Rejected GBG League Placement

[Demeter7]

Reason

The current GBG placement uses LP (League Points). This results in drastically bumping guilds up and down between leagues from season to season. This forces guilds that win one battle in Platinum up into the top level of Diamond, facing the strongest guilds in their world. The opposite also occurs, where a strong guild places low in Diamond when facing other very strong guilds, to end up next season on a map in Platinum or lower diamond with guilds that are too far below them to be a challenge. Guild league placement bumps guilds up and down too far, often above or below their ability.

This does not encourage guilds to fight to their full ability, because they are pushed too far up with one win.

This also results in guilds sitting out seasons as they are beached, or else they are bored on a map with guilds who can not keep up with them.

Some guilds intentionally lose to move themselves down to lower leagues. This gives them easy wins over weaker guilds. This has been evident with the recent GBG changes. Guilds try to get to lower Diamond to get the win, so that they get the Tournament building fragments. They are using the LP method to choose what level they want to be in for the next battle.

Details

I propose that league matches are determined by Total Player Points of all guild members and Total Fights Won of all guild members. This information is already available in the Player stats listing, so it does not require additional record keeping.
Use these totals to come up with an average of Points and average of Wins based on the guild member count.
Use these 2 averages to group guilds by a logical, predetermined range per league.

Balance

This would improve balance in GBG and would not affect other game features.

Abuse Prevention

This would prevent abuse of the current LP system. Guilds would be assigned to a league based on their guild ability.

Summary

With this change, guilds would no longer be able to work the LP system to fight in a league with weaker guilds for an easy win. It would also avoid guilds being forced into leagues above their ability, thus avoiding frustration.
All around it would improve attitudes in the game.

Have you looked to see if this has already been suggested?

Yes

I suggest replacing the current system of GBG guild league placement with a more accurate method based on guild ability, rather than LP.

 

[Demeter7]

An alternative to using averages could be using the total Player Points and total Won Battles of all guild members.

 

[planetofthehumans2]

Also allow guilds to choose if they want to participate in diamond or not, most of them know it's too much and want to stay in plat which may be enough rather than changing the whole league placement by a different value. They'd probably just work this system too.

 

[Yekk]

Player points and fights are both solid stats to consider but wouldn't it be better to add (average LP's over a period of time) also. Your suggestion could include players sitting in "rest-stop" guilds. That would skew league creation. Average LP would fix the inequities that occur from 175LP jumps and falls. From a single season where one guild gets stuffed by 2-3 others.

 

[one day flower]

I propose that league matches are determined by Total Player Points of all guild members and Total Fights Won of all guild members.

Wouldn't this give a rather static total, with many GBG consisting of the same guilds opposing each other time and again?

A much simpler solution to the problem would be to expand the diamond league from 100 points to 250 or even 350 points

 

[CrashBoom]

A much simpler solution to the problem would be to expand the diamond league from 100 points to 250 or even 350 points

or just remove the cap of 1000

 

[Emir von Katar]

This proposal would be rounded off if the sector points were adjusted to the individual leagues and the correspondingly necessary base number of fights.
A sector in the copper league must be worth less than silver, silver less than gold, gold less than platinum and platinum less than diamond league, then it is guaranteed that the end result will be in line with performance

 

[one day flower]

or just remove the cap of 1000

Certainly that would also solve the bouncing problem.

 

[.Chris]

I still think a multiplayer elo based system would be great, coupled with a max amount of Top Tier Diamond Leagues (let's say 8 for discussions sake)

The Elo rating system is designed for two-player games, like chess.
It would be nice to have a similar rating system for games with more players. Unfortunately, generalization of the Elo system to n-player (multiplayer) games has proven difficult.
Simple Multiplayer Elo (SME)
Generalization may not be necessary, though. I've come up with a simple and effective way to apply the two-player Elo system to multiplayer scenarios:

• At the end of a game, make a list of all the players and sort it by performance.
• Think of each player as having played two matches: a loss vs. the player right above him on the list, and a win vs. the player right below him.
• Update each player's rating accordingly using the two-player Elo equations.

I call this method "Simple Multiplayer Elo" (SME) and am making it public domain.
If you decide to use SME, I would appreciate an e-mail!

