No, I don't see the point of having another ranking system at all

I can see how good a player is from their historical data and etc
And I don't think people would bother playing a RANKED multiplayer match

I'd always hit the filter NON-RANKED most of the time

There should be a ranking system called solo queue, when you queue you get in a 4vs4 team with people of your skill level.
Dodging/failing/Losing as a team will make you lose elo, winning and not failing will make you win elo.
7 maps are decided by the matchmaking system based on what the players have.
The highest ELO player of each team will ban 3 maps ea-
Oh wait might as well play LoL.

there shouldn't be any of this

osu multiplayer is not competitive due to the nature of how it works
it's for fun

unlike OWC where there are specific map picks and brackets, random mp in osu is all BUT competitive. it's always highly biased in the host's favor and you're not really playing against the other players anyway

Aqo wrote:

there shouldn't be any of this

osu multiplayer is not competitive due to the nature of how it works
it's for fun

like i said in this thread over 9000 times already lol, that is why multi only has a very few percentage of the total players online. This is not to make every single player in multi competitive but to make people from SOLO join multi.

People who just plays for fun and are not competitive don't even have interest in self improvement in a competitive way, they are indifferent about it, which means for them pp is useless just like this rating system, therefor is unfair (imo) from them to just come and say instantaniously "no" to this request.

As a competitive player id like to have games against really really good people and not with the normal people frequenting multi but those players have almost no interest in multi because in a way it is just a waste of time compared to the time you can use to break records which is more efficient.

By this i don't mean i look down at other players, no, i'm not like that, i even encourage them to improve and help my friends as much as i can for that. Even i like to play just for fun once in a while.

People who are competitive in osu won't play multiplayer since multiplayer is the opposite of being competitive. You need to grind hard maps nonstop with no breaks if you want to be competitive. Multiplayer gives a break between every map you play, forces to play maps fully (which is often not optimal) and forces to play maps that are not the most suitable for your skill level at the time.

multiplayer in this game is, and will always be, something you either do to pass the time randomly or for fun with friends. it will never be competitive

ELO is something for competitive players in a competitive scene. people who only play for a non-competitive concept of fun don't need it, and if anything it only discourages them from playing.

Aqo wrote:

multiplayer in this game is, and will always be, something you either do to pass the time randomly or for fun with friends. it will never be competitive

ELO is something for competitive players in a competitive scene. people who only play for a non-competitive concept of fun don't need it, and if anything it only discourages them from playing.

Those are the thoughts of a non-competitive player, you can check the profile of each player who have said "no" or something against this idea and they are low ranks, including yourself, if you check the ones in agreement with this they are on the 2k's or less which means they are more competitive.

This thread's request is directed to and for competitive players. The non-competitive players have nothing to lose with this except seing hard challenges in multi but you can just disregard those just like i completely ignore the huge majority of rooms with Easy/Normal/Hard maps in multi.

Aqo kinda has a point though. If the host picks an Easy or Normal diff, then it's entirely possible a rank 100K could beat Cookiezi, since if both players have SS it comes down to spinner skill (Cookiezi is a decent spinner but a whole lot of people can outspin him, a bunch of noobs can spin 450+ effortlessly, etc.)

[MY] yummy90 XP wrote:

No, I don't see the point of having another ranking system at all

I can see how good a player is from their historical data and etc
And I don't think people would bother playing a RANKED multiplayer match

I'd always hit the filter NON-RANKED most of the time

No, you can't.

On match making you don't pick maps, the game should random a map for both to play from a pool (pools from 1 to 10, based on difficulty, rates by a select group of experienced players), best of 3. If you're on high tiers you will play ALL hard maps, no chance of getting easy shit, while low tiers will be easier maps.

I can fully develop this idea but I should make another thread.

Just do it like SC2, maps are random. Pick 10/20 experienced players and make them rate 10/15 maps a day (giving a score between 1 and 10), get the average score from all of those and that's the map difficulty, by doing that you'll get a decent amount of maps by the end of the day. Low tier pools don't really matter since easies and normals are all pretty much the same difficulty (not like insanes where you can jump from [Hard] to [Impossible]).

Actual MP keeps untouched, what we are talking about is match making, click a button, get matched, play 2 (or 3 if 1-1) maps, win/lose, game over. Only way to get an accurate ranking where farming is just impossible (even if you play 24/7 you won't beat those who are better than you, unless you get better than them and thus deserve the spot).

[MY] yummy90 XP wrote:

No, I don't see the point of having another ranking system at all

I can see how good a player is from their historical data and etc
And I don't think people would bother playing a RANKED multiplayer match

I'd always hit the filter NON-RANKED most of the time

No you can't. Pp can be easily farmed and skew your rankings. Wishy beat me in multi earlier and I know hes a better player. I can't beat few 1 - 2xxx in airman while they whoop my ass cause they happen to do better at jumps or they don't care about pp ranks at all.

I actually do like this idea. I stalk multi a lot to find people of my rank only to find none or very few. I also feel bad when everyone picks insane diffs a lot even If like 2 players can pass it only. I dont thinks it's fun to play something you won't be able to pass for a good time frame.

