superboytim wrote:i'm not going through what you're saying point by point because that would be too much effort but it sounds like a lot of the issues you are saying now exist have always existed but are now more prevalent because aspects of the game are no longer clouded by the chaos that NK caused
ranked has always been absolute garbage in terms of game-to-game variety via non-chaotic elements because it wasn't necessary when there was a huge amount of game-to-game variety via chaotic elements, mainly brought about by NK. now that NK has been stripped from the mode, the mode's lack of game-to-game variety via non-chaotic elements becomes glaringly apparent; certain metas will now be even more centralising than they previously were. however, in the context of ranked the "fix" to that issue isn't introducing something that entirely goes against one of the main aspects of the mode (competition), it would be to make changes so that certain metas are not overly prevalent and there is an increase in game-to-game variety via non-chaotic elements, which would be far more consistent with the ideals of competition
your argument of 'technical balancers always win the argument' is correct in the scope of ranked, and rightfully so considering the mode is designed around being competitive. competition ideally rewards the better player/team and punishes the worse player/team, so naturally changes for ranked should gravitate towards better and more consistently fulfilling this ideal. outside the scope of ranked, almost all if not all of the game modes largely or entirely appeal to casual game ideals rather than competitive game ideals, so i really don't understand why people think that casual game ideals should be the main focus in the one mode where it absolutely shouldn't be when there is a large selection of casual game modes and zero competitive ones
Welcome to the forums, Tim.
The final paragraph in your post is, in a nutshell, the technical balancers' manifesto: Ranked is a specifically competitive environment, therefore all decisions that reduce the influence of random factors in who wins and loses are positive. AMikeCk captured the other slightly more emotive aspect running in tandem to this of "you should never lose a game that, through your actions, you deserved to win".
There's nothing inherently wrong with this view, it just comes with downsides that are often glossed over by its advocates. The largest of them, in my view, being that the more deterministic the game becomes the more that winning strategies will become increasingly formulaic and the more games will inevitably play out in highly similar ways each time. While that leads to a more technically balanced endpoint, once the winning strategies are learned it may not necessarily lead to a game that a large number of people want to replay hundreds of times over.
It may be worth drawing a comparison with the Classic roleset. In many ways, it's one of the most technically balanced role lists in ToS - it's also bemoaned for being overly predictable, boring and hideously Town-sided. That those aspects naturally walk hand in hand should not be a surprise. Basically, if the aim of Ranked is to be technically balanced to the fullest extent possible, thought needs to be given into how to avoid Ranked falling into Classic's trap. I'm pleased to see you zeroed straight in on this problem, but the killer is how you'd propose it be solved.
Personally, I disagree with associating random factors with "more casual", as I'd propose a slightly broader view of what "competitive" means more in line with the Legacy Ranked approach. To my eyes, how players deal with unknown and unpredictable factors can be part of the skill required to be good at the game unless a deliberate choice is made to remove it. It's not saying it should be the main focus, but an impactful level of unpredictability means you need to be able to adapt your plans to the situation as it emerges, not just deploy the same tried-and-tested strategy for all given situations. Seeing a skilled Legacy-Ranked Town adapt on the fly to realising that Vampires were in play, or Mafia flipping round to address a double-SK threat that was more dangerous to them than the Town's majority, was part of the reason I fell so deeply in love with ToS. While I am not necessarily advocating their return as-was in Ranked, that additional complexity in how the games could pan out has been lost on the journey.
My view is that consistently reducing randomness in the interests of faction balance without thought to the consequence on gameplay has been a well-intentioned mistake. For a long-term scoring system like ELO, short-term differences in faction balance for any individual game (e.g. WTF, we have 2x NK here - Town are screwed!) are not massively relevant as they'll even out over time through random distribution (ie, play a whole series of game and you're as likely to benefit and lose out from 2x NK scenarios as any other player, therefore skill remains the defining difference between two players' ELO scores).
Issues such as the Jailor meta are balancing problems irrespective of the discussion of the relative merits of increasing predictability vs unpredictability. That said, process of elimination strategies benefit from a highly predictable roleset - in the current Ranked, Town has an astonishingly clear and consistent awareness of what its own side and its enemies look like for an "uninformed majority" and the shift over time towards reducing unpredictability in the overall shape of factions and roles in play has made the Jailor meta consistently valuable as a strategy.
