Florb is bad-- but triggers insight from Crab

[FlorbFnarb 537]

Insert Florb whining

 

 

I'm fucking tired of the first couple matches being almost guaranteed losses.  Last night, first two matches were losses.  Today, first FOUR matches were losses.  I randomly draw the weaker team four times in a row - first three were basically lost in the first sixty to ninety seconds, and only the fourth was even possible to win.

 

Every.

 

Fucking.

 

Night.

 

Edited May 13, 2016 by sr360

[Rexxie 10,779]

Do you platoon often? It's bullshit, but it's avoidable if you stack the odds in your favor.

[monjardin 1,014]

13 hours ago, Rexxie said:

Do you platoon often? It's bullshit, but it's avoidable if you stack the odds in your favor.

I've been playing really badly lately. @Cunicularius invited me to platoon with @Spartan96 the other day and we went 11 for 11. That's fun. 

Otherwise, you're venting about a sample size of 6. Maybe you'll win the first four next time?

Also, you've got a bit of a defeatist attitude. That doesn't help win games. I don't get mad at the matchmaker when I lose a match because I know that I could have done a dozen things better to help turn it around. 

[FlorbFnarb 537]

38 minutes ago, Rexxie said:

Do you platoon often? It's bullshit, but it's avoidable if you stack the odds in your favor.

 

Yeah, but usually I solo the first few matches.  Started the day 0 and 4, kept going and at one point was 1 and 7.  Currently 2 and 8 - 20%.  Peak WR for the day has been 2 and 7, or 22%.  When this happens I sometimes get ticked enough to just keep going to see how many times the game will put me with uncarryable teams.  So far only one of the losses was even kinda winnable.

But yeah, time to get in a platoon.

3 minutes ago, monjardin said:

I've been playing really badly lately. @Cunicularius invited me to platoon with @Inciatus the other day and we went 11 for 11. That's fun. 

Otherwise, you're venting about a sample size of 6. Maybe you'll win the first four next time?

Also, you've got a bit of a defeatist attitude. That doesn't help win games. I don't get mad at the matchmaker when I lose a match because I know that I could have done a dozen things better to help turn it around. 

Oh, I know the sample size is very low, and I know if I let it make me angry it makes things worse.  It's just hard to resist getting mad though, when i log on and the first three matches are effectively lost inside 60 seconds.

Anger leads to the dark side.

[SIRJ4MES 101]

 Guess u have some tilt battles.

I am not a good player. But your stats is quite bad.

 

[TohtoriP 82]

I played 78 games this sunday with the x5 event. I had been out in the sun enough so decided to stay indoors and crank some wot.

I knew it. Man I suck at this game.

Session WR 43,7%, WN8 2050

I must be farming damage so bad

Oh, session´s last game was in Shit-nu-Kai. Ace tanking, out-capping and in the end sole surviving a tier7 game. Like what do you really have to do to get a win around here....

[BlackAdder 1,390]

Solo 60%/2,1K WN8.

Mostly FCM games, but still. I had many excellent games and many super bad games. WN8 sucked, but WR is good  

[Archaic_One 1,853]

Statistically last night was one of the best nights ive ever had, running purple all night, getting great damage, just wrecking shit.  Sadly, only 3 wins in 14 games.  I was top damage in my Tiger II in a tier 10 game at one point.  Another Tiger II game, tier 9 game - 6 team mates do zero damage and 11 did under 400.  

I've also had runs where I played awful, could not hit a barn from the inside and won 8 in a row.  This game . . . 

[Cunicularius 4,543]

If you're not prepared to experience unlikely, inconvenient things, you shouldn't play this game. +/-25%rng, +/-2 mm, arty, and you're going to let this game get to you as if it's your fault? Sure, you could pour inordinate amounts of time into it, approaching the limits of your ability... but is it really worth it? Not to me it isn't, I've thrown enough time at this game, I don't need to be top 25, top 50, whatever. Maybe the rung is lower for you but the same ideas still apply.

