody new without any skill straight into the fire against top players will only yield frustration and dislike towards the game and will turn people away. like many already said the trick is how to determine "skill" and "experience". once you do that problem is solved.

in many ladder competitions (not roladder though, really wish they would btw), you cannot challenge a team that is ex. amount ranks below you. that stops the big boys from beating up on far weaker teams. i look at this point about server play the same way. the extreme top players should not be allowed to beat up on the extreme low players, which of course new players are not going to have any skill when they first start. don't let top "ranked" people play against players so ex. % or rank whatever, below they are. new players will always be playing against "better" competition, just don't pit them against the "best" competition at the start.

it's not really so much the worry that new players will hurt themselves playing against top players....if they want to get destroyed right away, then that's their choice! :D it's the top players being bullies and beating up on the new players for "fun" that worries me.
 
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in many ladder competitions (not roladder though, really wish they would btw), you cannot challenge a team that is ex. amount ranks below you. that stops the big boys from beating up on far weaker teams.

Please read the roladder rules first before stating things, as the entire point system on ROL is build upon weaker team protection :\. We just dont completely disallow challenges but after a certain difference in points (as rol is point based not rung based) allow people to freely decline. Feel free to read the declination rules :p. Now there aint a big "you can decline this match" button showing up but thats reserved for ROL2. For this reason new clans once they made their first challenge should get a reminder from steven about basic rules that are important to know, to avoid other teams trying to take advantage of them.
 
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