Town of Salem 2.0 - Ranked ELO Changes

[rickms]

Hi Townies!

I come to you today to explain the Ranked ELO changes that went into effect with the release of Town of Salem 2.0 this past weekend.

What was wrong ?

As many of you have pointed out, the ELO calculation hasn't felt quite right for quite some time now. As we get reports of specific cases we double check the math to see if everything is working as intended.

In our latest pass on the ELO algorithm, we noticed something off. Really off. The amount of ELO people were losing was calculated incorrectly. People were losing the amount of ELO they would have won, had they won the match. This is not how the algorithm is supposed to work. Ideally when facing an opponent of vastly higher skill you should win a high amount and lose a low amount. Conversely that opponent should win a low amount and lose a high amount. This was not happening.


What effect did it have on players ?

As a result of this miscalculation there has been a "Rich Get Richer, Poor get Poorer" dynamic that has developed.

If you were low ranking, you were losing way too much ELO against high ranked opponents making it very hard to climb out of the low ranks.

If you were high ranking you were losing way too little ELO against lower ranked opponents, making it very hard to fall from the higher ranks.


What can we expect going forward ?

As of Town of Salem 2.0, this calculation has been fixed.

As games are played over the days, weeks and months ahead people at the extremes of the ELO spectrum will most likely drift more towards the center. This will be a natural rebalancing period. Higher ELO players may find this a bit frustrating, losing more ELO than they are used to. Lower ELO players will find it easier to get up to a rating that more accurately reflects their skill. After the growing pains of this new fix people will find themselves in a more appropriate ELO range and thus facing opponents closer in skill.

In the end, while this may be disappointing to some players, we believe it will create an overall better experience in the Ranked play system.

We would never have found the ELO issues we've fixed over the years if it wasn't for the constant vigilance and passion of our players. We thank you and encourage you to continue to submit bugs and suggestions related to ELO so that we can continue to refine the Ranked rating system. We are also grateful for your patience. Making any change to the ELO calculation is something we take very seriously. While fixes may appear to come slowly we assure you that correct ELO calculations are a top priority.

As Town of Salem - The Coven releases this Tuesday, we are already hard at work on the next chapter of Town of Salem and we hope to provide our dedicated Ranked players with some love, in the not-too-distant future. (No, I did not just promise you anything )

[scarletgladiator]

Elo was broken, I´m not arguing that, but this "fix" isn´t a solution to balancing it out, this will just make high elo regulars (2k+ players) get stuck in towns full of inexperienced players since we either go down because of the harsh "fix" or we´ll get stuck with them since apparently elo means nothing now and anyone can climb up easily as long as they can leech off from a high elo player and until the actual skill of the players levels out (Spoiler alert, it´s going to take a long ass time, I´ve seen queue´s of 1.2k players) a lot of veteran players are just going to quit in frustration and come on, ranked has a lack of players as it is and now you throw the Coven at us, are you trying to kill ranked? the playerbase we have is small as it is and you are going to see a decay of the most active players with this "elo fix" you just implemented.

*Edit: My suggestion

If elo win/loss is determined by the average elo of the factions in game, would factoring the winrate of the faction itself help balance things out?

For this system to work, we´d have to predetermine an amount of elo win/loss. Town would have 6/9, Mafia would have 9/7, NB would have 4/3, NE would have 10/6 and NK would have 12/4. Depending on the elo gap between the factions, this average would decrease/go up, per say, each +300 that the other team has over yours makes it so you´d win/lose 1 more/less elo and if we were to implement a multiplier of the faction winrate; per example, assuming town has an 80% winrate, if a town wins (+6) and their opponent were +600 higher than them than it´d be (+8)* (.8) = + 6.4 elo for town, rounded up or down depending on what team had Any.

Granted, I´m not as experienced with this game as some of my other peers but the numbers would be the smaller concern, what we need is a system that doesn´t give the middle finger to high elo regulars

[anandre]

Bye bye ranked. 3200 is where I'll stay, not playing just to get a guaranteed elo loss.

[pod764]

Why not do the total elo reset with it? This change just engourages high elo players to not play at all. Or make a smurf account.

[Gracee]

As games are played over the days, weeks and months ahead people at the extremes of the ELO spectrum will most likely drift more towards the center. This will be a natural rebalancing period. Higher ELO players may find this a bit frustrating, losing more ELO than they are used to. Lower ELO players will find it easier to get up to a rating that more accurately reflects their skill. After the growing pains of this new fix people will find themselves in a more appropriate ELO range and thus facing opponents closer in skill.

