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Dengaroth wrote:QUOTE (Dengaroth @ Apr 20 2007, 07:27 AM) I logged in.

I looked around.

I logged back out.

(kudos to Cuculet)

Could have at least explained to the newbie team how to resign.

I figured Cuc is more than capable of doing that. That sort of thing definitely makes a better impression when explained by someone who's been playing in the match.

Jormagund wrote:QUOTE (Jormagund @ Apr 20 2007, 04:35 PM) OK, Heads you win, tails you lose. Take a random samping of ~300 coins (active players) and flip them each ~100 times and calculate the deviation from the 1:1 norm. Now throw that data out the window bc you forgot to add that some of the coins are trying awfully damn hard to come up heads. I know your argument is that over time everything evens out if you have perfectly even games and perfectly even comms and enough games under these conditions to tend toward a statistical average. However, such conditions do not, cannot, will not, exist. The fact is I have seen people get stacked and lose the game bc of the comm or the 'overstack' as I like to term it when you have 12 whores and 0 nans on a team. I have seen Aarm defend a teleport from an entire galv run by himself. Deviations from 1:1 are not a result of flying with the stack so much as at least being part of the stack. You either have the skills so that you can be a stacker or you don't. Even then the vast majority of games are merely unbalanced not stacked.

So what you're saying is that
* Auto-balance won't work becauseCommanders will never be perfectly evenTeams will never be perfectly even, partially because we can't take pilot roles into account ("11 whores and one nan is a better team than 12 whores")* Pilots that win more than they lose are good pilots.

Yes... Ensuring even commanders is a big problem. As I think someone wrote earlier in the thread, ACS might help here. Another thing that could be interesting is creating a separate commanding rank to make it easier to match up commanders.

Concerning team balance, I think that an auto balance algorithm could do better than we are currently doing. At least an algorithm wouldn't favor a select handful of players and make them win much more often than other players. And when we get more data on how the algorithm performs we can come to new conclusions and improve it.

When it comes to pilot roles, I don't think it's feasible to include that in a ranking system. See Seymor's thread for an attempt at trying to design an algorithm that ranks and distinguishes different pilot skills.
Perhaps this deficiency in helo will encourage players to diversify and gain new skills. Maybe one of those 12 whores can learn to jump into a scout when it's needed. One-trick-ponies are pretty inflexible.

Another thing that Helo can't account for is two players that play together very well but are much less valuable if they're without their 'partner'.

About the fourth point, I agree that most of those who often fly with the better / "stacked" team are probably at least "somewhat" skilled (if nothing else, then because they have generally been playing for at least a few months). But I don't think that having a win/loss ratio higher than 1:1 means that you're better than a pilot who loses twice for every game he wins.
EDIT: In other words and as I've said before, I don't believe that getting better will automatically mean that you will win more games.

QUOTE Look at it like this- I agree with you that 1:1 would prolly be every pilots win ratio if it were a perfect world, no one was overly lucky and human nature was more defensible. However, communism proved this world did not exist. It is one of those look good on paper things. Look at how many ifs/ands/buts you have to throw into your argument all mystically provided by the phrase "over time." I get it. It will all balance out over time- except that this is not how it will happen. There will be a LONG line of horrible games before ranks are accurate followed by a whole new method of stacking when the high ranks decide they don't want to fly with Noobs1-9 and the whole system will be shot.[/quote]
How long that line of horrible games will be is hard to estimate and lies in the eye of the beholder. And then you assert that pilots will find new ways to stack. Maybe they will. Maybe we can find a way to redesign the auto-balance system / Alleg client / whatever so that we can mitigate this new way. Who knows what'll happen?
I think it's overly pessimistic to avoid trying just because we might fail.

ImmortalZ wrote:QUOTE (ImmortalZ @ Apr 20 2007, 10:59 AM) Sycrus. The earth is not flat. If its late night for you, its morning or afternoon somewhere in the world.

of course its flat! what are you talking about?! heheheh
i thought the koreans arent supposed to be on our servers?

i love how all of the examples of horribly stacked games involve 4v4s at three in the morning.

Lykourgos wrote:QUOTE (Lykourgos @ Apr 21 2007, 12:01 AM) i love how all of the examples of horribly stacked games involve 4v4s at three in the morning.

At the danger of sounding like a broken record: It's three in the morning for you, not so for the rest of the globe When the 4v4 looks like that, it never grows to a 5v5, then to a 6v6

Why don't we just clone everyone and have the new people be on the opposing team?

(BTW, I meant ridiculous fictional cloning as seen in 'multiplicity', not real cloning that results in a fertilized cell with the same genetics as the parent organism.)

Stack THAT.

denga, euro primetime usually has a 10v10 going, doesn't it? i play at 1-3 p.m. my time fairly often, and i believe that's euro primetime, and usually there's a real game going.

my point is, these games are not representative of the average allegiance game.

Lykourgos wrote:QUOTE (Lykourgos @ Apr 21 2007, 07:23 AM) my point is, these games are not representative of the average allegiance game.

And Des' point, which I completely agree with, is that there was a time when the games in this time window were "representative of the average allegiance game", and there's no reason why they shouldn't be again.

Maybe you came to Alleg after that timeslot started its slow but steady decline (I could name a very specific list of names responsible for it, but that would probably make my post a personal attack in your eyes again), I don't really remember. It's just that these games were among the funnest Alleg experiences for us, so naturally when someone comes and claims "these are 3am games, you can't expect anything but @#(!", it tends to push our buttons the wrong way - because we remember a time where we could, in fact, expect something good.

Sorry for beating a dead horse, it's just a matter of some importance to me.

now-days there are literally no-one on in that timeslot, your lucky to even see ANY game going on.