MillhioreF wrote:

Aqo kinda has a point though. If the host picks an Easy or Normal diff, then it's entirely possible a rank 100K could beat Cookiezi, since if both players have SS it comes down to spinner skill (Cookiezi is a decent spinner but a whole lot of people can outspin him, a bunch of noobs can spin 450+ effortlessly, etc.)

technically you are saying that you, after gaining elo by defeating a lot of good people, are going to join a noob room where you have nothing to win and A LOT to lose? and is not even fun to play that.

like i've said before several times:

1- ELO gap per room
2- Modifier for easy/hard/insane maps (i already said how can you tell by data and not by title nor stars)
3- Player agrees with whatever the rules in the room are by clicking "ready"
4- I highly doubt there is a pro willing to waste time with a meaningless ranked AND boring game where you are in a LOSE/LOSE situation.

Wishy wrote:

On match making you don't pick maps, the game should random a map for both to play from a pool (pools from 1 to 10, based on difficulty, rates by a select group of experienced players), best of 3. If you're on high tiers you will play ALL hard maps, no chance of getting easy shit, while low tiers will be easier maps.

Just do it like SC2, maps are random. Pick 10/20 experienced players and make them rate 10/15 maps a day (giving a score between 1 and 10), get the average score from all of those and that's the map difficulty, by doing that you'll get a decent amount of maps by the end of the day. Low tier pools don't really matter since easies and normals are all pretty much the same difficulty (not like insanes where you can jump from [Hard] to [Impossible]).

Actual MP keeps untouched, what we are talking about is match making, click a button, get matched, play 2 (or 3 if 1-1) maps, win/lose, game over. Only way to get an accurate ranking where farming is just impossible (even if you play 24/7 you won't beat those who are better than you, unless you get better than them and thus deserve the spot).

Now that is also a fucking good idea too.

You should never be able to play easy maps with a newbie if you're good, never. When you get into the ladder thing for a first time you should be able to rate yourself and start out on insane level (pool 5~7), while bad players should be able to select lower tiers (just like on LoL you get asked about how good you think you are, or in SC2 you get to play 5 "test" matches to see get you rated).

Wishy wrote:

You should never be able to play easy maps with a newbie if you're good, never. When you get into the ladder thing for a first time you should be able to rate yourself and start out on insane level (pool 5~7), while bad players should be able to select lower tiers (just like on LoL you get asked about how good you think you are, or in SC2 you get to play 5 "test" matches to see get you rated).

thatd be amazing as well, at first i was looking into manually made matches just like in chess but automatic is better. I'm gonna edit the original idea a bit.

You just need to make it automatic. Everything must be automatic. All the player has to do is click a button, get into a lobby with another player, get ready and play. After losing getting some notification showing him how much rating he won/lost and that's it.

Mimic a SC2 ladder system (click a button, get matched).

Separate tiers. Like leagues on SC2, any number of players can fit in any league, top league has limited slots so being there is not that easy, you can make 8/9 separate tiers and fit players there, 6 standard ones an the top one, tier level = map difficulty, 1~2 would be easy normal, 3~4 Hards, 5~9 different insanes since the spread is gigantic, and then 10. Players should be able to get matched with people from other tiers (-1 or +1). Of course you will get a big rating boost if you defeat a higher tier player, and he would lose quite a lot. Number of tiers can be discussed, maybe you just need 7, 8, 10 or 500.

A good development for this would be the chance of meeting lower/higher tier players being dynamic. Say tier 1 = 0~99, tier 2 = 100~199, etc. Then if your rating is 590 (meaning you're tier 6 I guess) your chances of playing against a player on the tier above yours would be higher than the chances another user with a rating of 540 would have. Of course this applies the other way around. If your rating is 590 the chances of you playing against a lower tier player gonna be lower than the ones a 540 rated play has. Of course you can just "remove" the tier thing and just talk about numbers. But since map difficulty will change over time, having this "categories" thing helps sort this out. And then since you're playing a harder map than those you use to play on ladder, winning against a player who supposedly has been playing that already should give a little bonus (say 550 vs 540, 550 wins, gets 5 rating, then you get 595 vs 605, 595 wins, you get 7 rating instead of 5).

Use a proper rating/ELO system for calculations.

Rate maps by difficulty (get players to do so, it doesn't need to be 100% accurate, VERY long maps should be excluded, I don't think anyone wants to play some 10m map) so you don't get newbies playing Airman.

That's it, in a nutshell I think.

Great! I added it to the main post

Support. I really would like to see this. It'd make coming onto osu! that much more interesting. Hit a button and queue up,, and start playing 1 on 1 against others. Wishy's thoughts on the automation mimicking similar methods used by other popular competitive online games are very good!

For those who are not interested, stick to your casual osu, just going through songs to play.

As for rating difficulty, would this be similar to the "map rating" you see after playing a map? I know making it easy to pick after playing a song would be convenient. You might consider limiting the scope of the rating based on what the maps' difficulties are. So if you can pick out of 10 stars, Easy and Normal diffs can only be 1 or 2 stars (So 2 is like the "harder" stuff in those categories), Hards are rated between 3-4, and 5-10 for the rest of the maps, since as mentioned before, Insane diff spreads are huge.