In the end, while this may be disappointing to some players, we believe it will create an overall better experience in the Ranked play system.

So you're basically saying that we should all play the game, lose as much elo as possible to get closer to 1200 elo, just because you fucked up the elo-system from start? Why should we waste our time AGAIN to play a game just to lose our rankings? Just hardreset it, or compress it. Don't make this change, that is totally unfit for the kind of game you are running, and ask us to entertain you when we get NOTHING in return. You don't listen, you don't talk to us and you dont even consider how these changes impact high elo players. We have atleast 3 full pages of forumcomments on the "Patch 2.0 Original Town of Salem Changes"-thread that explains why people are frustrated and how this system is flawed.
And after an entire day, all you can come up with is "Working as intended now, deal with it" and flipping us the finger? Like I said in that thread, Great community management, topclass.

[Galaktik]

All the new system does is strongly punish anyone who queues outside of high elo discord groups (which is hard because so many high elo regulars have quit). No high elo player is ever going to want to queue if they get +1 for every win and -14 for town loss and -7 for mafia loss (along with their teammates who are unfortunate enough to have this high elo player on their team). This elo system they are using is not designed for asymmetrical, luck heavy games with lousy matchmaking and a very small community, which is why a modified version of the elo system (as was previously in place) was used. The fact is that even if you reset everything, the high elo community of skilled players is extremely small, and you can only fill a game with high elo players on rare occasions in which they all queue together. It doesn't matter if you modify the system or not, the queues at slow hours are filled with players who are about as bad as RP players, it's not "the system" that is keeping them down, they are genuinely awful players who belong in low elo brackets. If a high elo player queues outside of these specific high elo queues, they are going to need to maintain a >93% town winrate, a >88% mafia and NE winrate, and a >92% survivor winrate just to break even, which will lead to a lot of high elo players leaving.

If everyone started with a clean slate and the ranked community was many, many times larger than it is (so you could consistently matchmake with players of equal skill level and elo at all times of the day), and matchmaking was halfway decent, and the ranges were not so absolutely extreme and polar (+1 or -14, +1 or -7, etc), and certain roles had a higher floor, this system might work. But in the current state, it's completely broken garbage and they just slapped on an elo system as a lazy hotfix that does not apply in this case, and it just made everything worse.

Changing the elo system won't fix the problem, the issue is the community (specifically of skilled players who would tend to be high elo, whether in the new system or the old) is extremely small, and when you are forced to play with low elo unskilled players as a high elo (like you are vast majority of the time unless you specifically queue in high elo groups) the gains/losses are extremely disproportionate and unfair.

tl;dr
-community is way too small for a traditional elo system
-very few games are actually with players on similar skill level with you unless you queue together as a group like the discord does. This is not to do with the elo system, this is skill level of the players, majority of the players you queue with even in the highest elo queues during slow hours are legitimately bad players
-ToS is significantly more luck-based than games that use elo systems, so the winrate difference of a good player vs. unskilled players is not going to be as drastic as it is in other games. If I am a high elo player in a low elo lobby, I can probably maintain a 60-75% winrate across all roles, not a 90-95%+ as would be expected of other skill-based games, and not the 88% mafia winrate and 93% town winrate necessary to just break-even when the ranges are maxed out
-elo floors for NK/NE/mafia are too low (should never be +1, especially now that we can lose up to -7 and still only get +1 for roles with <20% winrates)
-Queueing with high elo players makes you trend towards high elo in the long term, while queueing with lower elo players will cause you to bleed elo at a rapid pace since you gain +1 for wins and lose big for losses (this is the biggest single issue)

You can exploit the elo system by just playing in high elo groups as your gain/loss ratios go from being +1/-14 for town and +1/-7 for mafia to +9/-1 for town and +16/-1 for mafia. The time you play and the group you play with has a massive impact on your elo, you either gain big or lose big just based on who you are queueing with. This is especially important for those who are in timezones that don't allow them to play during peak hours, so they are at an inherent (and very significant) disadvantage when it comes to laddering.

[pod764]

Give this guy a medal.

