Pending ELO range restriction setting

[FJ2K]

Hi,
Being from the EU and playing on low volume ladders ( currently ADV Gen 3 OU ) ( And in the past just lower tiers of current gens) , I often find myself having matches where I'm facing people a solid 300+ lower than me. Even if I win a good 7-8 of these matches, 1 loss is enough to set my elo gain to 0. With the RNG , a loss due to hax is just inevitable over a great number of games.

Every other ELO game I've played has a restriction feature where you can decide who you can play against, so I'm hoping it can be implemented on SD.

 

[Adeleine]

if the suggestion is not implemented, you may find this post on a related suggestion of use, where someone says they usually manage to avoid these situations by cancelling the ladder search if it takes 1-2 minutes

 

[FJ2K]

Whilst that is a soft fix, its still rather inconvenient. I'd rather be doing something else while trying to find a game, rather than just sitting there watching the search happen and cancelling every minute or so. This definitely is a Quality of Life thing more than a necessity, but there's no downside to this feature. Getting impatient at not finding games? You can widen your ELO range. Dont want to face players 300+ ELO below you? ( not fun for you or them) Narrow your ELO range. The feature would be something that users would have to manually turn on, since most players just want to get into a game quickly the current search is fine for them. But for players who are actively trying to climb the ladder, its a frustrating issue that could be solved with this simple feature

 

[Ortheore]

I came here to post this exact suggestion lol.

I don't care as much about my ladder rating, it's just that I find matches against opponents 300-400 points below me boring and a waste of time.

For rby, if you're 1500+ you're generally top 50 on ladder, but you can still get matched up with players around 1200, which is unambiguously low ladder and there can be such a huge gap for good players that it's absurd

 

[FJ2K]

Hi bumping this one time,
Issue is still annoying as ever. I've noticed that players in the higher end of ladder have even stopped laddering as much once they hit top 10. From speaking to friends in the top 10, the poor matchmaking is a major factor. The player response to not ladder as much once you hit top 10 further reinforces the current algorithm to create poor matchmaking, as anyone aspiring to hit the top of ladder will almost certainly play players exclusively far lower than them for most games.

Would love to hear if any progress has been made towards approving this?

 

[Felucia]

I've been playing 1v1 for over 10 years so I very much understand this struggle. I do wonder how it would be feasible to do something about this though.

The issue with a max elo range is that it actively inhibits the portion of the playerbase that doesn't give a damn about their elo and just wants to find a game as fast as possible. With that, I'd prefer to pose an alternative solution: Modify the elo formula to mitigate elo lost from significantly lower ranked opponents. This is especially impactful for small ladders (like 1v1) and volatile formats (like 1v1).

How we'd actually do this is beyond me, and I expect this to sit in "Pending" purgatory for a while longer, but I do think that matchmaking shouldn't be changed because it'll make unpopular ladders even less popular.

 

[FJ2K]

Most players don't care about elo ranges as they don't really make a difference until you're at the higher end where games are fewer and population size is smaller . Hence, most players will just use the default settings ; the same can be seen on other elo based games such as chess. The option for high ladder players to restrict their elo range would have minimal impact on other players, as players in lower ranges will have a much higher population to interact with. It's a feature that is optional to use, there truly is no detriment to this feature.

 

[Marshy.]

The elo gaps suck, making a toggle setting like, PlatDog mentioned, to set a lower elo range should be a simple fix to the problem.

 

[yerdunc]

There might be queue time issues associated with this solution but I suppose this toggle being optional would be helpful for high elo players that would rather rank sit than play games.

 

[Felucia]

I had a chat with the development team and my suggestion for changing the Elo system to accommodate for large gaps isn't considered desirable at the moment, so I'd consider this a QOL suggestion to let users limit the Elo gap when searching

 

[Ortheore]

I personally am totally fine with the elo system as it is, so if there had been any tweaks to it that would've been dodging the problem imo. I also don't see this as undermining lesser played ladders, like I think this feature specifically benefits less active ladders where it's hard to avoid opponents that don't pose a worthy challenge