Would be fun honestly, gives yet another reason to play and get better. I really do want to see how I compare to other players, especially if both are suddenly given a map to sightread. That is kind of why playing against others online is fun, see where you stack up. I can't emphasize enough how much I would like to see this happen. It might also make streaming this game a bit more fun. You see streams like LoL and SC2, with people queue'ing up against randoms. If a game like osu did that, it might attract some more attention.

Just some thoughts on why it *would* be a great idea. Good luck with this idea!

I don't really see how this would work. osu multiplayer by nature isn't competitive. Nothing you do during your play will ever have an effect on the other players in your multiplayer match. It doesn't matter if you're playing against Cookiezi or some random nobody like me, whatever they do on their end won't change gameplay on your end. This is the key difference between multiplayer osu and multiplayer competitive games like SC/LoL. In SC and LoL every game is different, because everything done by the players in the match directly effects how the game plays out. In osu, you're all playing the same map, and the map never changes. You cant really use an ELO rating for this, because you didn't beat the "person" you just beat the "map." The person you're playing against has no effect whatsoever on your play, so using a competitive rating system to say something like "oh I win. I get points and he loses points because I beat him" doesn't make sense.

Leaderboards are good for games like osu, where you're competing against a fixed object. This is the reason there's no competitive "rating" system for raiding in mmo's, just a leaderboard (wowprogress, and that new dungeon whatnot they have in this expansion are good examples).

The points you have made are quite true, Xivaxi. Unlike competitive games, you are not competing against another human for map control, or harass, or teamwork to get a lead in gold; simply a fixed, designed beatmap to attain a score. However, I think the purpose of having a "rating system" such as this would be to learn where you stand against other players, and as such, be "ranked". When doing this, it's more of a reason of proving if you are better than some other person.

Getting put into the ladder to find out where you stand in the sense of real-time competing would be interesting. You probably know the story. This "pp ranking" system requires you to get good ranks and perform well in accuracy (And as a bonus, with mods). There have been discussions about how players can play a map 300 times or so in order to achieve perfection on a map, and thus get ranked, while some other player who only needs 20-30 tries with the same setup gets that same amount of rank. There are players who will play easier maps to earn such points when some are playing much harder maps, and are not getting their fair share (Because figuring out what is "better play" is very hard to do through an automated system). That's not to say the system isn't fair, but it isn't a very accurate representation of pure skill. The kind you need in a more real-time environment per-say.

If two players, you can pick anyone, were put in a blind map pick together and were matched accordingly, who would win? It would come down to who had more experience in the game and better skills. Whether it be jumps, or streaming, or just pure reaction time to high AR. It wouldn't be "pointless" so to speak to gain more points than them. If you earned more score, it meant you kept a larger combo or the other player messed up more often, which is an indication that you are better. Since there is no actual "effect" or active ranking in multiplayer, doing it (As has already been mentioned) is purely for fun or with close friends. It's not a very popular thing (That has the potential to be a bit more exciting)

The point is, having some kind of ranking / matchmaking for this kind of play, may be more interesting and fun for some people. The fact that it would work similar to a ladder ranking system with different tiers would allow other players to finally meet players of their own skill level, and perhaps better themselves together.

Who knows, maybe a few new friends may be made here and there as well. That's my take on why a system like this would be really fun (For some?)

My thoughts.

The fact that it mostly comes down to experience with the map is still a rather large factor. If the random map chosen just happens to be one that I'm familiar with, I'm going to perform significantly better than a map I've only played once or twice.

On the other hand, once someone's become familiar enough with all the maps in the map pool, "competition" just boils down to how consistent their play is, not exactly how skilled they are.

It's an interesting idea, I just feel at its core it doesn't fit a game like osu.

I just want to enjoy the multiplayer. Do not want to be LOL like...

I think this is not a good idea i play multi the most of time and do that for fun no for competition

1 This feature going to be easy abuse for others o.o
2 You say no rank games people in multi win pp sometimes then if the game is not ranked we are not allowed to get pp?
3 With this feature people get really confuse with 2 ranks
4 The most of multi players going to hate this feature i going to hate it (really)
5 competition multiplayer = players hating that’s not good multi is for fun and for know people imo
6 I love osu multi for is just for fun and no body hate the others :s

well that just my opinion (I’m a multiplayer the most of time and really i don’t want it this)

You guys don't seem to understand even if this is implemented you could go and play for fun like you do now, right?

Even if you got match making you can just go and play a random lobby like you do nowadays w/o giving a fuck about the other system.

Xivaxi wrote:

The fact that it mostly comes down to experience with the map is still a rather large factor. If the random map chosen just happens to be one that I'm familiar with, I'm going to perform significantly better than a map I've only played once or twice.

On the other hand, once someone's become familiar enough with all the maps in the map pool, "competition" just boils down to how consistent their play is, not exactly how skilled they are.

It's an interesting idea, I just feel at its core it doesn't fit a game like osu.

Maps in the pool will end up being thousands, doubt you'll be familiar will all of them, ever.

This is intended for fun (people will like it) and for real competition. It's way better to compete in real time and see who does better overall than having retry wars. Plus with an ELO system you would get a somewhat accurate ranking system, thing you will never be able to do with pp or anything like that.

