Let me say that HoN is a team game. You will never see one character go up against five characters and win (excluding some lame 1337 pro vs extreme nubs). That being said, ranking a user's PSR based on the amount of games they have won or lost is, I think, rather absurd. For pub games, you may join a team with people who have won many games, but yet completely suck just because they happened to have joined a lot of games with pro players on their team, and the same goes the other way. The pro may then lose the game, dropping his PSR by a lot, although in the game he got like 20 kills and only died once.
For this reason I think the PSR is pointless in it's current state. Instead, why not base it off a few factors that would actually meaningfully judge how good a player is
A) Kill/Death/Assists - some sort of meaningful calculation like kills would give you 1 point, assists give you .5 points and deaths give you -1 points. This might be better off if it was some type of calculation against of percentage of K/D/A
B) Total Time played - obviously if you have played the game like 50 hours you would expect this player to be better than someone who has played only one hour. This would be a multiplier on the values above
There could be some more logic added to this algorithm, but I think a PSR based off of wins/losses just doesn't accurately depict a players true abilities.
Also incorporate the leaver percentage while you're at it I guess. 1 leave = -5 points or something. Of course, you might need to fix the problems with the leaving system before you do that, but...
I agree that the PSR calculations need to be tweaked. Take assists into account, take personal stats into account per lost game, don't penalize me because I was stuck on a team with a nerdraging feeder. (True -- and probably common enough -- story: idiot feeds other team, then blames you for not 'backing him up' when they're all 3 levels higher than you.)
My KDR is still <1 because I AM a noob, and it's only slowly improving as I get better. Perhaps there could be some kind of time-based thing on stat calculations as well as overall, to be more forgiving of noob mistakes as we learn. I used to die a lot but not nearly so much now, but it'll be a long time before my KDR overcomes all those early deaths. And for god's sake factor in assists. I enjoy playing support heroes and I get way more assists than kills. Only counting kills also encourages kill-stealing -- you get the guy down to 10% then someone else runs in and steals the kill for both the gold AND the stats, while you just get a useless tick in the Assists column? Sucks.
I won't pretend to be a pro in any sense of the word, but I'm not an idiot either. I've been accused both of being a Bad, and of being a Pro slumming in noob games. Personally I think I'm a very average player. My PSR doesn't reflect this; it's hanging around the mid-1300s, mostly because of poor teamwork/picks/true noobs in blue tier games. Once there's an automated matching system in place (there will be, right?) this won't be as big an issue since you'd mostly be playing with people near your own PSR and so you'll have a chance to repair it, but right now it sucks getting kicked from game lobbies because my PSR (or KDR) is too low; then the only games I CAN join are noob stomps which hurt me even more.
Totally fine with matchmaking using K/D/A stats. However, if they do, the stat-farming games where people don't even hint at a push and simply hunt in a pack will increase. Games won/lost still needs to have the greatest weight. That said, it could be a sliding scale. Games won when you are playing with other people with great KDAs wouldn't boost you much, and games lost when playing with a whole team with .3/1 ratios wouldn't hurt you very much.
I wonder as well, if K/D/A stats need to be invisible...the stat farming games are ridiculous. (Kicking or switching good players to your team, pulling off a good gank but then not pushing a red tower with 5 heroes uncontested there.) I love a good fight in games, but it seems like many I've joined lately are either stat-farmers who then get banned but waste a bunch of my time in a game that's no fun or a team that concedes as soon as their KDR is in any jeopardy even though the outcome of the game is far from decided.
I thought about stat farming games screwing this up as well, but understand that someone who stat farms to get a higher PSR through raising their K/D/A ratio is only going to be doing that - raising their PSR. The only motivation you have for wasting your time to raise your PSR would be to look more pro just outside of the game (once inside the game I'm sure people could tell the difference). That being said, I'm thinking that the amount of people who want to waste their time with raising their PSR like this would be minimal, as it gives you no gain at all except for looking cool BEFORE a game starts.
Another thing I thought about last night, would be to have a CSR as well, whihc would be your clan ranking. This is a clan wide rating, and this number IS based on games won or lost - but only when the game is marked as being a CSR rated game (mostly, if not always clan vs clan matches). I'm not sure how you would limit setting a CSR rated game, simply because you wouldn't want some rogue clan member setting the game as a CSR, then taking the clan rating down just because he lost that game by himself. Perhaps the game automatically effect the CSR if all members on a side are from the same clan?
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