The initial topic can be found here:
viewtopic.php?f=83&t=30971
To sum up my thoughts:
- ELO fluctuates a lot in LIHL due to the nature of this game (luck, rng etc), so also older players will sometimes be 100 ELO above their "real" ELO and sometimes 100 below, or even more. That's not much different than the starting ELO of new players being sometimes off.
- The balance isn't heavily disturbed. If a new player has 1000 ELO but should have 800 for example, the ELO balance will just slightly be off, like 15/15 instead of 17/13 or maybe 18/12, no big deal imo.
- Even if the ELO for new players is too high it will only be so for a few games and probably balances out in the long term (ie, every player will have new guys on their team as often as on the enemy team, in the long run).
- Who says that all new players are at the skill level of 800 ELO? New players will regularly play better than 800 ELO, thus making it imbalanced aswell (actually only a few new players drop to 800 ELO).
- We will most likely not have an automatic system for this and most likely not even us LIHL Moderators will be able to set the initial ELO to 800 and to increase their ELO after a certain amount of game. Instead this will probably be handled by Forum Moderators or ENT Admins which might delay this whole process quite some (LIHL Mod needs to check when a player reaches X games, PMs another Mod/Admin who then adjusts the ELO).
- This delay will also result in weird situations, like a player should receive 200 ELO but plays 5 more games until his ELO is being increased which then again leads to more imbalances.
- Last but not least new seasons (everyone starting with 1000 ELO) have a 10 times bigger impact on imbalances than the few new players who might or might not be worse than their starting ELO.
TL;DR: I vote for no because the imbalances created by new vouches are almost meaningless and this system can't guarantee any improvement and just results in more work and new problems.
