No, this is not a rant against the game. And no, I don't consider myself an expert player who's been tragically thwarted by the official stats. I'm an average player and freely admit it.
Rather, I'm amused by so many people quoting the official stats as if they have any significance. I've even noticed people judging posters by their win/loss record, as if that record carries some great weight. As many have pointed out, the stat tracking system is bugged right now. Host disconnects don't count, etc.
But even if the stat tracking weren't bugged, the stats wouldn't be that useful in terms of judging someone's skill. Why?
1. If you play with PUGs as opposed to premades, you'll have more relatively losses. Doesn't matter how good you are, you will lose if your teammates are uncoordinated or are not good. You have a higher chance of someone just flaking out with a PUG.
2. If you are a creative player and are willing to try new builds and strategies, you'll have more losses. Part of the price of experimenting is willing to take the risk of more losses as you try unconventional strategies.
3. If you like high quality games and play mostly premade vs. premade, you'll have more losses. You will be fighting highly coordinated team games where everyone is on vent. People are likely to split up teams so the teams are evenly matched, so your win/loss record will break closer to 50/50.
Anyway, my advice: just forget about the stats . The only way you can tell how good someone is to play against or with them. If you want a high win %, just play with some folks in Vent and beat up on PUGs. You will not only face PUGs, but probably PUGs who are mostly newbies. Most experienced players can sense when they're facing a premade in the lobby (there are tell-tale signs), and will likely leave before the game starts. Consequently, premades who face randoms often end up playing new players who don't know any better and have no idea that they're about to hit by a truck. But trust me, winning like that really isn't that fun compared to a close, even match, even if you end up losing it.
It's possible. But when I give people my vent info and they hop on immedietly, it makes me think im in the right.
Would you want to be the company that set that precedent? Thats alot of people to anger, especially on a game whos reputation right now is so fragile.
I'd trust the players not to use vent except in custom games where they know everyone is using it.
Or I'd at least hope they wouldn't.
If this is what our arguement has been reduced to, this will be my last statement. We're now debating what companys should or not have in their policys based on opinion. I still believe I am the majority opinion, but I'll leave it at that.
@ WickedBear. You said earlier stats are meaningless, then after a few posts, you changed your mind and said "yes, stats aren't pointless, and I agreed" ??. WTF? And you call people here stupid and can't read?
This point is irrelevant. The OP pointed out "As many have pointed out, the stat tracking system is bugged right now. Host disconnects don't count, etc. But even if the stat tracking weren't bugged, the stats wouldn't be that useful in terms of judging someone's skill.". OP acknowledged the stat tracking is bugged and said it wouldn't be helpful even if it weren't bugged due to 3 reasons he mentioned which are valid. And Wickedbear, you call people here stupid and can't read? Out of 122 games that you played so far, almost 100% you played with someone you know or who is your friend. So for you to say that "real problem with stats is buggy games more than anything else" is ridiculous. Yo Wickedbear, I have to say though I find your way of naming game titles you hosted like " 3V3 US CENTRAL NO MILKSHAKSE @@@" and "3V3 US CENTRAL STARDOCK IS FAIL" amusing. Is "milkshakse" even a word?
Well, firstly, this is way off topic. OP was just pointing out that playing in a PUG as opposed to a premade will skew your results, making stats a badindication of personal skill. Voice comm contributes to the advantage of a premade. You can't dispute this.
Now, the argument has been between whether you should or should not use voice comm. I think there can be an argument either way, but I don't think you can start by assuming everyone is using voice. It's one thing to join with friends who are already on Vent, but to expect the PUGs to alt-tab out (half of the ppl crash) to join a vent channel is unrealistic, not to mention not everyone has Vent. Usually only established gamers have those. Many casual players don't.
I don't think using voice is cheating, but I do think that it gives no basis for people who use it a cause to say that they are better players. It is amazingly frustrating to lose a game just because you know the other team is using voice.
I'm pretty certain most premades don't advertise themselves because they are afraid it will take longer to get a game going. I'm also willing to say that I'll bet they even enjoy the advantage, even just a little.
Yes, I made a typo on the second time, congratulations for pointing it out. I think stats are pointless. You can have a cookie.