[ririta]

Your new calculation will just help you to get rid of the 2k + elo community. thanks for that. I've been playing this game for more than three years now and I'm disappointed about how it developed. this so to say "fix" of the elo system just will lead to barely experienced players (1200s will go up very fast) to play with long term players (2000s will go down very fast too) which will lower the quality of the whole gaming experience. I have more than 5000 games played and it took me a while to become high elo because of constant -12 losses and +1 wins (which I already never considered to make sense) but now that -24 and +0 is a thing I'm not willing to play anymore and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
Have you ever considered to listen to players who played this game a lot instead of boosting new unexperienced players? elo system won't become better if you make people have all the same elo. and yes, it took high elo players a long time to get up there, why destroy everything they gained in a lot of time? this way elo won't be about good and / or experienced players anymore because it's completely unbalanced.
Thanks for three years of fun but I'm done. - Lemming ♡

[rickms]

No high elo player is ever going to want to queue if they get +1 for every win and -14 for town loss and -7 for mafia loss

This is not the intended outcome. If you win against an even matched team you will get +/- 13 for a win loss. If you play as town and win, your ELO is based off of your winning faction's average ELO. So if you end up in a queue with a 1500, they will bring your ELO average down. Making those edge cases when you lose a large amount and win only 1, hopefully few and far between.

[Daselend]

For me, the First step is already achieved: Playing on the alt account.

Second step is leaving.

Keep up the good work. If you can't understand that the overwhelmingly majority of high elo players are the ones who have played this game the longest, are absolutely dissapointed with this elo fix, not because we're in danger of losing our elo, ego or whatever, but because it's destructive, you'll lose us.

I don't care if i have to improve and raise slightly my winrate, i can live with that. But -24 as Vamp? -7 as 3-man Mafia with Any town? -11 as town with higher elo players than me?

That's ridiculous.

[Achilles]

Your new calculation will just help you to get rid of the 2k + elo community. thanks for that. I've been playing this game for more than three years now and I'm disappointed about how it developed. this so to say "fix" of the elo system just will lead to barely experienced players (1200s will go up very fast) to play with long term players (2000s will go down very fast too) which will lower the quality of the whole gaming experience. I have more than 5000 games played and it took me a while to become high elo because of constant -12 losses and +1 wins (which I already never considered to make sense) but now that -24 and +0 is a thing I'm not willing to play anymore and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
Have you ever considered to listen to players who played this game a lot instead of boosting new unexperienced players? elo system won't become better if you make people have all the same elo. and yes, it took high elo players a long time to get up there, why destroy everything they gained in a lot of time? this way elo won't be about good and / or experienced players anymore because it's completely unbalanced.
Thanks for three years of fun but I'm done. - Lemming ♡

The +0 was a bug that got fixed immediately. The team is discussing what to do right now.

[pod764]

Just dont make the System factor in the Elo of each specific player so much and we fine.

[rickms]

It's not the INTENDED outcome, but it IS the outcome nonetheless.

The system has been out for ~1 day. Let's see how it plays out. The point of the ELO system to to properly rate people in a competitive situation. Having it implemented properly won't put everyone at the same ELO, that would defeat the purpose. It'll put people at the ELO that best represents their skill.

[DBrock01]

No high elo player is ever going to want to queue if they get +1 for every win and -14 for town loss and -7 for mafia loss

This is not the intended outcome. If you win against an even matched team you will get +/- 13 for a win loss. If you play as town and win, your ELO is based off of your winning faction's average ELO. So if you end up in a queue with a 1500, they will bring your ELO average down. Making those edge cases when you lose a large amount and win only 1, hopefully few and far between.

So you're saying you know that people will gain elo as town and lose elo as evils? If I'm 2000 and the rest of my town is 1200 our average is 1300. If I'm 2000 and the rest of my mafia is 1200 our average is 1450. If I'm NK my average is 2000. So this new system punishes rolling evil, because your effective elo will be higher.

The elo calculations desperately need to scale off of how many players are on each team. It doesn't matter if my silver tongue gf can convince every player below 1500 that he is innocent, it only takes one jailor who sees through him to execute him. And we can't even kill the jailor because of TP trans and lookout. And this jailor, even if they have the same elo, will gain more and lose less because of the elo on his team.

Having elo disparity be a large factor in the elo calculations doesn't work with a game that relies on luck and doesn't have a large enough playerbase to ensure players are only playing with people of similar skill levels.

[shapesifter13]

So you're saying you know that people will gain elo as town and lose elo as evils? If I'm 2000 and the rest of my town is 1200 our average is 1300. If I'm 2000 and the rest of my mafia is 1200 our average is 1450. If I'm NK my average is 2000. So this new system punishes rolling evil, because your effective elo will be higher.