[FlorbFnarb 537]

3 hours ago, Cunicularius said:

If you're not prepared to experience unlikely, inconvenient things, you shouldn't play this game. +/-25%rng, +/-2 mm, arty, and you're going to let this game get to you as if it's your fault? Sure, you could pour inordinate amounts of time into it, approaching the limits of your ability... but is it really worth it? Not to me it isn't, I've thrown enough time at this game, I don't need to be top 25, top 50, whatever. Maybe the rung is lower for you but the same ideas still apply.

You're correct.  I expect the law of averages to kick in far too quickly - far more quickly than it really does.  Something happens and I do some rough math and figure that there's a 1 in 200 chance of it happening, and the fact that I should expect such a chance to happen a lot over 18,000 matches...doesn't console me in the heat of the moment.

Part of it is just this gut feeling that the game happens much faster than it did maybe two years ago, but I have no way of proving that.  The rest is just impatience.  I'm working to achieve an elusive, rather slippery mental state: working harder to win more, while simultaneously caring less about losses, and moving on to the next match.

[KruggWulf 552]

When having a bad time, play some stupid shit like the 183 and not give a fuck and laugh as hard as you fucking can when you ruin someone's day. I'm doing it often for the 183 xp on track missions 

 

Just remember to type in chat "JOOOOOOHN CEEEEENNAAAA" or "RKO OUT OF NOWHERE" when you 1 shot someone

 

[woe2you 367]

53 minutes ago, KruggWoofyWolf said:

When having a bad time, play some stupid shit like the 183 and not give a fuck and laugh as hard as you fucking can when you ruin someone's day. I'm doing it often for the 183 xp on track missions 

 

Just remember to type in chat "JOOOOOOHN CEEEEENNAAAA" or "RKO OUT OF NOWHERE" when you 1 shot someone

 

T49 works great too. You get to scurry away sniggering, which the 183 isn't so hot at.

[KruggWulf 552]

True, but the 183 isn't going to constantly roll 300 and on rare occasion get a 900 pen

 

[Bavor 266]

On 5/8/2016 at 5:55 PM, FlorbFnarb said:

I'm fucking tired of the first couple matches being almost guaranteed losses.  Last night, first two matches were losses.  Today, first FOUR matches were losses.  I randomly draw the weaker team four times in a row - first three were basically lost in the first sixty to ninety seconds, and only the fourth was even possible to win.

One of my few complaints with matchmaker is that it allows for 30% of your battle to be guaranteed wins and losses.  Basically, in 30% of battles, the skill difference between the two teams is so large that the lower skilled team will lose 90-95% of the time.  So, 15% of the time most players will win no matter what they do and 15% of the time most players will lose no matter how hard they carry.  That's based on tracking stats of teams for several thousand battles.  It seems to correlate well with real world experiences. The highest sustained win rate I've seen from dark purple players when platooned is 80-85%.

I'm not saying we need skill based matchmaking where every battle is an equal chance of a win, but when you eliminate those battles where the skill difference is huge, that means you can win any battle.  

However there are also many other things Wargaming could fix about this game first.

[FlorbFnarb 537]

The only thing I'd wanf to maybe see are somewhat larger teams to statistically smooth out the variation in team skill naturally, along with larger maps to slow matches down a bit.

[3lite5niper 28]

I'm no statistician but I'm rather sure that the number of players per team, per game has to be really large if you want to reduce the variance in player skill to a much lower level. Maybe more often than not you still get x-1 number of reds and oranges. That will mess up the meta and gameplay, if it fixes the skill difference. Btw some games are really nigh unwinnable because of team composition and like 3 unicum plats or something like that. But for the most part, alot of games are there for the taking, won't be an absolute steamroll, and its you or your team playing well enough to win the game.  A string of 3-15 losses may be truly bad RNG on your part, but perhaps if you get that everyday, you should improve on your own level of play as well.

[Archaic_One 1,853]

Skill base MM would crater pretty hard and would be the straw that breaks the back of NA.  On the other hand, the MM composition fails probably could be sorted pretty easily -  9 vs 2 heavy armor mismatches should probably not really ever happen.  Maybe I'm missing something though, I mostly just push the battle button and shit all over myself.