Oh, and regarding the milkshakse, it's a refrence to my DOTA games. But that's alright, you got the inside joke apparently. Yes there are people from my old DOTA games that recognize the title. Sorry for keeping things consistent across games . You should look for more typos to feed your ego though.
Except for the fact I won I believe all but one of my games with pugs? What's an ALMOST 100%? And I don't see how this hurts my credibility any. I can tell you more than anyone, that playing with friends doesn't assure you victories the way you seem to believe. Much of those earlier games were losses by just having new players on my team. My highest chance of winning has been with Char, and he just started playing the game. It's not so much the fact we have voice communication as it is we learn from our mistakes quickly. After our recent loss we improved significantly.
@ Shadow: To be honest, I don't enjoy a level 4-6 victory other than a few laughs, which unfortunately has been increasing in rate. I would much rather win a game by a few seconds, much more exhilerating. Yes I don't want to put were a premade, because it would take longer to host. Yes I don't boot anyone from my games unless they're on my banlist for leaving, or they have a bad mouth.
I've got to disagree here. Voice absolutely gives a basis for people who use it to say they are better players. All things being equal, the team that communicates is better than the team that doesn't. The team that communicates more efficiently is better than the team that commincates poorly. Voice gives people an extremely efficient method to communicate, and those that use it are better players than those that don't (at least as far as communication is concerned).
I think you are arguing a seperate point. Yes, better communication makes a team do better. But he was talking about being better players, as in more skilled on their own. Voice gives the team using it an advantage, but it doesn't make them better at the game, it just makes them better at communicating their plans. So while being on vent won't make you any better at chasing, timing stuns, pushing towers, etc. it will make your team do better.
Correct. Player A might beat player B in a 1v1 match, but player B might beat player A on a 3v3 if B is using voice, while A is not. A has better skills, but B has a better team.
I acknowledge your point Shadow, though I don't see how this renders stats useless.
In a team game like Demigod, the win doesn't solely depend on which individual player is better than another in a 1v1 setting. Players A, B, C can each independently be better than D, E, F, but if DEF work together better and plan out their strategy in the game then they can surely overcome individual skill. DEF would get the win, be higher ranked, and in my opinion the rankings would be fully justified.
Wow this thread exploded. Premades have a huge advantage over random PUGs. Both from knowing how your team works to having real time voice communication. It goes without saying that if you are playing with friends, you are on a voice comm program. When I played Quake 1 DM professionally over a decade ago, we played using conference calls. Today we have ventrillo, teamspeak, and rojer wilco may even still be around.
I'm confused, voice communication makes you better at all that. I time my stuns with my partner. He grasps, after that comes off I stun, after that comes off he grasps again. I chase when I know that my partner is going to support me and the same with tower pushing. Hell, we even choose complimentery favor items. A premade will always be better than the sum of their parts - which I guess is the point. Taken individually, people may suck, but when working together they do much better.
Whoever says that premades dont hold advantage or not high enough are lying through their teeth. Same goes for voice communication.
Examples:
Daoc my first pvp mmorpg i played and where i stayed forever is good example. We had good, decent folks and we won a lot, but at the time we didnt use vent/ts. We had advantage that we played with each other and we knew what others will do and react in that way. Then came groups that obliterated us and we decided to switch to vent and suddenly we faced them pretty much evenly and winning most of the encounters.
Pugs is also prime example there, you could steam roll a group of 50 with 8 easily. Hell whole relic raids were destroyed by 8 (relic raids consisted of 100+ people). But they lacked good communication and playing together a lot so that was possible.
Then comes WOW and its arena. There without voice and knowing ppl you couldnt get beyond 1800 ratings.
Slide ahead to Warhammer and their pvp arenas. 15vs15 out of those 5 ppl were in premade, those usually destroyed all the rest. Simply stating over vent oom/oor you overextended so you fell back gave you huge advantage.
In retrospect most fun i had was against other premades, because bashing pugs is seriously boring. I mean whats the point when you win 500-0, where score = deaths for example. There is no challenge.
Now lets see demigod, i play with random and i try to type to him i am out of mana(sedna) and before i type that and he reacts, he will probably be dead.
