Re: Examining the NAF meta
Posted: Mon Dec 11, 2017 9:42 pm
If you're using win rates that are not broken down into race1 vs race2 then no - you're pretending a race will never face itself. You're pretending it didn't face itself during the tournaments you're taking data from when calculating the win rates that you're going to use to "balance" things.plasmoid wrote:We're blessed with 24 "factions" in BB, which somewhat disguised the problem. But I think any PvP game with factions like, say, Overwatch (25?), Hearthstone (9) or Starcraft (3) ought to strive for a good balance between the factions. In this respect I find the information that "faction x never really beats itself" completely devoid of meaning, and this only gets worse of any faction gets played significantly more than average.
You also thought orcs were underpriced, and that the analysis you launched this thread with was something other than gobbledygook. You're aiming to create a system that is overly simplistic (for mentioned reasons, though I'll end up elaborating if you don't understand them) while supporting it with bad math... or even legitimate stats misapplied (the latter being the fault of other people - plural).plasmoid wrote:But I think that the meta-game, the game of team selection, can be balanced - i.e. that no team comes in with a substantial advantage or disadvantage already before anyone has chosen their team.
Your belief in the legitimacy of performance tiers is the real issue here. You can absolutely change which teams have an advantage and which have a disadvantage, but what you cannot do is use the sort of simplistic "tournament tier" you're aiming for: to create legitimate balance between the rosters without accounting for composition prior to determining placement for rosters in different categories.plasmoid wrote:EuroBowl rules (and lots of Danish tournaments) have showed me that teams can be pushed into different performance tiers.
You will just push the teams around, yes. Its not a potential outcome, it is an inevitable outcome if you try to use the sort of system you're trying to develop... or any of the tournament tier systems currently used.plasmoid wrote:The problem, as you say, is that we may well just push teams around and create a new top/bottom. I tried to adress this by creating the excel sheet that would (to some extent) show the effect on other teams with each performance tweak so that for example, in theory, massively boosting High Elfs wouldn't just send Lizardmen into a tail spin.
No, and that should be obvious given what you know (and very clearly do NOT know) about those tournaments. You seem to think the tournament data will be better data than, say, FUMBBL data, because those tournaments are (usually) rez, and are the style of play you're trying to affect... yet, you don't know much about the sort of houseruling that was involved, and a whole lot of them already pushed the mess around using just the sort of tournament tier system you're trying to build. The external validity of anything made with that data is going to be wretched, and the confidence intervals wiiiiide.plasmoid wrote:Is it possible to project win rates based on global composition, so in essence, given that we know which races have shown up to tournaments for the past 6 years, what the most likely outcome would.
I'm pretty sure you didn't do anything with what I refer to as the normal(not ized) distribution. You didn't work with distributions.plasmoid wrote:That's what I tried to do with what I think you refer to as normalized distribution.
The word you're aiming for is not "normal" it's "uniform". Because you don't know what the composition will be, you can't predict the outcome or even the advantage ahead of time. You seem convinced you can... but it's like trying to predict whether a racecar or a horse will win in a race without knowing the terrain. You can certainly declare that racecars are faster than horses in general, but if the race ends up being in a hilly forest, it isn't the horse that needs a heap of additional benefits to be competitive.plasmoid wrote:I get that no 10 (or 24) team tournament will indeed be normal in distribution, but trying to figure out which team/faction is likely to win (i.e. a stronger or weaker team choice) is still a relevant consideration... In that most attending coaches will consider it.
So does exposure to high levels of radiation.. those differences just aren't likely to be an objective improvement (except in superhero comics).plasmoid wrote:I do think that strong tier rules can make a World of difference.
There isn't any way to do it using the sort of tournament tier system that is popular with tournaments. To legitimately eliminate, or at least significantly reduce bias you'd need a more complicated system... either one that assigns membership to "tier" groups only after rosters are fully selected, or which applied the balancing not at team creation but at the match level, etc.plasmoid wrote:Even so, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how to fix/de-bias tournaments. Would you care to share your thoughts on that?