[Discussion] Balance, Bias, Matchmaking and Battle Ratings

That’s what we THINK we know… it is a presumption.

They literally proclaimed they balance by SL earned.

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When? Some more info in how the balancing system works is pure gold

That’s a few years ago when Gaijin adjusted some of the Bombers BR, they said they relied on the efficiency (reward)

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This is definitely a solid idea, but I think it’d be also helpful to design a system that adds context to the statistics with tags to indicate if there is unusual activity or similar.

For example, the CL-13 in IT tree that was pushed up by a number of very skilled players a few years ago, that would have received a tag of “played mostly by very high skill players” and should have been reviewed manually. Or using the BMPT/T58/Su-30 prems, they would have gained the tag “extremely popular” and “filter outliers” to indicate the large number of games played and the varied skill of the playerbase, thus prompting manual review.

A system like this should help them get more accurate readings of their collected statistics.

Ideally they’d also implement a pair of stats like “WR difference” and “K/D difference” (or “Kill per game played difference” that shows how much a player’s average WR or K/D increases or decreases when they play a given vehicle. Stats like “X difference” can absolutely be a great indicator of vehicles that underperform or overperform significantly.

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Continuing the discussion from Responding To Your Feedback On Separate Battle Ratings:

also @Josephs_Piano

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Do you have a better system in mind? Because just saying “go by hard metrics” is a meaningless platitude. People with thousands of battles disagree all the time about which hard factors are more important. Hell, so do the real world engineers that work on these things.

If you’re referring to vehicles played by a small number of people, they say they do weigh that in. Whether you believe it or not is up to you. However, I feel compelled to point out that they are a business. Their BR decisions are clearly based, not just on how a vehicle is performing in competitive terms, but how much SL/RP per battle it nets a player in relation to its rank. In other words, efficiency.

See what @RunaDacino has already explained.

Lol no. Why would they do this? Their objective is player retention. If you exclude inexperienced players from a vehicle’s statistics, those worse players are going to have a bad time and may even quit the game.

Like, hello? This is an MMO. You structurally cannot play it without other people!

It’s not in their commercial interest to do this. You are raising barriers of entry into different game modes by only balancing BRs on the people who are already good. But people starting a mode afresh are likelier to buy premiums and populate different areas of the MM as they progress through a tree.

You fundamentally misunderstand what the BR system is for.

The BR system is not to sort vehicles into competitive brackets all else being equal, because it is impossible to separate the vehicle from the player - no vehicle in the game plays itself - and more importantly, because Gaijin’s customers aren’t the vehicles.

The players are the customers. All the players, even the bad ones. So Gaijin will try to standardise the experience of all the players. Which is why vehicle statistics include all the players.

This idea of “harmful stats” is hilariously out of touch man.

It is not a way to bypass anything, since you failed to address all the structural reasons and commercial incentives behind the current BR system.

I believe we need to incorporate the usage frequency by “Up-Tier” into the data.
This should allow us to identify vehicles and aircraft that are excessively underrated in both BR and Rank.

What are you talking about? Obviously this is already baked-in. If a vehicle sees more uptiers than the average/suffers from the MM, its efficiency will drop and it will perform worse.

Some vehicles can be thrown into +1.0 to +2.0 BR lineups without any issues whatsoever. These vehicles are likely to achieve exceptional results even when UP TIER, from which we can derive their genuinely suitable BR.

I guess they moved this thread here

Pretty unfortunate the Polls ate a reset.
And that this will probably be buried by other topics

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They literally said SL earnings are only part of the equation - we do not know how much or exactly how that is used!!

russian propaganda symulator doing well with bmpt, great job

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Some vics have bad loadouts for air and bad global KDS… leaving only good silver earnt from base bombing so it has a lot of influence, some cases it must be all they go off as the vics are never moved down

Like I already said, this is an unhinged take. Gaijin’s customers are the players, not the vehicles. They of course tailor the game to the experience of all their potential customers (especially the average and therefore more numerous ones) because that’s where the money is to be found. Bad players and mediocre players do not taint any info because they’re part of the same ecosystem that supports the whole game. Vehicles are just pixels, not moral agents, and there’s no incentive to be “fair to them” when your objective is making money.

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Just to be clear, there is no evidence gaijin even uses data, because we can’t see the data and never have been able to. Very easily they could just be doing what they want to do.

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I think the Italian cl 13 incident back in the day kinda confirms they use data of some kind. Its just completely unfiltered and with some heavy biases when it comes to specific vehicles like premiums and such.

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So, what do you propose?

Keep the unbalance?

Balance by hand all TTs?

Balancing by performance is perfectly fine for a PVP game.