Replace the elo sytem with something more suited to the game

[cheekything]

Ok so I've been noticing a lot of issues with the Elo system (no it's not ELO).

A quote from the wiki if people need a quick recap of what is it. Spoiler:

he Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in competitor-versus-competitor games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor.

The Elo system was invented as an improved chess rating system and is also used in many other games. It is also used as a rating system for multiplayer competition in a number of video games,[1] and has been adapted to team sports including association football, gridiron football, basketball,[2] Major League Baseball, competitive programming, and esports.

The difference in the ratings between two players serves as a predictor of the outcome of a match. Two players with equal ratings who play against each other are expected to score an equal number of wins. A player whose rating is 100 points greater than their opponent's is expected to score 64%; if the difference is 200 points, then the expected score for the stronger player is 76%.[3]

A player's Elo rating is represented by a number which increases or decreases based upon the outcome of games between rated players. After every game, the winning player takes points from the losing one. The difference between the ratings of the winner and loser determines the total number of points gained or lost after a game. In a series of games between a high-rated player and a low-rated player, the high-rated player is expected to score more wins. If the high-rated player wins, then only a few rating points will be taken from the low-rated player. However, if the lower rated player scores an upset win, many rating points will be transferred. The lower rated player will also gain a few points from the higher rated player in the event of a draw. This means that this rating system is self-correcting. A player whose rating is too low should, in the long run, do better than the rating system predicts, and thus gain rating points until the rating reflects their true playing strength.

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A few points explaining reason I find it to be unsuited to Town of Salem.

The first is that Elo is designed for games where you have to work as a team with people who are known to be part of your team. ToS is a game based around randomness, social interaction and guess work, which in a serious game as many of us love to play it can be glorious, however this is where the Elo system has no place in the game. You can be the best player in the world but you can lose every game if random luck conspires against you, sure this is unlikely but this is what does happen. I've seen good team of town destroyed by disconnections and players with power roles going afk mid game. Sure these players also get negative points but they could also win in other games because they might be dead but their other teammates push them on to victory while you have your Elo points crushed by bad teamwork and bad luck.

The second point is that Elo just isn't a good representation of player skill or how active / well they used their roles in game. As an example you could have a spammer in game, their role is lookout and they die n1 to mafia because they are annoying but then they can end up winning because the mafia ends up losing in the end. I mean I've won games by pure accident while being afk and lose games I should of won because of the game desycning for me during a night day cycle.

Third is that an Elo system can not improve game quality. Sure it can reduce the number of trolls in games who leave as power roles each game they play or randomly exe town members a vigi or jailor then leave the game but this only applies if a) the town loses or b) that player leave the game afterwards. Elo has no bearing on player skill level because it is based arounds the wins and loses of the players and they can't effectively be judged when the team they have to play with is most of the time unknown to them.

Lastly point on Elo is that the roles given to each player are completely random, there is no context behind each win or lose for that player as that role. I could play 2 nearly exact games as say a witch and lose one and win the other based on the flip of the coin because the mafia kills me n1.

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Solutions from easiest to make to hardest.

So there are a few systems I can think of the top of my head that would be more (even if slightly) useful for the player base, I'm sure others can add more.

1) Have no system for points, just higher and higher play counts in ranked to play against similar players of said play count.

So Ranked I - 50 games of standard, Ranked II - 100 games of ranked, Ranked III - 250 games of ranked, Ranked IV - 500 games of ranked, Ranked V - 1,000 games of ranked. Yes I fully understand there would be a population issue, so we would need to be able to see the number of players currently queuing for each tier of ranked in order for this to work. The ideal state being that the high up you go the better game quality will be.

2) Have W/L/D/DC be for each class only, then match players of similar W/L/D/DC ratio of class values together using a medium range.

This one would be fiddly to work but it's how some other games deal with their match making when dealing with different skills of players, the medium ranges could be adjustable to be wider in offpeak times and closer in peak times to ensure best player interaction. Note perfect ratios would have to be ignored for this to work e.g. if you have no games as witch that ratio will be ignored, if you have 10 wins and no loses as jester that ratio will be ignored and if you have 0 wins and 10 loses a WW that ratio will be ignored.

This does suffer the same issue as Elo with the randomness of the games causing players to lose lots but it will be more accurate than Elo at fair matchmaking in general.

3) Role based events Matchmaking. So this one is very fiddly and would be completely at the discretion of the game designers.

What this would entail is that based on your role you will be given points for each time you do an event in game that benefits your Role. So for WW and Arsonists the more people you manage to kill in one night the more points you get. For Vigi/Jailor/Vet the more bad people you kill later in the game the better with a penalty for killing town early on.

For some roles like Spy this will be hard without a more robust will system that uses a set formula but you could try and parse text for LW against mafia targets. I'm sure some people are more clever than me to get this to work but this would be the only system that would truly reward good players against bad players.

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Summary

I know the game makers are trying to make the Elo system work but lets face it, it's likely to do very little and the issues with bad players would still remain. The report system is not the best and ranked and casual games are both being ruined by players who do not care for the game or the player base.

I ask that they maybe rethink that sort of system they can easily use that will benefit the game, even if it means coming up with their own unique system.

[Hicksy]

1) This doesn't take skill or intelligence into account, so pretty ineffective.

2) This combined with the ELO would be effective but as you said, it's fiddly.

3) Too many factors to take into account.

[SarahSaurus]

To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about if Elo really makes sense in ToS, but for completely different reasons. I actually don't think many of your points are valid points to begin with.