This may also be interesting for new players who just don't know what to play, they can just click a button, get matched with some other newcomer and randomly play. They will even have some rating to see they are "improving" which is a good source of motivation to many people.

I actually find this idea really interesting and I'd love to see how it pans out if it was implemented.

Wishy wrote:

Xivaxi wrote:

The fact that it mostly comes down to experience with the map is still a rather large factor. If the random map chosen just happens to be one that I'm familiar with, I'm going to perform significantly better than a map I've only played once or twice.

On the other hand, once someone's become familiar enough with all the maps in the map pool, "competition" just boils down to how consistent their play is, not exactly how skilled they are.

It's an interesting idea, I just feel at its core it doesn't fit a game like osu.

Maps in the pool will end up being thousands, doubt you'll be familiar will all of them, ever.

This is intended for fun (people will like it) and for real competition. It's way better to compete in real time and see who does better overall than having retry wars. Plus with an ELO system you would get a somewhat accurate ranking system, thing you will never be able to do with pp or anything like that.

This may also be interesting for new players who just don't know what to play, they can just click a button, get matched with some other newcomer and randomly play. They will even have some rating to see they are "improving" which is a good source of motivation to many people.

The problem with having absurdly large map pools is it's not feasible to require everyone to have every map of such a large pool downloaded. This is especially a problem for newer players, who don't have many maps, and usually aren't willing to download a significant amount of content for a game they're not sure about committing to. Additionally, many new players only like to play maps they're familiar with (particularly songs they're familiar with and like musically)

If you allow only having partial map pools, then what's to prevent people from playing only with the maps they're familiar with and throwing everything else into a different folder while they're grinding ranks.

No rating system will ever be 100% accurate, even ELO systems in their proper competitive setting have been criticized as being inaccurate and farmable. As far as I see it, pp does a decent job for what it's trying to accomplish, and accomplishes it better than trying to force a competitive ranking system in a game that's inherently not competitive.

i like this idea, though setting up matchmaking for an elo-based system would be a fairly large undertaking.

Xivaxi wrote:

The problem with having absurdly large map pools is it's not feasible to require everyone to have every map of such a large pool downloaded. This is especially a problem for newer players, who don't have many maps, and usually aren't willing to download a significant amount of content for a game they're not sure about committing to. Additionally, many new players only like to play maps they're familiar with (particularly songs they're familiar with and like musically)

If you allow only having partial map pools, then what's to prevent people from playing only with the maps they're familiar with and throwing everything else into a different folder while they're grinding ranks.

No rating system will ever be 100% accurate, even ELO systems in their proper competitive setting have been criticized as being inaccurate and farmable. As far as I see it, pp does a decent job for what it's trying to accomplish, and accomplishes it better than trying to force a competitive ranking system in a game that's inherently not competitive.

Active players have lots of maps and those who care about ranking have pretty much every ranked map. It is true that this map be a problem for newcomers, you can just make low tiers to have a smaller map pool and that's it. No need to have 2000 maps for newbies when:

1- They won't play that much.
2- They won't care that much.
3- If they actually care about it, they will eventually get better and quit playing those difficulties in no time.

In the possible situation where one (or both) of the players don't have the map, they should get 1 minute to download the map. If one player fails to download the map, he loses that one by default, if both fail to do so, both will get a ELO penalty for not being able to play (this is to avoid situations where people try to force a draw since there are some maps they suck at).

Tho you are right, having lots of maps could be a problem.

No rating system will ever be 100% accurate, tho this is better than anything else you can think of.

I'm sorry to put it like this, but if you think pp is accurate at any rate you are completely clueless about the competitive scene this game has. pp is 100% farm, harder to farm than ranked score but still farm based.

If you're actually serious about having such a huge map pool, then who wins is largely going to come down to luck of the draw, like I said before. If a map is picked that one person is familiar whereas the other has just downloaded but never played, of course the one who's familiar with it is going to win - no skill involved. ELO systems were designed with completely equal playing fields in mind, games like chess and such. The only thing being measured is skill, nothing else. Even in chess, the game that started the whole ELO system, rarely ever are the world rank 1 holders the actual world champions.

I don't see what's so bad about pp. There are a few outliers that people keep bashing, like shadowsoul and a couple rank >500 that play nothing but normals, but other than that, the 2 digit ranks and high 3 digit ranks for the most part are better than the remaining 3digits and 4 digit ranks. 4 digit ranks for the most part are better than 5 digit ranks, etc.

There's a whole plethora of issues that arise with ELO systems as well, such as win trading/sitting on rank. The fact that osu doesn't have that many players and that this whole system is just going to be optional is just going to make these worse.

All this aside, you've still never solved the core issue in which an elo rating system logically doesn't make sense for a game in which 2 "competitors" aren't actually competing against each other.

Xivaxi wrote:

Even in chess, the game that started the whole ELO system, rarely ever are the world rank 1 holders the actual world champions.

I don't see what's so bad about pp. There are a few outliers that people keep bashing, like shadowsoul and a couple rank >500 that play nothing but normals, but other than that, the 2 digit ranks and high 3 digit ranks for the most part are better than the remaining 3digits and 4 digit ranks. 4 digit ranks for the most part are better than 5 digit ranks, etc.