On other hand two people who know each other and are on vent(lets say erebus/ub), one of the will say ill grasp him, erebus runs a bit ahead and when grasp runs out he bites and mass charms the guy(i have doubts anybody will survive this).
Problem is game has no real ladder system and no way for premades to fight each other. This will probably be fixed in near future, but there will still be people who will not use this system and prefer beating pugs.
i partly agree with op. it helps to sort out the real bad noobs though that join "pro" games (i really don't get why, but it happens a lot). if he has 20 games played and won 3 of them, it's a kick. Wether you're #1or #200 on the ladder doesn't say a thing about skill.
for the premade part, i fully agree that we NEED a team pantheon. it's much more fun to play premade vs premade than randoms vs randoms, not even speaking of premade vs randoms as this is mostly boring slaughter. (on a few very rare occasions you'll get a very good randoms team though). part of the problem was already mentioned, if i have a random team i don't play against a premade, except i know all the players on my "random" team, chances are you get at least one bad player and the game's over before it has started.
Wicked - I really can't understand how can you claim, premades don't make you almost 100% wins against randoms !? If you are so good, why do you only play with 3 friends vs 3 randoms ? Why don't you join other premades ? Maybe to not make your stats worse (only 1 game lost in 27 games for now ?). You think you are pro, because you got almost all wins ? LOL ! Why don't you play against AI then ? You will win for sure (just like now), but you will not crush other humans (which, I assure you, isn't fun for them at all). It's no difference for you will you crush AI's or humans, unless you are sadist... Your games are all about crushing the others now, not about playing for fun !!
Maybe, instead of writing bullshits on this forum, you should spend this time playing IN random team vs good premade teams ? Try to tell your "random friends" what to do and how to win the game if that's so easy and obvious in your opinion. Then, show us your game ranking, to see how good you really are.
BTW: Don't tell me you really think someone will respect you because of 95% winning rate ?!
Sometimes, when I read this kind of "discussions", I have a known saying from my country in my mind:"Don't argue with idiots. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience".
Poul, you obviously didn't read anythign I posted as I said no one should respect me for my winning rate. The rate was posted to give validity to the claim that stat's really don't matter, from somone who DOES have good standings. Do they have somthing in your country for that kind of stupidity?
This whole mentality that premades don't join games is absurd. I don't go out of my way looking for them no, because it already takes 10+ minutes to start a game 90% of the time. However, even last night, we had at least one premade join our game. To be honest they're more plentiful at joining than most give credit for. Most of you I doubt host or you would realize this.
Onto why I don't play without friends, why would I? I have before, I won some games, I think I lost 1-2 as well. I don't claim to be pro, and welcome any challenge, never once have I said otherwise in this thread. Maybe when you get a 9 hour shift at a job, work full time, with a 3 hour commute everyday, you can tell me who or who I shouldn't be spending my time with everynight. Life is too short to spend time doing things with people you couldn't give two cents about.
You jump to random conclusions about why I play, and the way I host. You have no validity for any of your statements other than sheer opinion which you're welcome to. I don't know any american saying's for people like you, but a nice descriptive term would be flaming idiot? You have added no value to this thread.
Edit: Not to mention, out of curiosity we did lookups of people who joined our games, and over 90% of the people who had good standings left our game in the lobby. 2/3 premades left our game as well. I don't go through the trouble of hiding anything, but that doesn't make much sense to me. The last game was actually pretty intense, it's too bad we had major splits =/. Char dropped near the beggining of the game.
I think Milskidasith is separating two things: team skill vs. an advantage that one team has because they have an external advantage that the other team does not. Team skill is what you're describing above: timing of stuns, synergies, etc.- essentially how well the teammates coordinate. An external advantage is if one team has a device or set up that the other team doesn't have the benefit of, like Vent or if three allies are playing in the same physical room. These external advantages can help communication, but if one team has it and the other doesn't, then the game is set up at a handicap. The issue when interpreting the significance of a win is whether the teams are at a level playing field. If not, then whose fault it is is irrelevant- it's not a fair game in terms of reading something from the statistics.
Just to be clear: I am not bashing anyone who uses Vent because they prefer talking. I use it myself when running a premade. But I'm not going to kid myself, if I am on a 3v3, and my allies are friends with vent while the other three are randoms, then we have a clear advantage.
