IDK if it's just me, but it seems that stats and ratios are almost meaningless. Almost every teammate I've had played very well, provided they've played 150 games or more. Win/loss ratios almost never seem to matter - only the total games played. That being said, I try to make sure that the experienced players are evenly distributed between the teams... just in case.

I enjoy fighting premades

At least then you didnt win because they couldnt work together

The secret is to play as UB.

I joined a game last night with the title <55% wins. Got in the game and the guy hosting had 55% wins. So basically, the guy only wanted to play against people worse than him. Me and some other guy, who was a total dink btw (if you're reading this) stomped him, even though my win % is in the 40s. That's what happens when you only play people "worse" than you. Sometimes people like me, with low win % because I'll play against anyone, will join and kick your arse.

Similar thing happened a week or so ago. Joined a bunch of premades with 700+ wins and 70% wins. We were a bunch of randoms, my teammates with comparable games but 50% wins and me with 150 games and 45% wins. We smoked them. They were awful. Noob/ pug stomping makes you a weaker player.

Here is my stance

-- random decent pugs can coordinate fairly well to beat pre-mades, so pre-mades are totally fine.  I welcome the challenge.

-- stats are not indicative of anything since not everyone is playing on the same field

That said, all players being equally skilled and all things being equal, when they play against each other, their win % will converge to.... 50%.  LeBron James vs LeBron James in a 1v1.  Odds of Lebron #1 winning?  50%.  Odds of Lebon #2 winning?  50%.  Sorry guys.  If the 70-80% players kept playing each other, one group will either STAY at 80%, or they BOTH converge to 50%  No lies here guys.  But that is top tier playing against ONLY top tier.  Play them against the rest of the world equally and you get the equal distribution.

Now, if you play an equal distribution of the Demigod world, then the % is indicative of what 'tier' level player you are.  The problem is, it is near impossible to play an equal distribution.  Good players might show up at different times, there are disconnects, player teams don't mix well, you dont' play enough games for a good sampling, or you play too many of one type of game for an incorrect sampling.

Because of this, stats sadly don't mean much.  I've seen 70-80% players who were some of the worst... absolute worst teammates.  They would give up half-way, I would insist not to give up, and we would nearly win due to better TEAMWORK (gosh, imagine that).  Boss you in the incorrect way because they don't have a wide understanding of game dynamics.  Those guys are prima donnas who are trying to jack up their win rates and aren't terribly good.  They constantly try to stack the teams in their favor to maintain their covetted "record".

It isn't a surprise as in this thread we already heard stories of "low win % players" beating out the "high % players".  Sometimes that cockiness backfires. 

On the other hand, I've seen some godly godly 70-80% players too.  Playing with them or against them is like a whole new world.  They coordinate well.  They command well.  They understand your character development (shocker, some characters are late game bloomers, stop asking them to run up front).  They simply combo well using good "gaming" sense.

When I was playing with them, we would just combo well.  There wasn't always communication needed for it.  We didn't plan for it.  We just did what made sense and came to the same conclusion.  That's why I think GOOD random PUGs can beat pre-mades. 

It is when egos get in the way and good players can cramp each other's style because they dont' necessarily know how well they mix.

Play more.  If you keep playing people of the same skill level as you, you should converge to 50%.  The win stats mean nothing unless it is in an enclosed, fixed, controlled environment (everyone plays the same people and the same number of games.  Think, any major league seasons/series).

lol your right, but wrong.  Yes, if LeBron James played himself in a 1v1, theoretically a 50 / 50 chance.  However, until we start cloning humans... that's never going to happen.  Nobody is exactly the same skill level as the next guy.. and the more people you add, the less fixed, controlled, and enclosed the environment is.  It is entirely impossible to have completely even teams.

Your last paragraph doesn't make much sense either.  Major league seasons DONT converge to 50% yet you used it as an example... how can teams go 12-0 in a season?  Because they're superior that year.  Someone has to be the world record holder... there aren't 2 people that tie on everything just so you can have a perfect 50% win ratio against a literally equally skilled opponent.

The demigod ranking system sucks.. but not because it doesn't mimic ideal conditions.  No game or sport does.  

Of course no one is precisely the same.  Of course it is impossible to have completely even teams.  I am saying, you can't claim the 80% "pro" player always plays other 80% "pro" players.  If they always played each other, they would drop to ~50% or you would clearly find out who was the better player as the win ratios would converge to say 60% for player 1 and 40% for player 2.  So player 1 was the "better" player in that case.

Re-read the final paragraph again. 

Keyword, UNLESS.  Stats matter to a point IF you have an ENCLOSED system.  They do not matter if you do not.

