[New] HLStats point drop-off for dying to new players seems a bit excessive

[evilliar]

The HLStats points penalty for dying to a new player is -25 points. Personally I see it as a bit of an overkill. On a bad day it doesn't take much to suddenly drop hundreds of points in the ranking.

Working your way back up requires a lot of effort, especially when playing against said new players. For every death to a new player that nets -25 points you need to kill that player 5 more times to get even. This means a requirement of kill ratio that is at least 4:1 (if we factor in stuff like dominations, points for multiple kills in one row etc.) So in order to mitigate these losses you have to be at the top of your game, at all times and that's just to keep your rank.

TF2 has been around for 18 years now. People now generally know how to play the game and the likelihood of someone completely new to TF2 trying out TF2c is extremely low in my opinion. This means that a "new" player is usually not really all that new, yet their participation can severely affect the amount of points other players have.

I know that there's an easy fix to all of this and it's simply ignoring these points. After all, these points do not affect gameplay whatsoever and aren't required for anything. This approach to the matter however raises the question of what is the actual point of this system and what it is intended to track. It obviously works in some capacity as the people in top ranks are very good at the game, but at the same time maybe it could be tuned better?

 

[Shens]

HLStats is a very inconsistent system when it comes to skill tracking, unfortunately. It was originally developed for Counter-Strike and HL2 Deathmatch, and then just hammered into other games like TF2. Point gain itself is very inconsistent across modes too, because for example capturing a point on a map like cp_mountainlab is a very good goal but on dom_railway the points exchange constantly, yet give the same +5 everywhere. Leading to some maps naturally inflating point scores.
Truth be told, you also get a lot of points for side events. For example and airshot headshot kill would be +8 minimum (2-25 for kill, 2 for headshot kill, 4 for airshot headshot) compared to the default +2 minimum. Then there's round awards such as MVP #1-3 and general team win awards. Around rank 80, I have to usually sustain at least 2.5kdr (3 for good measure) to gain points, given I get +2 for most kills by default.

I too wish it was more balanced around actual skill, but it would require more resources and research to properly tweak than what we have. That said, tweaks are being made where possible for absurd point gain abuse, and deaths to "new" but experienced players are just how MMR redistribution always works in games until people are more-or-less where they belong given time.

Also, you only start losing 25 points after that "new" player gets 50 kills, otherwise it's capped at -2 prior to tthat.

 

[VintagePC]

I think Shens covered most of the why-it-is-the-way-it-is and while we do make small adjustments from time to time, the current defaults also fit with the "classic tf2" intent of tf2c as a piece of nostalgic late 2000s/early 2010s era gaming when many tf2 servers were configured similarly.