If you are an evil role the win rate of your role is factored in, so this should account for you being solo vs having a team of 3. In a team of 3 the average Elo of the mafia would be taken to account for you having teammates that may be better or worse than you. If you are solo it is just your Elo and win rate that factor in.

[DBrock01]

So you're saying you know that people will gain elo as town and lose elo as evils? If I'm 2000 and the rest of my town is 1200 our average is 1300. If I'm 2000 and the rest of my mafia is 1200 our average is 1450. If I'm NK my average is 2000. So this new system punishes rolling evil, because your effective elo will be higher.

If you are an evil role the win rate of your role is factored in, so this should account for you being solo vs having a team of 3. In a team of 3 the average Elo of the mafia would be taken to account for you having teammates that may be better or worse than you. If you are solo it is just your Elo and win rate that factor in.

The winrate of the role is factored in? Then why have people been getting +1 for NK wins all the time? A +1 NK win means that the expected winrate, including elo disparity, is over 40%. I might be able to pull a 40% SK winrate off in classic. That's with the best NK role, and townies playing their first games against a player with over 2000 games and 2500 elo. There's just way too many ways for a NK to lose that are luck based.

Overall elo disparity shouldn't affect calculations this much.

[rickms]

So you're saying you know that people will gain elo as town and lose elo as evils? If I'm 2000 and the rest of my town is 1200 our average is 1300. If I'm 2000 and the rest of my mafia is 1200 our average is 1450. If I'm NK my average is 2000. So this new system punishes rolling evil, because your effective elo will be higher.

If you are an evil role the win rate of your role is factored in, so this should account for you being solo vs having a team of 3. In a team of 3 the average Elo of the mafia would be taken to account for you having teammates that may be better or worse than you. If you are solo it is just your Elo and win rate that factor in.

So the average ELO of the town could be 1100 but there are 3 very good players in it....
imagine you are 2300+ish...
-8/9 NK loss?????????????????????????????????????????????????????

There are additional revisions done to ELO based on Role..... for example SK should never lose more than ~2 ELO for a loss.

There is a separate bug withe Vampires that is partially fixed that was causing all vampire losses to cause -24 no matter of ELO. There's an additional bug that isn't factoring in the vampire win rate.. we're working on this.

[Galaktik]

No high elo player is ever going to want to queue if they get +1 for every win and -14 for town loss and -7 for mafia loss

This is not the intended outcome. If you win against an even matched team you will get +/- 13 for a win loss. If you play as town and win, your ELO is based off of your winning faction's average ELO. So if you end up in a queue with a 1500, they will bring your ELO average down. Making those edge cases when you lose a large amount and win only 1, hopefully few and far between.

This is why it would help if anyone on the dev team had any clue how high elo play or elo calculation works. That's not uncommon at all, and at 3k elo, when I random queue my wins as neutrals and mafia are +1 about 99% of the time, and my town wins are frequently very small (since my elo alone raises up the elo of my faction enough to make us get the minimum gains). Now to get more than +1/-1, the enemy faction has to be high elo, in which case you gain and lose a lot (+9 / -14 as town, +16 / -7 as mafia). The reason it's hard to advance as high elo is that the few games where I would be able to win more than +1 are when the enemy faction is quite stacked with high elos, and I am at a significantly increased chance of losing (and when I do lose these games against high elos, I lose big)

Now, of course that's not perfect, it's actually pretty shitty, and that's why people complained. But the current system now is a whole lot worse. This hardly even affects lower elo players anyways since 1100-1300 elo in the old system is pretty much standard ranges anyways every game (+5 / -7 as town, +8 / -3 as mafia, etc.). With the new system, I (along with the poor bastards on my team who were unlucky enough to be assigned the faction that will lose huge if they don't win, and gain +1 if they do) gain +1 and lose -14 as town, gain +1 and lose -7 as mafia, gain +1 and lose -7 as NE, gain +1 and lose -12 as survivor. So if I am not queueing in a high elo lobby, I am going to bleed elo at a rapid rate. And the thing is, it won't stop when I reach some mean elo that you are aiming for, because the average elo of the highest elo lobby at any time can range from around 3k to like 1.4k (I've been in lobbies where only players was 1700, one player was 1500, and the other 12 were in the 1200s, this is not even that uncommon), and it's not the elo system that is flawed in that good players are not high elo, it's that the proportion of skilled players is a small portion of an already small ranked community. The only way to actually play games with skilled, high elo players is to coordinate queues together or play in one of the few high elo queues during peak hours.