In an open system (such as demigod's current system), the stats are meaningless without a fixed control.

Since there are no dedicated 'good player' servers, the good players are inevitably forced to play semi-stacked games (e.g. hence, fulfilling a partial distribution of game play), thus they have better "demigod" stats.  Some do it intentionally, some do not.  But this is the correct value if they are playing an equal distribution of players.  However, not all players choose the same distribution of players to play against.    Again, intentionally or unintentionally.

Sure, no "ranking" system is perfect.  I was not proposing that at all.  What I am proposing is that in demigod, not all 80% players are the same since they probably didn't play the same number of games and they played against different opponents.  I also threw in the somewhat SCARY fact that, if the 80% players fought against each other, shocker, they would not all be 80% players anymore.  If they ended up being ~50% against each other, they are similar (not identical) in skill.  If some ended up on the bottom, they were clearly "posers".

true.  I just wondered why you said major league teams were an example of an enclosed, fixed, controlled environment that resulted in ~50% wins for all teams when in fact, some team usually tends to come out with 90-100% wins depending on the sport.

I do wish we had a better ranking method..

Apologies for the confusion.  Oh, absolutely.  In an enclosed environment, stats are extremely meaningful.  Hard to make a claim of being the best in a NBA league when you are 0-15.    But, that doesn't mean some team off the street can beat an NBA basketball team just because they were 0-15 against other pros.  On the other hand, if the random team off the street could, oh boy, maybe that team shouldn't be in that league to begin with. 

Two ideas here: Tournaments and More Detailed Individual Stats.

[TOURNAMENTS]

Well, the easiest way is to simply have a tournament.  Ironically the problem with that is to do that, defeats the biggests advantage of online gaming:  convenience.

Right now, anyone can just go "ho hum, let's go play" at any time of the day, find some games, and voila.  No commitments.  No schedules.  No hard funky rules.  No need to wait for your friends to wake up.  It is excellent, but, for competitive players this does not give them a good metric.

As a compromise, they can do a quick "filtering" sort of pre-tournament.  Teams register (all in game of course).  They play a fixed number of games against the same pool of competing teams.  It then ranks them out and plays them tournament style where the best teams play the worst ones in round 1, etc.

Warcraft 3 basically does this.  However, the drawback is people have to play at a certain time-frame.

We could do it "slower" in which the tournament does not have to be completed within a few hours and people can slowly play out the same pool of people perhaps through a span of a month.  Sort of like a mini-league.

But, the key is to register every team and they have to end up playing against the same pool of competing teams, the same number of times each.  

Our universe might be too small to make this happen, but this would clearly be a step in the right direction.  Plus this does not really help out random PUGGers like myself.

[INDIVIDUAL STATS]

They should add individual stats on the website.  I mean things like Average Favor Points per game.  Average kills, average deaths, average flag caps, creep kills, flag locks, gold spend on citadel upgrades, losses WITH one disconnecting teammate, wins WITH a disconnected teammate, etc.  The list is tremendous.

The way the game keeps score, you could be a godly player on a losing team, but end up getting out-classed in favor points by ONE death or ONE flag or 500 damage points, etc.

Someone with a "crappy" record could just be indifferent about playing against stacked teams, but if you see his kill/death ratio is great, he kills a lot, does not necessarily die a lot, captures a lot of flags.  Those stats matter quite a bit more than the binary "win or loss".

So type Premade in your gamename and you are set to go!

Its not freaking hard, and if you dont do it I take it you are just another asshole who wants to pwn Random noobs who never played with eachother. In that case you truly ARE the reason so few people play this game.

Yeah.  I've rarely been in a pre-made team before.  However when asked by a team of two to join them, we waited about 25 minutes to no avail.  We ended up splitting up.  I was really looking forward to face another pre-made team too.

Sadly, a lot of the solutions to the problems we are proposing require a LOT of avid players.  We are sort of in a chicken and the egg scenario here.

This is such a nifty game too!  I wonder if they do some sort of formal "re-release" to bring back some of the 20,000 or so players we used to have.  Of course, that is after they fix the other issues and such.

"

So type Premade in your gamename and you are set to go!

Its not freaking hard, and if you dont do it I take it you are just another asshole who wants to pwn Random noobs who never played with eachother. In that case you truly ARE the reason so few people play this game."

LOL Try doing this a few times, just for shits and giggles. You can keep your slots closed. I have waited /2 hours/. /2 hours/ for games with "Premade" or "Be Awesome" or "Premade Welcome" or "Premade Preferred" such-and-such in the title.