[RichardNixon 835]

3 hours ago, 3lite5niper said:

I'm no statistician but I'm rather sure that the number of players per team, per game has to be really large if you want to reduce the variance in player skill to a much lower level.

Well, you'd need to quadruple the player count to halve the relative skill/tank variance, and personal influence falls because the absolute skill/tank variance increases. An easier option would be to reduce the impact of platoon padding, but I'm not sure how popular that would be.

Steamrolls are strongly map-dependent, but it's the campy maps that give the closest results.

[FlorbFnarb 537]

8 hours ago, RichardNixon said:

Well, you'd need to quadruple the player count to halve the relative skill/tank variance, and personal influence falls because the absolute skill/tank variance increases. An easier option would be to reduce the impact of platoon padding, but I'm not sure how popular that would be.

Steamrolls are strongly map-dependent, but it's the campy maps that give the closest results.

That actually reminds me: lately I've been thinking again about the pace of the game.  It seems like the game is much faster than it was like two years ago; I remember feeling like sometimes a game would settle into a slower struggle, and I could work the situation, with enough time to flex in most heavies, whereas nowadays it seems like it's extremely common for one team to be down two or three tanks within the first sixty seconds.

I have no idea what could have caused such a change of pace, however.

[RichardNixon 835]

20 minutes ago, FlorbFnarb said:

I have no idea what could have caused such a change of pace, however.

Well, all the newer maps are in the bottom half on game duration: Kharkov, the current Sacred Valley, Pilsen, Stalingrad, Windstorm. Not necessarily small maps, but short on defensive advantage. Some older maps were also sped up, with El Halluf, Redshire and Swamp springing to mind. It's probably intentional.

On balance of anecdotes, NA also became more yolo than EU. Back when I was watching WoT regularly, NA was slightly campier if anything.

[CraBeatOff 5,741]

2 hours ago, FlorbFnarb said:

That actually reminds me: lately I've been thinking again about the pace of the game.  It seems like the game is much faster than it was like two years ago; I remember feeling like sometimes a game would settle into a slower struggle, and I could work the situation, with enough time to flex in most heavies, whereas nowadays it seems like it's extremely common for one team to be down two or three tanks within the first sixty seconds.

I have no idea what could have caused such a change of pace, however.

I can. They chopped up all the maps into separate areas which cannot easily be supported by the other areas. Before on Redshire you had 1 fight where anyone in the 700m draw box could fire and it was a slow spotfest to see who could break the camp. Same with swamp and pretty much every other non city map.

Now we have mutually exclusive lanes. MM picks some tanks, those tanks distribute and the fights play out on a smaller more intense scale. Lanchester's Laws come into play very quickly and very soon any mismatched flank has fallen and is moving to crush a stagnated flank or else chasing the blob on the other side which also rolled hard. 

In the old days, a good player who knew all the firing lanes could influence both those flanks. Or quickly move to shore up the weak one. But not anymore. Those lanes are mostly gone and generally only useful after a smaller engagement has been won. You can get "exit damage" but nothing that really helps during the fight.

Of course arty can still shoot everywhere and create immediate influence, but that's generally a random element or targeted directly at the good players and so not helpful at all at controlling game flow.

[Deusmortis 4,618]

Huh.  Guess that explains why I've gotten the most enjoyment out of heavies and armored TDs since my return.

[CraBeatOff 5,741]

2 hours ago, Deusmortis said:

Huh.  Guess that explains why I've gotten the most enjoyment out of heavies and armored TDs since my return.

They're the best for going some place and winning the fight. Now, take it to the next level, with these crabby tips:

Are there less than 6 tanks total going to your flank? If not consider other deployment options. 

Do you expect more ( either in quantity, or tier/armor/firepower quality ) of their tanks in your flank? If so consider other deployment options.

If you still think you need to deploy to a given area (and you might actually be correct) then consider that most brawl zones now have 2 or 3 rows of potential engagement points. If your team is strong, then engage forward. If they're weak, then engage in one of the safer rows. If you're not sure of the enemy tank count (and most times you won't be because 400m lanes of fire and thus vision are now almost all gone) THEN FOR GOD'S SAKE STAY SAFE, BACK, AND UNCOMMITTED until you've got a count.