The flip side is, for people who've never used Vent, is that Vent doesn't automatically make you win. I know this might sound weird, but Demigods is really is a lot about individual skill (knowing when to fight, knowing when to run, knowing how much you can fight without getting killed, having a sense for when you're about to be ganked, etc.) and Vent is not going to make a bad player good. I've seen Vent freeze a lot of new players as they can't handle the sensory overload of people asking them questions and telling them what to do. Timid players also second guess themselves a lot on Vent if a loud teammate starts barking orders. I point this out not because having Vent isn't an advantage (it is), but Vent won't make a player good by itself. And by the way, if you think rage quitting is ugly in chat, just imagine what it's like on Vent .
EDITED: Fixed some minor things.
I agree with pretty much this entire post with exception to the fact that vent is only an unfair advantage in terms of scale. The better your players are, the more likely they will use voice communication properly. I've met plenty of good players that play side by side with us that just spam acronymns just fine. Yes he probably could have been more effective on voice chat, but unless the competitive play is that even, the difference it makes is nominal.
And yes, i'm one of the worst for vent rage. Although I try not to let it escape to the game . I ussualy end up only getting mad at myself though. "WHY THE HELL DID I ASSUME MY HEALER WAS IN THAT GLOB OF DEMIGODS/CREATURES?! ::UB explodes::"
Skill has to be there i have to agree, but here is what you forget this is team game, so coordinating everything via chat vs typing is huge advantage. Put same skill people together, 3 premade, 3 random who you think will win?
I would agree with you, except for the justification part. What you just said there supports the fact that premades would clearly have better stats than PUGs, even if the PUGs have better individual skill. Unfortunately, the stat system tracks individuals, not teams.
It comes down to if you think it's ok for people who play premades to have better stats than good players who are only able/just want to play in PUGs. Either way, stats are a bad reflection of actual individual skill.
Now, if the stats were team-based, then that's a different matter.
I didn't point it out because I want to feed my ego. I pointed out to show you the irony. You obviousy did not get it. You called people "stupid" and "can't read" because they have a different point of view.
Look, just because people disagree with you or may have different point of view doesn't make them stupid ok? You're the one who sounds like an idiot to me. People respect your right to speak your point of view. You should respect their right to speak their point of view too. I respect a person who can state their views without malice and who can understand that others have different viewpoints. It is the people who push a view no matter what that lose my respect and others' respects
Alright ill spell it out for you since you obviously just don't get it. Theres a typo for the SECOND time saying this, in that sentence. I've said it 4 times elsewhere in the opposite direction but you focus on that one for some reason.
It is supposed to be,
Do You Get It? I can't argue a point with you if you're off in imagination land. I apologize for the typo, I was in a rush.
Voice chat does not make you better at any of those individual skills. Those were all taken as individual decisions you make, not as decisions you make with your teammates. I meant timing stuns as in interrupting the enemy, not timing with another person to chainstun.
I'm going to let this stupid thread die now as we are severly off topic (meaning, I wont be posting, even if I have to correct somone else). I think we're all in agreeance stats are so situtionally based on who you play and the game glitching. I don't really think the word "premade" comes into that as nicely as, how you decide to choose your oponents. I do believe that stats can be utilitized to see a fair amount of detail into the depths of somones ability, but the amount of effort required to reach a true representation of their abilities requires so much data mining it hardly seems worth it. As far as ranking goes, well ;x thats laughable.
Ranking's shouldn't be based on win%, the wc3 model was far superior. Matching good players against good players, bad players against bad players. At the fundamental level it's kind of the same, except if you wanted your stats to be shown, forced matchups were made based on your history. A more logical, but not perfect design of a ranking system.
As far as ventrilo goes, I believe that the hype of voice comm is severly overrated, and it flat comes down to player skill more than anything else. The pro's of RoC dota almost never used voice com, and they could stomp premades like anyones business. All inhouses were without voice com, and the amount of teamwork and individual skill was astounding. Yes voice comm would provide a better channel for coordination, but really, unless the teams are that even to begin with, I wouldn't see much of an advantage.
Was fun
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