Essentially, these ranges are completely out of wack and way too polar and don't reflect the heavy luck aspect of ToS (which makes the winrate between skilled and unskilled players not as drastic, especially when you are part of a 3-10 person faction where your impact is not as significant), and they punish you with incredibly brutal ratios when you random queue while giving freelo if you queue with very high elo lobbies.

[Gracee]

This is not the intended outcome. If you win against an even matched team you will get +/- 13 for a win loss. If you play as town and win, your ELO is based off of your winning faction's average ELO. So if you end up in a queue with a 1500, they will bring your ELO average down. Making those edge cases when you lose a large amount and win only 1, hopefully few and far between.

What you fail to see is that there's no chance to have a balanced game after you hit 2.2-2.5k elo. And we're not "willing" to play our elo down to get in line with your new ELO-system.

[BlazinIce]

Either make ELO additions the same per faction, or factor in every action that happened.
If you do the first one, -1 if lost and killed n1, +1 if won and killed n1. Town: +3 win, -3 lose. Mafia: +5 win, -2 lose. Witch: +6 win, -2 lose. NK + Pestilince : +7 win, -1 lose. Coven: +4 win, -3 lose. Amnesiac: -4 lose. Survivor: +3 win, -3 lose. Jester: +3 win, -2 lose. Pirate: +1 win, -1 lose.

[rickms]

What you fail to see is that there's no chance to have a balanced game after you hit 2.2-2.5k elo. And we're not "willing" to play our elo down to get in line with your new ELO-system.

The system as it was before was mathematically broken and unsustainable . Fixing it causes those at the top to lose their elo a bit but in the long run is better for the health of ranked play.

[scarletgladiator]

The system as it was before was mathematically broken and unsustainable . Fixing it causes those at the top to lose their elo a bit but in the long run is better for the health of ranked play.

A bit? people are losing 9 and 14 every match, that´s not a bit and while it may have been unsustainable, a soft reset before implementing this fix would have made this more bearable than you pretty much kicking us out of ranked with this outrageous elo loss.

[WittyRecluse]

What you fail to see is that there's no chance to have a balanced game after you hit 2.2-2.5k elo. And we're not "willing" to play our elo down to get in line with your new ELO-system.

The system as it was before was mathematically broken and unsustainable . Fixing it causes those at the top to lose their elo a bit but in the long run is better for the health of ranked play.

Your system is assuming that people at the top are going to voluntarily play a ton with the new system to deflate their elo.

Spoiler alert, that's not going to happen, top players like Taz, Ikrum, and I are either quitting or using alts because there's no reason to play on our main account if our elo can only go down.

Say goodbye to seeing high elo players in games. You've gotten feedback from the high elo players, all of them are saying the same thing - fix this NOW if you want to ever see high elo gameplay again.

[rickms]

What you fail to see is that there's no chance to have a balanced game after you hit 2.2-2.5k elo. And we're not "willing" to play our elo down to get in line with your new ELO-system.

The system as it was before was mathematically broken and unsustainable . Fixing it causes those at the top to lose their elo a bit but in the long run is better for the health of ranked play.

Your system is assuming that people at the top are going to voluntarily play a ton with the new system to deflate their elo.

Spoiler alert, that's not going to happen, top players like Taz, Ikrum, and I are either quitting or using alts because there's no reason to play on our main account if our elo can only go down.

Hmm personally I'd see it as a challenge to see if I'm as good under a properly calculating ELO system as I think I am under a broken one. To each their own though. All I can say is we have plans for the Ranked players, show us some love in the mean time, we're gonna be showing you some.

[WittyRecluse]

What you fail to see is that there's no chance to have a balanced game after you hit 2.2-2.5k elo. And we're not "willing" to play our elo down to get in line with your new ELO-system.

The system as it was before was mathematically broken and unsustainable . Fixing it causes those at the top to lose their elo a bit but in the long run is better for the health of ranked play.

Your system is assuming that people at the top are going to voluntarily play a ton with the new system to deflate their elo.

Spoiler alert, that's not going to happen, top players like Taz, Ikrum, and I are either quitting or using alts because there's no reason to play on our main account if our elo can only go down.

Hmm personally I'd see it as a challenge to see if I'm as good under a properly calculating ELO system as I think I am under a broken one. To each their own though. All I can say is we have plans for the Ranked players, show us some love in the mean time, we're gonna be showing you some.

That's not what's happening though because the new system requires a 90% winrate to not lose elo, and nobody has ever gotten a winrate above 70%. There is too much luck involved in the game to get a winrate high enough to avoid losing elo at high elo.