Ladder parking

Over a year ago, there was a period of time where highly ranked players would drop by for one game on the Matchmaking Ladder to re-cement their position display, without then going on to play more games. This behaviour led to a phenomenon where the most active players vying for advancement would fight amongst themselves indefinitely without the opportunity to climb, because they were merely passing rating back and forth despite any skill growth gained from the sessions.

At the time, I wanted to imagine a change that would solve this problem and incentize more activity. After much consideration, this is my suggestion:

Instead of gaining 1 month of visibility per game played: Winning a game nets the player 1 additional day of ladder visibility, and losing nets 2 additional days (a consolation boon). The period of visibility on the ladder is capped to 15 days banked. (Numbers provided are 'feel based' and could be changed to address arising concerns)

With this system, title holders are incentivized to risk their heavily banked rating on staying visible. The competing bracket then either gain a chance at those spoils or are advanced by default of inactivity on the ladder parking player's part.

As a natural side effect, the Matchmaking Ladder would have much greater temporal accuracy and provide a better read of who's active and up and coming.

Any thoughts or context I'm missing with this idea?

Maybe such a system would be beneficial also for the Casual Ladder, although probably the parameters could be different there.

The exact numbers could be tweaked but I definitely think you should need to remain active to remain on the ladder for an extended period; the only mechanism by which inactive players have been purged in the past year has pretty much just been XNTWSAD accidentally cooking the server every few weeks by uploading malformed mods (thanks for your service keeping the ladder fresh in that way!).

we could enable a scheduler for XNTWSAD to take action.

I think ladder parking is something that naturally happens due to busy life and other distractions but it's also a symptom other issues with the current system:

A- player's ladder position/achivement vanishes if they grind then stop playing for a month

B- (iirc, may be wrong) mm rating references shift over time, sometimes to lower values than the player had, so being very active fighting evenly skilled players will lower their rating over time, leading to avoidance (they only experience the drop IF they play)


to mitigate issue A, player's profile could show something about player's past achievements
- year, month and best rank color, top% the player achieved, ever
(reward intense participation at some point)

- year, month and best rank color, top% the player achieved and was able to consistently hold for 3 months, 6 months, a year?
(reward recurrence/consistency)


to mitigate issue B (if true), when ladder references shift at the end of each month or whatever, shift player's scores immediately, and/or do explicit MM rating rescalings or resets, that way people won't feel punished when they eventually get back to playing.

Apparently the graph shows current rating, not ladder rating. I think current rating can be rescaled and adjusted over time without playing, but the graph only shows points that coincide with days where they played at least one battle.

Maybe it should show vertical lines highlighting rescaling events and points with the corresponding adjustment.