[SUGGESTION] Measuring a player's skill level.

Hi!

In this thread I want to just discuss a "new" solution I wrote down.
It's about measuring skill level of Xonotic players to make it possible to arrange matches where no one is a "pro" or a "noob" and everyone can enjoy tight competition.

Read this document and share your opinion:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u1h-...LmP18/edit

Remember:

THIS IS NOT
MANDATORY

Best wishes!

Good idea, however, the points that are associated with frags against bot AI need to be carefully balanced. Maybe people could do statistics about that, to calibrate the scale.

Im aganist

For duelers a chess-like elo system would be a better way to produce a (more or less) realistic skill rating imo. Whenever Xonotic has > 1000 competing players a skill rating system would make sense. But for now, with the limited amount of players a ladder would be the best way to get a ranking.

Sarge999: I agree - balance is the key (as I wrote in the doc.)

Justin: Why are you against?

asy7um: Does this chess-like thing has any relation to actual gameplay? ;D Also: I'm think Xonotic will have >1000 players in 86 months after 1.0 release. So I think being ready is a good thing. I expect this game to be very popular.

Btw: just got a new idea: the skill test results could be used to create a hall of fame kind of thing. Like in TrackMania Nations.

Sarge999: I agree - balance is the key (as I wrote in the doc.)

Justin: Why are you against?

asy7um: Does this chess-like thing has any relation to actual gameplay? ;D Also: I'm think Xonotic will have >1000 players in 86 months after 1.0 release. So I think being ready is a good thing. I expect this game to be very popular.

Btw: just got a new idea: the skill test results could be used to create a hall of fame kind of thing. Like in TrackMania Nations.

ELO Is a somewhat complicated but supposably rather fair ranking system. As far as your idea goes it may work, but again will only measure pure one-man-army death-match skills. What happens when we want to arrange a 'fair game' of, lets say, keyhunt? Experience tells me that not only does team games require a different skill-set, but also that some teams simply don't work even tough every player on the team are considered quite skilled. Here CTF provides a very clear example. With a team of just good defenders or attackers, the other team will always win (as long as skills are comparable, but the mix is right)

So, in a nutshell any sort of automatic skill calculation needs to deal with far more then just death-match imo.

One possible solution would be to simply let the player rank him/her-self, either for each new mode played (some sorta first run dialog, ofc later accessable tough menu) Or perhaps in some generic groups, like Deathmatch: 0--10 Teamplay: 1--10 Movement: 1--10 ...

I'm not sure about this. I guess everyone can beat the bots kinda easily after some time. Also only 1v1 is not so good to define the level of skill (see post above) - there are players who are quite good in CTF but terrible in 1v1.

I think it would be easier to combine it with XonStats. Just need to define a system, which consinders you as a 'good' or 'bad' player (first idea in my head right now: average score in gamemode X).

If X = DM and your average score ~25 (assuming the fraglimit is usually 30) then you are considered to be a 'godlike' player.
This way you can set a skill level for a player for each gamemode (and an overall [average] skill level).

Problem: What if you just play vs. 'noobs'?
MAYBE even assign a skill level for each match and take the other players into account.
I.e.you play DM with 2 players = skill level 1 , 3 = skill level 3, 1 = skill level 5. Then we calculate a factor (average skill level of the oponnents) which is 2,67 here.
Now your score/frags gets multiplied by that factor (i.e. 20 frags) and we get 53,4 score.
The maximum score (with 30 frags) in this match would be 80,1.

Skill level 5 = 90-100%
Skill level 4 = 75-89%
Skill level 3 = 50-74%
Skill level 2 = 20-49%
Skill level 1 = 0-19%

Your score 53,4 would be 66,67%, which means you get skill level 3 for this game.
The XonStats site can calculated the average skill level for all DM games now to get your skill level in DM.

Understand?
I have no idea if it's hard to implement such a (weird ) system.