Performance
To measure the performance of SME, I did the following experiment:

• Imagine 10 players with "true" Elo ratings of 1100, 1200, ..., 2000.
• Each player is assigned a random initial SME rating of 1500 ± 1.
• Multiple rounds of an imaginary game are simulated:
  • The players are assigned random game scores according to their true ratings. The scores have normal distributions with μ = true rating, σ² = 200.
  • The predictive ability of the SME ratings is calculated by enumerating the 45 possible pairings between the 10 players, counting the number of times the higher-rated player beat the lower-rated player, and dividing by 45.
  • The predictive ability of the true ratings is calculated using the same method. This is the ideal predictive ability.
  • The SME ratings are updated according to the SME method, described above.

I ran this experiment millions of times and averaged the results:

After round...	SME predictive ability	Ideal predictive ability
	50.0% (random)	84.5%
1	62.3%	84.5%
2	72.5%	84.5%
3	77.3%	84.5%
4	79.2%	84.5%
5	80.3%	84.5%
10	82.2%	84.5%
20	83.3%	84.5%
1000	83.9%	84.5%

You can see a graph of this curve here.
This experiment shows that SME only needs a small number of rounds to achieve near-ideal predictive ability, and is thus a strong candidate for any application that requires a multiplayer rating system.
Compared to Microsoft's TrueSkill
A well-known multiplayer rating system is Microsoft's TrueSkill (web site, paper). It's a much more complicated system that's based on Bayesian inference.
I ran the experiment described above using Jesse Buesking's implementation of TrueSkill (GitHub):

Round	SME	TrueSkill
1	62.3%	63.4%
2	72.5%	68.7%
3	77.3%	71.7%
4	79.2%	73.7%
5	80.3%	75.1%
10	82.2%	78.7%
20	83.3%	81.1%
100	83.9%	83.7%
1000	83.9%	84.4%

SME approaches ideal accuracy much faster than TrueSkill. Eventually TrueSkill produces ratings that are almost perfect (after hundreds of rounds) but at that point the difference is marginal.

Source

 

[Warrior816]

Player points and fights in my opinion is the poorest choice for matchmaking.

For example, you can have a guild full of Industrial Age farmers using Higher Age Units winning every battleground season, or at the other end have guilds turning down players with a lot of points because they don't want to have tough competitors.

In every game, as the competition goes up, participants decrease. But in FoE GbG, the number of guilds competing is the same from Copper League to Diamond. This leads to guilds sitting idle in the highest league due to the highest competition.

I would upvote an idea that suggests reducing the number of competitors in Diamond leagues to 3-4.

 

[angelgail]

something need to be done we a good team an work hard to get to diamond but the top guilds will win .
28 members 5 dont play gbg at all verse 77 members all mandortory to play gbg .

 

[.Chris]

something need to be done we a good team an work hard to get to diamond but the top guilds will win .
28 members 5 dont play gbg at all verse 77 members all mandortory to play gbg .

Yeah what needs to be done is for you to grow your guild

 

[angelgail]

Yeah what needs to be done is for you to grow your guild

why thank you wonder why i did not think of that

 

[Dessire]

There is a better option, but it would required the deletion of gbg and make a new one.

 

[Demeter7]

There is a better option, but it would required the deletion of gbg and make a new one.

Something needs to be done. The recent changes did nothing at all to address the guild league placement issues.

 

[Kronan]

Wouldn't this give a rather static total, with many GBG consisting of the same guilds opposing each other time and again?

A much simpler solution to the problem would be to expand the diamond league from 100 points to 250 or even 350 points

I never posted the idea (quote) this comment ^^ is in response to. @Demeter7 said what you think I did, in his original post, here:

Rejected - GBG League Placement

I suggest replacing the current system of GBG guild league placement with a more accurate method based on guild ability, rather than LP.

forum.beta.forgeofempires.com

The response in your quoted post to me, is for something that isn't mine. It GOES to a post I made, but on a different topic (Rival), not GbG or even in this topic. Not sure what caused that.

Pilot error (you), or a technical cross-linking bug/error in the forum software...

 

[MageKnight]

One of the upcoming problems that is tied to this is Bye Bye GVG, no need to go beyond Future. You can kiss the ghastly AF/OF/VF goodbye and do just as well on GBG by picking up their troops. I've just whacked my way through those three Era's, not playing GVG on U world and realised it's not worth the effort as GBG works best up to Future and Space Age Venus, Titan being rubbish.