Your first couple of points seem to be mostly about how your team can be negatively affected by players going afk, leaving the game, spamming, and etc. I just want to point out that those things are all (well maybe not afking, but it SHOULD be) against the rules anyway. You can't critique the Elo system based on rulebreakers. Players who break rules should be punished for breaking the rules, and rulebreaking should try to be reduced/eliminated from the game- it is an entirely separate issue from the Elo system.

I don't really understand what you're trying to say in your third point.

But about how your team is "unknown" to you- that is the entire point of the game. I don't see how having a known or unknown team should affect Elo. I mean if you're playing LoL, yes you know who your team is, but your goal is completely different than in ToS. In LoL your team is known, but your goal is not to deceive enemies and trick people and find your allies, your goal is to y'know...kill the other team and take over their base. If you're having problems playing ToS because you can't find your teammates, maybe you just need to read some guides and practice playing more.

As far as bad luck in the game, such as dying N1 and whatnot, the general attitude right now is that EVERYONE is going to have those games. And generally it's not like every game you get into you're going to die N1. So overall, it balances out. You may lose a few points here and there because of pure bad luck, but so will everyone else. You're also likely going to win a few games simply based on luck or the enemy team being really bad as well. However, there have been some other suggestions made in regards to this, like in the Suggestions forum I remember seeing a thread one time requesting that players who die before N3 have their Elo gains/losses for that game reduced by half. That way if you die N1 as a neutral role, you don't get punished as harshly for bad luck, or even if you're town if you die N1 as a random kill and watch your team make huge mistakes but are unable to help, you are not punished as harshly for their mistakes. At the same time, if you die N1 as a random kill, you would win less points, but this is fair because if you were dead all game you really did not help your team earn that win anyway.

Finally: I would say that a bigger issue with Elo in the context of ToS is simply that it's hard to measure individual skill in this kind of game. You could carry your entire team and win, and they win points for doing nothing. You could also lose because your teammates were bad, even if you tried to play well yourself. The game has no way to measure which players are playing smart and which ones aren't, which is where I believe there is a problem. I had an idea to implement some kind of tool that has say, buttons next to everyone's name in the role list where you can click to "suspect" someone or "trust" someone to show and keep track of who you believe is on your team or who you believe is against you. The game could take this into account, like players who suspected and trusted the right people consistently maybe get a few extra points, and players who suspected or trusted the wrong people don't win as many points. It's just a rough idea though

[gorilla578]

*Gets Lookout*
DIES NIGHT ONE TO SK
Town loses
I lose 13 elo for a game I didn't do shit on.

Change or remove it.

[Hicksy]

*Gets Lookout*
DIES NIGHT ONE TO SK
Town loses
I lose 13 elo for a game I didn't do shit on.

Change or remove it.

Or have patience and wait until they sort the system out. They've stated many times that it's not finished / released, so wait.

[sirshitshimself]

The Elo system is not perfect at all and there's no way to measure how well an individual player played in this game. But the good players, over the course of lots and lots of games, will win more than the bad players even if luck(role, quality of teammates, etc.) skews the statistics. So the system isn't perfect but eventually the good players do rise and bad players drop.

[Gobln]

elo is great for ToS.
not perfect, but its pretty good. If the devs actually fix it.

[Kombr]

Elo is totally useless for ToS. I have 45/9(W/D). I play almost every game as townie luckily. So I should be playing with clever and skilled guyz, I lost last game because of 3 total stupid townies. I was proven sheriff - I found 2 mafias, remained gf, sk and 3 townies+me. Again I was proven sheriff and they still lynched me and they said that I'm sk like wtf? People with high elo shouldn't be so stupid.
So even if you have 50 IQ you can still have high rank and destroy so many games, because you were lucky or you were boosted by some good players.
My feedback? Remove elo.

[agigabyte]

Elo is totally useless for ToS. I have 45/9(W/D). I play almost every game as townie luckily. So I should be playing with clever and skilled guyz, I lost last game because of 3 total stupid townies. I was proven sheriff - I found 2 mafias, remained gf, sk and 3 townies+me. Again I was proven sheriff and they still lynched me and they said that I'm sk like wtf? People with high elo shouldn't be so stupid.
So even if you have 50 IQ you can still have high rank and destroy so many games, because you were lucky or you were boosted by some good players.
My feedback? Remove elo.

It's useless because it's broken right now.

[Speaker]

*Gets Lookout*
DIES NIGHT ONE TO SK
Town loses
I lose 13 elo for a game I didn't do shit on.

Change or remove it.

Look I can do this too:
dies n1 to sk
Town wins
gain 13 elo for doing nothing

Elo has it's flaws but this is not one. Everyone will die first at some point. Elo is not accurate in the short term, but rather over a large number of games. Over the course of a large number of games randomness like this is eliminated.

[MrPhil]

Elo is great for Town of Salem. Sure, there is a luck factor involved, but as long as you are clever and perceptive when playing you can easily make game changing decisions that will put the odds in your favor. Elo won't be that great however for people who don't play a lot or are new, but as time passes they'll get around it.

I think after a good 20-30 games once Elo is fixed anybody with decent skill will be separated from trolls and games will become even less luck based.

Overall, your points do not convince me that it is a good idea to replace the Elo system.

[Osprey]

The first is that Elo is designed for games where you have to work as a team with people who are known to be part of your team.

Actually, as the quote that you provided indicates, Elo was designed for chess, which is not a team game. You're right, though, that Elo was not intended for games with a lot of luck. There is no (or very, very little) luck in chess. It's pure strategy and the outcomes of games come down almost entirely to the relative skills of the two players. Even if you're good at chess, you're going to lose to a grandmaster just about every time. It's not at all like this game, where a great player will still lose to a poor player 40% of the time just out of bad luck and the quality of teammates.