There's a whole plethora of issues that arise with ELO systems as well, such as win trading/sitting on rank. The fact that osu doesn't have that many players and that this whole system is just going to be optional is just going to make these worse.

All this aside, you've still never solved the core issue in which an elo rating system logically doesn't make sense for a game in which 2 "competitors" aren't actually competing against each other.

1. You know why is that? General skill rating. Having a high elo rating doesn't mean you will ALWAYS play the best, it is like you are saying Cookiezi easily got his score in FREEDOM DIVE just because he is the greatest player of all times, It required a good amount of tries until he got the best round. Same with every other game like in your example chess, the world championship won by someone who doesn't hold the #1 just because simply he had better games. Once a world championship holder from another game said "we aren't the best players just because we won, we still need to keep improving"

2. PP is ok, is just not as accurate since it can be farmed. I.e. i am 100% sure i know some 3k ranked people who can beat you every time even if you are almost 3 digits, that just doesn't make sense, losing a few times happens to anyone but losing every single time means something is wrong. Either they don't deserve their ranking or you don't deserve yours which means pp is not accurate because again it can be farmed.

3. There is no issue with " such as win trading/sitting on rank " you are where you deserve to be. words from pros about elo rating.

4. That very last statement doesn't really make sense to me, if what you said is true, there was absolutely no need for world championship for pump it up (another rythm game which is arcade) and lets not go too far, following your statement there was absolutely no reason for making a World Championship for Osu!. You directly compete against another person just not in very usual way such as fighting, RTS, FPS, etc. games. You compete to see how has the best score, who does better than the other.

In my opinion the only way an elo system will truly work in osu! is if you have a small mappool set for a certain period of time, and changes after each period of time, kinda like how the owc mappool works.

KRZY wrote:

In my opinion the only way an elo system will truly work in osu! is if you have a small mappool set for a certain period of time, and changes after each period of time, kinda like how the owc mappool works.

^this all the way

The only thing is how much effort it is to actually choose maps for the mappool every single time, and if this 'certain period of time' isn't too long, then there could even be the possibility of running out of good maps to put in the mappool. But a long set period for the mappool would fix this.
IDK I just really like this idea.

KRZY wrote:

In my opinion the only way an elo system will truly work in osu! is if you have a small mappool set for a certain period of time, and changes after each period of time, kinda like how the owc mappool works.

And we're back to grinding a few maps, plus if for some reason you don't happen to like most of the maps you're likely not gonna play for a whole cycle. Just get a huge pool and make people download lots of packs.

If we talked about numbers we could agree tho, like you're saying 1 month cycles? How many maps per cycle? If you talk about 1 month cycles, remember you would need a huge amounts of maps, unless you decide to ignore several pools (merge all low tiers, merge hard with insane and then just get the very hard one) your map pool will be gigantic. You need to have enough maps for them not to be that farmable, if you just make it 10 maps per tier, then it's again about drilling. Yet more accurate than pp of course, but still farm based, because as you can see drilling a map can do wonders (retryui).

Xivaxi wrote:

If you're actually serious about having such a huge map pool, then who wins is largely going to come down to luck of the draw, like I said before. If a map is picked that one person is familiar whereas the other has just downloaded but never played, of course the one who's familiar with it is going to win - no skill involved.

How often do you get into multiplayer? I played with lots of people there and when someone is better he usually wins. Top tier like Niko, Cookiezi and rrtyui kind of FC everything on a random try while even other great players can't do the same thing, and even if they do their accuracy is way lower than theirs. There is some amount of luck involved, yes, but not that much. Sometimes your first play is better than your next few plays because you don't know the map at all and rely 100% on reading and not memory (first play always the best anyone?). There will always be some luck factor, even if both have never played the map (random lags, nose itching, etc hueuheh).

I'd like you to join some multiplayer room with lots of good players and see how the ranks don't really change that much, and if they do it's because those players are all on the same level (or close to that).

Hikaros wrote:

Xivaxi wrote:

Even in chess, the game that started the whole ELO system, rarely ever are the world rank 1 holders the actual world champions.

I don't see what's so bad about pp. There are a few outliers that people keep bashing, like shadowsoul and a couple rank >500 that play nothing but normals, but other than that, the 2 digit ranks and high 3 digit ranks for the most part are better than the remaining 3digits and 4 digit ranks. 4 digit ranks for the most part are better than 5 digit ranks, etc.

There's a whole plethora of issues that arise with ELO systems as well, such as win trading/sitting on rank. The fact that osu doesn't have that many players and that this whole system is just going to be optional is just going to make these worse.

All this aside, you've still never solved the core issue in which an elo rating system logically doesn't make sense for a game in which 2 "competitors" aren't actually competing against each other.

1. You know why is that? General skill rating. Having a high elo rating doesn't mean you will ALWAYS play the best, it is like you are saying Cookiezi easily got his score in FREEDOM DIVE just because he is the greatest player of all times, It required a good amount of tries until he got the best round. Same with every other game like in your example chess, the world championship won by someone who doesn't hold the #1 just because simply he had better games. Once a world championship holder from another game said "we aren't the best players just because we won, we still need to keep improving"

2. PP is ok, is just not as accurate since it can be farmed. I.e. i am 100% sure i know some 3k ranked people who can beat you every time even if you are almost 3 digits, that just doesn't make sense, losing a few times happens to anyone but losing every single time means something is wrong. Either they don't deserve their ranking or you don't deserve yours which means pp is not accurate because again it can be farmed.

