Yesterday I wrote a thread where I condensed a lot of information from the patent of Trust Factor.
Useful conversations about Trust Factor in the community keep getting shut down by the subset of people that think that, somehow, Valve has managed to build the worst system imaginable, where anyone can completely fuck up the gaming experience of anyone else just by falsely reporting them.
That would be such a monumentally stupid and self-defeating system, I wouldn't blame Valve for feeling a little bit insulted at that insinuation of incompetence (I don't worry though, they're not new to the game). But the intention (usually) isn't (entirely) to insult. A lot of people just genuinely don't have a clue about machine learning and how this kind of abuse would be the first thing that a deep learning system would be trained to prevent.
Usually misconceptions die out but this one is growing and it's why I'm bothering with this post. Conversations are getting increasingly stifled and pushed off-track since people are shoving that myth into every conversation they see, or upvoting their fellow believers and downvoting the few people that bother to correct it anymore. And it's always the same thing. Every time they lose a game it's because (A) they're playing against cheaters, because (B) they have low trust factor, because (C) they "get reported a lot" (whilst somehow still always losing badly), which (D) lowers their trust factor.
(A) They aren't losing as much as they think.
(B) They are barely getting reported at all (compared to actual cheaters), and one of the first thing a deep learning system will learn is to identify unreliable reports (see (D)).
(C) A lot of them don't actually have a low Trust Factor, they just want to whine.
(D) Trust Factor considers how many times people have been acquitted in Overwatch. People who are falsely reported often have a higher trust score. Not lower.
They often tend to have two funnily conflicting beliefs: They are a superstar player who wrecks their opponents so hard and hard-carries their team, that they constantly get reported. Also, they play against cheaters in 80% of their matches and are constantly losing.
There is usually absolutely no way to talk to these people, they don't respond to any actual answers, or at best "prove" their point with an anecdote about their uncle's roommate who saw a red trust factor warning 2 months ago on his friend right after a game where he 30-bombed and someone said "reported".
But they keep on upvoting each other, further fueling this myth. A lot of people buy into it, and it's making them feel miserable for no reason, since they can't figure out any other reasons for why they're losing their games. I mean, they do have a point: every time they are a part of a team, that team somehow always loses. Weird, isn't it? Must be Trust factor...