With every map chopped up this is the single most frequent error I see among my platoon mates and assorted top tier tanks. They fail to count or wait to count. They push to the most aggressive position, they play well, but ultimately no one is better than the numbers. NA pubbies can be stupid, but they also know how to win a 4v1. 

I see this especially among returning players. It used to be that good play meant you don't your tank to an aggressive forward position, protected by covering fire from your TDs and pubbies who were less skilled at driving to stay alive. You'd light, poke, assist and win your lane by forcing your enemy into either withering cover fire, or by stalling that lane then driving to a new one and crushing it instead. But this hardly works anymore, in only a handful of positions. The guys behind you aren't 400m away, protected by bushes and hard cover. They are 20-50 back and exposed to the same risk you are, and they're worse at managing it. If you stall, it simply means you're losing the other flank or the guys behind you are feeding their HP faster than you can return fire.

Playing aggressive has changed. The game is slower to play out, except that once it has its generally a furious brawl and from there plays out rapidly. Being aggressive doesn't mean taking the forward most position ASAP, it means counting the tanks and then (if you deployed right) winning as fast as possible. It's a lot easier to win if you push those last 20-50m with a known count.

TL:DR don't go to the most forward row in the brawl until you've got accurate Intel

[PityFool 7,737]

Forum?

[FlorbFnarb 537]

6 hours ago, CraBeatOff said:

They're the best for going some place and winning the fight. Now, take it to the next level, with these crabby tips:

Are there less than 6 tanks total going to your flank? If not consider other deployment options. 

Do you expect more ( either in quantity, or tier/armor/firepower quality ) of their tanks in your flank? If so consider other deployment options.

If you still think you need to deploy to a given area (and you might actually be correct) then consider that most brawl zones now have 2 or 3 rows of potential engagement points. If your team is strong, then engage forward. If they're weak, then engage in one of the safer rows. If you're not sure of the enemy tank count (and most times you won't be because 400m lanes of fire and thus vision are now almost all gone) THEN FOR GOD'S SAKE STAY SAFE, BACK, AND UNCOMMITTED until you've got a count.

With every map chopped up this is the single most frequent error I see among my platoon mates and assorted top tier tanks. They fail to count or wait to count. They push to the most aggressive position, they play well, but ultimately no one is better than the numbers. NA pubbies can be stupid, but they also know how to win a 4v1. 

I see this especially among returning players. It used to be that good play meant you don't your tank to an aggressive forward position, protected by covering fire from your TDs and pubbies who were less skilled at driving to stay alive. You'd light, poke, assist and win your lane by forcing your enemy into either withering cover fire, or by stalling that lane then driving to a new one and crushing it instead. But this hardly works anymore, in only a handful of positions. The guys behind you aren't 400m away, protected by bushes and hard cover. They are 20-50 back and exposed to the same risk you are, and they're worse at managing it. If you stall, it simply means you're losing the other flank or the guys behind you are feeding their HP faster than you can return fire.

Playing aggressive has changed. The game is slower to play out, except that once it has its generally a furious brawl and from there plays out rapidly. Being aggressive doesn't mean taking the forward most position ASAP, it means counting the tanks and then (if you deployed right) winning as fast as possible. It's a lot easier to win if you push those last 20-50m with a known count.

TL:DR don't go to the most forward row in the brawl until you've got accurate Intel

Okay, this might be my problem then.  I religiously push as quickly as possible to whatever I believe the key terrain is.  I don't get over-aggressive in that fight, and try to conserve my HP, but I always figured my presence there would force the enemy to move more cautiously and therefore move into position more slowly, giving my team an advantage at getting into position a little more quickly than the enemy.

But you say that it's now better to wait and see how the teams position themselves before committing?

Sounds logical, but at the same time - you say the game plays out more slowly than it used to, and my gut is telling me the opposite - that games are very often decided inside 90 seconds now.

4 hours ago, PityFool said:

Forum?

Glad to know it wasn't just me...