3. There is no issue with " such as win trading/sitting on rank " you are where you deserve to be. words from pros about elo rating.

4. That very last statement doesn't really make sense to me, if what you said is true, there was absolutely no need for world championship for pump it up (another rythm game which is arcade) and lets not go too far, following your statement there was absolutely no reason for making a World Championship for Osu!. You directly compete against another person just not in very usual way such as fighting, RTS, FPS, etc. games. You compete to see how has the best score, who does better than the other.

I'm getting tired of this constant back and forth so this will be my last post.

1. The same can be said about pp, it's just a general skill rating. The difference between 2600 and 2400 ELO is not that big, despite being thousands of places apart when you consider the rankings.

2. Elo can be farmed in the same way. Why do you think nobody takes the top of the starcraft leaderboards seriously? For one it's optional, most of the top players don't even play league games. Second, the people at the top of the leaderboard are people who constantly play, and have many times more wins than people who only play ranked games every now and again, regardless of their relative skill levels to each other (you might note this is very familiar to what all of you are complaining about with PP). So if you throw that into osu terms, if Cookiezi only bothers to play this new elo ranking system a few times, but someone else goes on and just plays thousands of no-mod ranked plays with a 55% win rate and hits rank 1, can you really say he's better than Cookiezi?

Another note on ELO farming. Playing during off hours makes the matchmaking significantly more lenient, as the game struggles to find a match for you especially at high ELO. High ELO players can just queue during off hours and farm off teams hundreds of rating points below them, then stop once they get queued up with an equal team. This is made worse the less people there are in the queue.

3. Win trading and Sitting on Rank are very real, I'm not sure how you can say they don't exist.

Win Trading: Get two fairly skilled people, have one make a smurf(or just use his main if he doesn't care about ranks) and get his ELO past the bell curve so he's significantly more likely to be paired up with his partner. Both queue at the same time, let smurf lose every time. Once smurf's ELO get's low enough, farm him back up and repeat. This was very easy to do in SC/LoL/Warcraft, and these games had significantly more players than osu. With less players, the chances to be matched together go through the roof.

Sitting on Rank: Once you've gotten an absurdly high rank you probably won't be able to hold onto by either being lucky/win trading/farming lowbies, you maintain it by just not play any games, or play the very minimum against easy opponents/your wintrade partner to maintain rank if there's a point drain over time. This too also happened in SC and WoW, I didn't pay enough attention to the LoL leaderboards enough to know for sure if it happened there, but chances are it did.

4. I don't know about you, but I don't, and never have, considered a world championship of a rhythm game as an actual "world championship." The reason is exactly because rhythm games themselves aren't competitive. Does that mean there's no reason to hold them? No, it's obviously quite fun to watch all the highly skilled players play at the same time, but that doesn't mean there's any real essence of competition behind it.

Wishy wrote:

And we're back to grinding a few maps, plus if for some reason you don't happen to like most of the maps you're likely not gonna play for a whole cycle. Just get a huge pool and make people download lots of packs.

I think the realistic problem with this might be that, as someone pointed out in this thread earlier(too lazy to quote, sorry), players won't bother to practice all maps in the huge mappool before queuing, which makes it an imperfect elo system. Because the elo system was originally designed for chess where there is only one kind of board(8x8) and one set of pieces(king, queen, 2 rooks, etc.), it fails to work 100% in other systems with different backgrounds.
Take LoL for example, and put aside the fact that LoL is a 5v5 game, not 1v1, for now. There are slightly more than 100 champs in LoL, and I'm pretty sure nobody plays all champions in his highest skill level; most of the time, a player is only good at several champs, not so good on others, and honestly have no idea about some of the champs. If the opposing team decides to play with a champ that the player has no idea about, then his game has already been affected; ideally, this shouldn't happen in an elo system. One may argue that this is the same with chess players coming up with 'cheese' strategies to win games. It is not. Cheese strategies in LoL would be CLG NA's 3TP 1Promote or AZB's lane swaps (which actually now is a common meta in the pro scene). The set of pieces in chess remains the same always, and this is a premise for the elo system to work.
Back to osu!. 100+ champs in LoL already make the elo system imperfect, which means that we can expect a mappool with 100 maps to function imperfectly. Nobody is going to practice all 100 maps, they will most likely just practice maps they are going to pick and hope that they win all their picks and try to take at least one game from the opponent's pick. Quickly, this could come down to a game of "who has practiced the tiebreaker map more", and while this system may be an accurate portrayal of who is the best player on the tiebreaker map, it is certainly not an accurate portrayal of who is better at osu!. Reducing the size of the mappool reduces this inaccuracy. As the size of the mappool is reduced, players are more and more able to practice all maps, which makes for an actual skill matchup. Of course, if a player does not like the mappool, he may choose to skip the entire mappool and wait for the next one. If we are to implement the elo system in osu!, this cannot be fixed in any way, because osu! is not chess.
Think of it as this way: every week in LoL, rotation champions are announced, which players can play for free even if they do not own the champions. If LoL worked so that players can only play rotation champs in ranked games, would it be a better representation of the elo system than it is currently now? I think the answer is yes. One may point out that the games will be boring as shit, and this is true for LoL. Not for osu!. There aren't strategies for single maps in osu!, you just hope you don't make a mistake. There is no element to make the games boring in the first place.

