Legomenon-gh
commented
3 years ago I like this idea for working on matchmaking psychology and can work on it in the next couple of weeks, and iterate on it as needed. I think starting new matchmaking users as grey and setting their ladder points to their expected WHR after 10 games will be an improvement. Should this apply to all users who have less than the required number of matchmaking games, or just new ones entering the ladder for the first time? (It's probably simpler to apply it to everybody who qualifies)
I had a similar idea when discussing matchmaking last a few months ago, and had some concerns on overselling the benefits of calibration. Matchmaking will be more even after their first games, but there are limits to what a matchmaking system can achieve (especially with low population).
- The acceptable WHR range is large to ensure games do happen at more quiet times, this can go against the queue description promising "opponents of similar skill".
- Users who place near the starting WHR are likely to run into other brand new users whose own rating is uncertain.
- ZK games can be pretty swingy especially at lower levels, so even a statistically 50/50 game can feel like a stomp. Some users expect individual games to be very close to balanced, and it is difficult to communicate that matchmaking even in Starcraft 2 only promises that their win rate will eventually be a few percent points off 50%.
- As you said, figuring out when a user's rating is calibrated is tricky since it requires multiple games against opponents of various skill levels to start to zero in. 10 games is probably good enough for most users who aren't at either ladder extreme.
GoogleFrog
The current matchmaker has a failure of psychology for new players. It doesn't tell them that their rating is uncertain (which they could assume anyway), but more importantly it doesn't tell them when they should expect this uncertainty to end. The fact that they can navigate to their ratings page is irrelevant because uncertainty metrics are not intuitive to the majority of people.
There should be a simple UI and progress bar that fulfills the function of telling them "Don't worry about your first few games, your later ones will be against more even opponents". This could be calibrated against the usual uncertainty reduction after people play a few games, or we could simply pick 10 as an arbitrary number and say that they have a rank after that many games. Infrasructure should reflect their lack of a rank, possibly using the grey rank for this purpose, or maybe forcing their MM rank to grey until they have 10 games.