TWO HOURS

What comes in? A decent premade but with roughly 75 games. We still win. Or newbs who are sick and tired of getting kicked out of games for being a newb (oh yeah, also a reason so few people play this game). Or one of several puggers that you play over and over and over again until you want to stab your head off. Playing against the same people gets boring.

Also, don't look at my Epoch 3 stats and tell me I'm a horrible person:

1- I only just started playing with Nazerith, and we are pure-text, no VoiP (and he isn't even that awesome)?

2- stat reset makes balancing games extremely difficult because you can only seperate the pros and the newbs by how familiar their screen name is and there are PLENTY of smurfs out there.

The Overlay makes putting "premade" in the title extraneous. I don't care if you leave and join, doesn't bother me at all.

Yeah, sadly economically this is not feasible.  Doubly so since according to Frogboy their sales have increased or have been stable.  If people are buying the game for the single player element and saying f the multiplayer, there is no real incentive to push the multiplayer.

Although I bet they could tap a bigger market if they could regain that multiplayer community again.

It is funny because after the reset, I became an "accidental" smurfer.  With such new records, got into some stacked matches, ran into some bad luck, and the normal similar skilled players.  I was sporting a happy ~20% record for a while and no one wanted to play with me.  I kept a tiny list of the players who refused to play with me in my head.

The few that did decide to give me a whirl helped me upset a few "superior" players.  It was actually extremely fun.    I meant no malice or deceit about it though.  I tried to mention I am better than I seemed, but people seemed to think I didn't know what I was talking about, so I stopped bothering.

It some ways it is actually GOOD.  I'm able to play against these "80%/70%/60%" teams and they don't bat an eye since they are thinking they got an easy win.  Instead we usually end up with a great match which is all I was really looking for.    And we know some of those 80%/70%/60% players will never play against another "80%/70%/60%" player.  Heaven forbid they have almost a 50/50% chance of winning now. 

The irony is, I ended up playing against or with the same list of people who refused to play with me before.  Both beating the ones who insisted I was total garbage (I'm only partial garbage) and winning with those who didn't think I could beat a fly.  Certainly has made my past few games more enjoyable. 

[edit]

By the way. I don't think you are a horrible person.  Correct me if I am wrong, I would propose you are one of the top tier players in the Demigod community and would gladly enjoy a good match.  Not all "80%+" players are evil noob stomping stat whoring fiends.  But that's the problem with the system.  I shouldn't have to say "some 80% players are good" or rather, people shouldn't even really be using that as the metric at all.

http://forums.demigodthegame.com/371549   pres really aren't that hard to play against with some good PuG friends, just add them when u play with them and go beat some Pre ass .  They noob stomp all day, when they have a balanced game they usualy lose because they are used to getting 10 kills and will mess up because of that.

/agree

Just hosted a game with a 88% player.  No names, but we "love him"

It was my lowly 44%, a 48%, and an 18% vs his 88%, 54%, 48%. 

  "Let's go! GOGOGOGO"

We open it up to 4v4.  We get a 33% and he gets a 0%. 

  "NOOOOO!  We aren't stacked anymore!  This isn't fair!"

Nice enough guy, but get over it.

Game-spectro-meter:

|-------Noob-----======Normal======------Pro------|

You see, we want the needle to point in the MIDDLE of the meter.  Outside that range means you are: simply new, possibly just suck, or play way too many games.

I think I have a stereotype stuck in my head.  I once met a "uber pro" player from another game, in person.  He kept trying to tell me how great "2nd Life" is.

You can't look at it by win % though.  The number of aggregate games played is probably a more vital factor.  Fairly easy to guesstimate based on total favor points ever earned (you can look people's stats up on the website really fast).  Demigod being a team game, 3 good players and one bad one, will lose to 4 mediocre players with better teamwork. 

You're right.  More than once I've gotten a 0% guy on my team, whom turned out to be damn good, just on hiatus since the reset.

This is what I've learned about people who always whine about premades, they are nerdy dumbasses who need to grow a pair of nuts and just play.

You don't get better by playing crappy players and you definately don't learn anything by having them on your team. I find myself wanting to play more and more with players I'm familiar with and less with others simply because they play dumb. I find I am less frustrated with a loss when playing with friends, than with someone I don't know.

NECROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Lol. Just a random Necro, RAWRRR? Or did you resurrect this one for a reason?

I think he read wrastler's comment and felt a need to revive... people get bored  

I would be more concerend about players with 60-65% wins if I was making a beginner/mid game, these are the players that are good because they play other good players. (Their % score breaks down in reality as 50/50 win loss against other good players and 90%+ win against mid or lower players)

150+ games, 70%+ wins,  Chances are they are desychers / n00b stompers unless you recognize the name.