After writing this, I'm now convinced that the elo system is probably a bad way to represent any skill level in osu!. I just think that having a small, changing mappool for periods of time is a more accurate implementation of the elo system into osu! than having a huge, fixed mappool.

KRZY wrote:

After writing this, I'm now convinced that the elo system is probably a bad way to represent any skill level in osu!. I just think that having a small, changing mappool for periods of time is a more accurate implementation of the elo system into osu! than having a huge, fixed mappool.

Your entire post made me agree and disagree at the same time lol. So now that is an issue, true, for chess ELO is okay because it is a fixed game scenario and for Osu! is different because of the amount of maps. So a small known amount of maps per cycle would fix that, however that brings up the problem of memorizing, like Wishy stated before, grinding makes wonders (we already know who we're talking about) so then it goes to who memorized the song and doesn't make mistakes rather than a first-sight played song skill. Bringing up chess again, ELO works because the strategies are very changing, is a very dynamic game. In Osu! fixing the mappool for it to be small and revealing the maps is like putting 2 chess players to compete against a BOT in a chess engine to see who wins, they just need to memorize a strategy to beat the BOT, the player that messes up one movement will lose.

So looking the problem that way a big mappool is still a good idea compared to a small one unless the cycles are very short.

I somehow agree with you, KRZY, but using LoL as an example is terrible because that's what LoL is, terrible (as a competitive game it's a joke).

But anyways I see your idea more realistic. Having a huge map pool would be really troublesome since players may lack maps. Now if you make 1 pool every X time and change it players would be able to have all maps. Problem is:

1- How long will the cycle be? It shouldn't be too long (or too short).
2- How many maps? They should be big enough so you can't go and play all of them 500 times imo.
3- How many tiers? You can merge easy and normal, use hard, then 2 or 3 for insane and that's it. Yet you will end up needing lots of maps even if the cycle is short (you should never get easy insanes for pros where both player can easily FC).

Remember users should not be able to pick maps, they should be random. You will play a random map according to your skill level (which will be similar to your rival's one) and that's it. If you can pick maps then you will get stupid cases (like mine) where I can get a safe win by picking Mad Machine (most players can't play this, even many pros fail at it), then lose on the second map and just play the tie breaker. This should no be able to happen.

And then what Hikaros said. Having a small pool means drilling the map pool and then playing ladder. A big pool is just better overall, since even if you may by chance end up playing your favorite map, this won't happen that often. Problem is people won't have all maps, ever.

Some interesting discussion going on here. Great to see this back and forth about this discussion of the ELO system.

I have been pondering it a little, and I think the core idea can remain the same. The discussion has shifted to how the competitive play will be performed. I have been thinking that it would not be a very taxing calculation to let the random map picker try to see what maps both players have no playcounts on, with a small chance that it will pick a map both players have at least had 1 playcount on previously (With even more bias against maps where one player has played it many times over another player)

With this method, you can ensure either:

a) Both players have never played on the map before, and therefore need to play it completely blind.
b) Both players are comfortable enough with as closely matched as possible experience in terms of the map play.

So if the map picker decides to pick the random unplayed maps, it will again be choosing from the "map tier" appropriate for both players, as discussed earlier.
If the map picker decides to pick a map both players have, then it will come down to maps that both players have similar plays on: So if Player A had 50 plays on one map, and Player B had 60 plays on that same map, it will probably be picked at some point. If Player A had 700 plays on a map and Player B only had 3 plays, it will probably not be picked for the sake of fairness.

Under most cases, we would hope that there are plenty of maps (Which there should be, at least 1000 in each map tier should be possible) for the random map picker to make careful selections about. I understand some players will never play maps, but have them in their lists and have seen others play them. But I think actually playing the map is a bit of a different experience than just watching someone. Sure, you'll have analyzed some parts of the map, but you still have to use your skill to perform the execution.

Hoping this is a fair compromise to leveling the playing field when going against other players.

I have not much to say about the ELO ranking itself (in terms of exploitation), but I will say that players that attempt to cheat the system usually won't get carried very far without meeting someone else. Even if there are low amounts of players in the queue, it is likely that you will come across strangers. Enough that you will be forced to lose ELO you have gained. I understand some people have that kind of weird persistence to exploit ELO, but it's almost not worth the work needed to do it. Besides, does anyone really want to be known as having a high rank by being carried?

Nah, people can play offline, use multis, etc. Map should always be random and that's it. Luck factor will always be there yet if you play lots of matches it will end up balanced.

ELO can be exploited but who cares, you won't make it far, and banning players who exploit this (all you need is to save logs of all matches) is quite easy.

Ah you're right. Totally forgot about offline / beatmap sharing possibilities. Fair enough.

