Matchmaking Ladder Incentives

Casuals aren't going to engage with "ladder protection" or care about 5 mm whr increments. This is the bulk of your audience and potential audience. What they will care about:
- being placed in matches faster than opening a lobby and waiting or joining the team MMO game.
- skins, new models, unlocks, etc ("content")
- not getting stomped in the first 5 minutes.

Currently MM has no guarantee that you'll be in a match in a reasonable timeframe (there's literally only ever 1 - 10 people in the queue), you get nothing out of it outside of MM rating (mattering only to a handful of rating snobs), and matches tend to be decided too quickly for the MMO team game playerbase.

You have to be asking yourself: what can I offer in MM that can't be obtained by piling into the large team game on start up? If anything, the old planet wars turn out shows us that having a metagame or some sense of progression attracts the casual audience -- enough to break up 1RC.

Some (relatively) low effort idea: Tie an achievement to MM -- say win 10 games in a day. Add a reward of say a gold dante skin, or gold commander skin. Have the UI reinforce this after every match. Show off the cool looking skin you can earn. Have a pool of these you can gain over time. Such goals need to seem obtainable by most players.

I dont realy need incentives, anonym matchmaking would be nice, but ... one look at the chat is enough to know whos in it (queue) 99% of the time.

An inactivity decay system would be nice (decay ladder rating, not elo rating) , other games have that, i saw some concerns about not having time to play enough, doesnt look like a big deal to me since elo matters for points gain and you will just get more rating if there is a gap between your ladder and elo rating.

I think the next thing to try is leagues. People have been asking for someone to fiddle with the way the "human-friendly" rating rubber bands around the WHR for ages, to no avail. I'm not convinced that increasing the minimum to 5 from 1 is going to have a greater impact on psychology than the hack would have on the coherence of the ladder. Things get stupid if the rating is able to decouple too far from WHR. The ladder protection thing sounds like more ways to make rating decouple from WHR.


We don't have the hype machinery to make MM-only skins worth much. If the general community doesn't know about them, then they won't join the MM for them. The top 10 will quickly collect all the skins, then be back to where we started. The kudos thing would also require art and site infra manpower, which we have approximately none of.

Make a league. Here is how it works. esainane has shown that ZK replays can be mass-parsed. His tool lags behind because he runs the replay, but a league would not need that. Just look at the outcomes of MM games within a certain date range, and assign points accordingly. So any web dev could permissionlessly set up a league, it wouldn't even be that hard because esainane already has an example for us.

How might a league work? Perhaps look at https://zero-k.info/Forum/Post/230973#230973 I'll even repost the more pertinent bits for you.

Structure

A league would last for 3 months. This means that all MM games within some pre-announced three month period count for the league.

• The league has a flux period for the first few weeks, after which point it records the highest rank you attained.
• Players in the league could receive a badge at the end that shows the highest rank they attained (after the flux period).

Score

Players receive points for each game they play, based on their rank when they play it. Here is an adjustment of what I wrote last time.

Rank	League Points
Top 1	150
Top 2	100
Top 3	70
Top 4	50
Top 5	40
Top 6	30
Top 7	25
Top 8	20
Top 9	15
Top 10	12
Dark Blue	10
Light Blue	8
Yellow	6
Orange	5
Sub-Orange	4
Red	3
Grey	2

Whoever has the most points at the end wins.

i like the idea of leagues but of course the cost of increasing forms of rank with leagues exists in the complexity for players..

not trying to say people cant handle an extra feauture.. but the other day i looked at a game with leagues, ladders, events and a few other things and my initial feeling was overwhelmed. im already noticing some players get to yellow rank and still dont know how to d-gun with dante.. O.o

a great thing about ZK is its very accesible to simple minds.. while also being deep and rich in content.
never-the-less there is a potential risk that each new thing you add to the inital greeting might turn away 1 new player that never gave it a chance and tried to learn it.

To add onto the split rank icons idea,

A potentially elegant solution would be to divide the colors in half on the icon, with the Left Side Color being MM, and the Right Side being their casual rating color.

So a Star Player Blue MM and Silver casual would have a STAR icon that is the color BLUE on the left side and Silver on the right side.


Just food for thought.



Personally I do think leagues are a good way to go with the highest rank you have received in the previous seasons being visible.


Adding Purple to top 5 in MM would also be better then just keeping it solely to top 1

quote: To add incentives for the team games perhaps the kudos gained in team games can be DOUBLED or TRIPLED if done in MM so players playing teams in MM can get skins faster then doing 1v1s if they feel more comfortable doing that.

Who cares about the commander skins though, especially enough to bother with 1v1 matchmaking, considering most don't look at their commander much beyond sometimes trying to not have it die alone in some random corner of a map.
In all honesty took me like, 300 hours to ever notice commander skins are a thing and immediately forgot about them because of someone saying they're "for winning tournaments" or whatever.