Mirror Match

People who don't know me often disagree with me. Those who know me realise they're wrong when they do.

Neither of us knows the future. I simply think that the potential effect on viewership should be seriously considered, that's all.

You're wrong though.

You equaling disagreement with being wrong, leads me to suspect you are a theologian.

*Poirot-beard*

People who don't know me often disagree with me. Those who know me realise they're wrong when they do.

Sounds like a verse from Bible.

Problem with doing this in automatchups or "ranked" is that your already splitting the player pool in half.

No, the idea would be that everyone draws from the same pool, just that certain players are more selective in their opponents. For example, a Soviet player who has mirror matches enabled is just as likely to get pitched against the same Soviet opponent as a German player who has it turned off. All that changes is which players within that pool you're going to get matched up against.

You're still creating two brands of players, and they are essentially incomparable: a single meaningful rank system for all players is then not an option. It's a dreadfully bad idea.

so easy to solve, just making a official poll.

Representability?

so easy to solve, just making a official poll.

I feel like this is a non-issue, since the inclusion of mirror matches is something you can get over if you don't like it, and the removal of mirror matches has a very minor effect on competitive gameplay.

The worst case scenario I can envision is a tourney where two players who are best at Axis and favor Axis are facing off, since one of them has an advantage in a given round. My reaction is that it's a competitive game; the best player is the player who does anything (legal) to win. So our definition of better player must be revised to include those players who master every faction, not just one; a player who's good at both is, on an absolute scale, better than a player who masters just one.

Edit: To get over the fact that mirror matches annoy you, just divide multi player competitive CoH from single player immersion CoH. CoH is quite abstract as it is, it shouldn't be that difficult...

I feel like this is a non-issue, since the inclusion of mirror matches is something you can get over if you don't like it, and the removal of mirror matches has a very minor effect on competitive gameplay.

The worst case scenario I can envision is a tourney where two players who are best at Axis and favor Axis are facing off, since one of them has an advantage in a given round. My reaction is that it's a competitive game; the best player is the player who does anything (legal) to win. So our definition of better player must be revised to include those players who master every faction, not just one; a player who's good at both is, on an absolute scale, better than a player who masters just one.

Except that sometimes a map favors one faction over another and whoever gets to pick the map or pick the faction gets an advantage.

What moron includes a map in his tourney which has a significant advantage for one faction over another? Why would a map with a significant advantage live long in the map pool?

If a map has a w/l ratio significantly exceeding 1, we have a problem which can and should be resolved without mirror matches.

Representability?

The same as here? It would give a proportional idea about what the fans are thinking.

What moron includes a map in his tourney which has a significant advantage for one faction over another? Why would a map with a significant advantage live long in the map pool?

If a map has a w/l ratio significantly exceeding 1, we have a problem which can and should be resolved without mirror matches.

Langres...

What moron includes a map in his tourney which has a significant advantage for one faction over another? Why would a map with a significant advantage live long in the map pool?

Have you ever played Company of Heroes? A "moron" would pick an unbalanced map because those are pretty much the only ones Relic knows how to make. The closer to symmetrical the better, but generally the maps aren't symmetrical, and when you combine that with asymmetrical factions, someone inevitably ends up with an advantage.

War is asymmetrical, a game about war should be too. \o/

lololol

Best counter to fast AC? Fast AC with upgun!

(The above is not based on any real evidence and is purely speculative!!)

How significant are these imbalances? Does anybody have statistics on them revealing a significant tilt towards one side or another?

There is no such thing is a "imbalance" in a mirror match. There might be some issues like Soviet AT guns piercing Soviet armor far too often that might be changed to make the game more enjoyable, but since both sides have access to the same AT and the same tanks- it doesn't create an imbalance.

There are two ways we use the word "balanced." One way is used to refer to opposite sides. When we use the word that way, the way to check if a game is balanced is to just look at win rates for the different teams. US vs Wehr win rate is 50% for both sides? The game is balanced. It's 60/40 US? The game is unbalanced. And that's it.

The second way we use "balanced" when we talk about RTS games is whether something is OP or not. Is CoH "balanced" when Scorched Earth is useless? Well, not quite, because that's one third of PE's doctrines off the table. Is the game "balanced" if the only way for a Wehr player to win is Piospam and if they can't cap both +16 fuels in the first 3 minutes they lose the game (that one's a hypothetical of course)? Not really, because there's only one way for Wehr to win and if you can't pull it off you're screwed. Maybe 50% of players pull it off perfectly and 50% of players can't do it, so that's where the 50/50 W/L rate comes from.

Mirror matches can be unbalanced in the second way: if the only way to beat Wehr as Wehr is to go quick T3 and get out an upgunned Puma as fast as possible, and the first player to do that always wins and the other one always loses, then you have an unbalanced matchup. Does player skill still decide the outcome? Well in Starcraft II it does, so even though mirror matches are sometimes boring, you at least know the better player typically wins, but in CoH with all the randomness, if mirror matches are "balanced" only in the first sense but not in the second sense then there's a serious possibility that they're really bad for competitive play because there is only one optimal strategy and whether you win with it or lose with it comes down to whether your penetrating shot destroys the tank, takes out the engine, or lets you recrew the tank and take it for yourself (lol).

The way to make mirror matches balanced is to have lots of strategies open to both players, so that you don't have to pick the one best strategy against your mirror.

Now obviously there can also be "one best strategy" in non-mirror matches, like the Piospam example I gave above, so I'm not against mirror matches just because they can possibly be unbalanced. But you're wrong to say there can never be imbalance in a mirror match, because a 50/50 win rate isn't the only kind of balance that matters in an RTS.

Also you're ignoring the fact that maps aren't symmetrical in CoH so that's a big way for mirror matches not to be balanced. Again this is another thing SC2 solves because they have symmetrical maps.