Not only that, you can get tons of fake plays on a certain beatmap you don't want to play. The more possible exploits you avoid the better, best solution I can think of is just randoming the map both players are gonna play, if any of them gets lucky then ok he will win a map, not the whole match, and even if he wins the match just by pure luck, he will eventually lose cause he's gonna play against better players etc.

There are also other factors to take in cosideration lol even if the player knows a song well there are always random misses, random fps drop, internet failure, etc , etc. So either way it should always be fair, the one with higher skill will win most of the time.

The general idea sounds pretty cool but there are just loads of complications and a system like this can never be truly fair in a game where song selection is key, unlike LoL where it's strategic team selection and reaction to unknown possible events. Like predicting what a player will do against you in lane, where as in osu! the map never changes.

BUT REGARDLESS. The idea still sounds cool lol.

Of course it won't be as good as on other games but it's still quite fun since even while your play won't interfere with your rival's it's still a real-time competition where you have to get a better score than the other guy on the very same play.

Some thoughts:
-Map acception. Both players have rights to decline a randomly chosen map once without any penalty in case one doesn't like or can't play it. Decline second time to dodge queue and lose slightly less ELO than if it would be a regular loss (voting process can be hidden so a player won't keep a decline vote and wait till his opponent press DECLINE).

-Show map play count of both players while map selection so a player can decline if it something like 0 pc to 300. Preferably to show ranked plays as well if possible. ex:
Player A ------------- Map-------------------Player B
Map pc: 5------------The Big Black------------Map pc: 1900
Ranked pc: 0------------------------------------Ranked pc: 2
ACCEPT / DECLINE
Maybe add more information here like current ELO, winrate %, ranked accuracy and such. People love stuff like this.

-Mode queues. Pick any mode combination and match a player with the same combination. HR, FL, DT, HD, HR+HD, DT+HD, EZ+DT etc. In case of DT match making will pick maps from slightly lower tiers, vise versa for HT. Also it would be more skill relevant and fun than no-mod. Imagine HD+FL random map queue or EZ+HD. But it will requires separate rating system for each mode combination I suppose (more scoreboards - more fun!).

-Option to choose a stronger opponent. Something like a checkbox (Queue me with a stronger opponent/higher map tier). It will partly exclude ELO farming and let people like cookiezi gain their true ELO faster in less matches.

-Limit amount of matches with the same player (ex. 2 in a row, 1 hour break) to prevent win trading.

-Drain ELO because of inactivity to prevent "Sitting on Rank".

Also changing map pool every month/week sounds good.

It's not like the system won't work, it will. Every issue or abuse can be thought out and fixed. Problem is that it will take A LOOOOOOOOT of work (from the DEVs in the first place) and like already said it won't be anything but just for fun because of the Osu! MP specialty. Worth the effort?
I totally support the idea though.

Being able to decline 1 map could work.

Play count is irrelevant and should not be shown. It's misguiding data. Showing info such as ELO and win rate of a player is ok.

Mods should be ignored by now and maybe added later. HD and FL should not really be used at all, DT and HR should be applied to normal maps. Insane DTs would be top tier, [Hard] DTs could be on a lower tier if they are that doable, etc.

No. You just click a button and get matched, say everyone checks this option, who's gonna play? Everyone will be looking for someone above them. Even when this won't ever happen, it would be stupid to have such an option. You will always get matched with people who's on your same level, same level = similar ELO, you will face stronger opponents and weaker ones all the time. If you apply all the tiers/leagues stuff I mentioned on my previous posts, you'll see this option is "already included".

Not really necessary, you won't make it far by win trading and if you do so it's gonna be quite obvious. Plus you would need a lot of luck to achieve such a thing. When looking for a match you should be queued for some time (10s or smth) and then get randomly matched with someone (so you won't just get free wins by clicking "PLAY" at the same time).

Yes, losing ELO if you stop playing is good.

Map pool stuff still somehow needs to be discussed.

I LIKE IT

i support this.

I am sure there are a lot of tricky complications and valid concerns (ffa elo?, maps..) but I too would like a more accurate system which aims to predict who is most likely to get the highest score in a multiplayer game.

gogo

This is not really a way to go, i honestly do not see a problem with the current system for multiplayer, if the person is not good it shows and vise versa. what you are implying is that you think their needs to be a competitive aspect of multiplayer not tied to the grind of pp. while i think that is ok their should be a better way, plus i feel like this would divide multiplayer. I do not know this just screams cancer to me.

I tend to call performance points effort points because it literally is just effort to me. On days I feel like playing some pp I replay some maps 50 times till I luck a good score or annoy myself to death. IMO a elo system is a more "stable" measure of skill. pp strongly rewards peaks while elo rewards consistency. I think elo would be a great addition to the game.

I dont see it dividing multiplayer as the more reasonable approaches of elo matching capsules the elo system far away from multiplayer. I see it as a 3rd way to play and enjoy osu! feeling grindy ? go play solo. wanna chat and play ? go play multiplayer. wanna have a challenging match ? go play elo. Everybody wins. ppl who dont like the competitive aspect can just avoid it without missing out anything.

For me the biggest pro for elo would be the ease of use to find a player matching your power level and not the prestige of having a high elo.