Rewards for high ELO

Nobody will ever be locked out of content because of Elo rating.

Some purely-visual bonuses could be nice, although given that the biggest problem with the game right now is people who rage at and/or kick inexperienced players to protect their Elo, I'm not convinced more Elo incentive is needed.

luckywaldo7 - that's good point, although I suspect the rage might come from the frustration of losing matches, and having no control over it, rather than the elo-ego thing. Winning/losing is biggest motivator IMO. Basically I'm saying soften that by making it more fun to lose :)

In regards to unlocked units giving high-elo players and advantage, I think there are already so many options that the effect would be negligable if they were carefully chosen and balanced. Most of the level-based locks give minimal advantage, except maybe singu and superweapons late game in even matches. IMO one or two smaller novelty units wouldn't be a problem. Altho luckywaldo7 has spoken lol I am too late it seems.

I ABSOLUTELY disagree about rewarding high elo with unit unlocks. It would cause an inappropriate unbalance for the elo system as it would additionally falsify the relation between skill and elo by making future elo dependent on past elo in a very inappropriate way, even if the effect may be small. Are there other rules for successfull sportsmen in a fair game? We already have experience based unlocks so that experienced players can enjoy some cool stuff. (I like exp based com and unit unlocks, but unit locks should be reduced to only the heaviest units.)

Also any kind of visible rewards for high elo only demotivates less skilled players. Good players know that elo is the most important number to determine one's skill anyway. Some more visible motivation to get better may be ok, but it should not be too directly visible for the noobs.

banana_Ai
Sry, but why should winning tournaments be rewarded more than playing normal games? Furthermore being at the lower bound of your elo range would be an inappropriate disadvantage for those medals. Separating players by elo (with blurred or situational boundaries) is actually a good idea when there are enough players, but temporarily increasing the number of active players with regular tournaments at certain times is too inflexible and excludes those who are busy at that time. (very rare "dates for increased number of players" would be ok, but without special medals.)

I don't like to be always put in noobs' teams either and there are good ideas to fix it (e.g. Teams unlock tutorial), but wearing a medal meanwhile doesn't make it much better^^.

quote: Its not a game changing advantage, it just reinforce the "leader" role of those players.

If a "leader" needs an icon to show that he is high-skilled, then he's not a leader worth listening to.

It is possible to game the elo system with fake accounts. If there were rewards for elo then people would do this. This would break the balance system.

Ideally people would not know or care about elo at all. They would all just happily play balanced games without trying to influence it. If they become more skilled then their elo would change to reflect that.

Don't you care about comparative skill and ranking? You may care about the Elo number itself but ideally you would just care about underlying skill. If you care about the number then you are vulnerable to trying to abuse the system to make the number larger.

"Ideally people would not know or care about elo at all"

I dont care about elo directly. I care about games that i lose because of players that dont care about elo(mostly newbies nabs) and indirectly makes me lose.

In all games ELO is hidden, just ZK is exception. While its cool to know how good you are with a single number it also brings negatives such as discusions about elo rewards, or just trying to reach higher elo. ELO should be number in database nothing more from my point of view.

As for for skill show to know who is truly better there should be tournaments.

You dont understand me guys...i dont want to lose games because 1 player dies to a glave, or to a bandit or to a pyro...and so on. Happens to many times in bigg maps and thats why i always play on two way maps like fields of isis, ravaged( has 3 ways of places where you can attack and 4 if you go sea), icy run.

So those are the maps where i dont blame no1, and in bigger maps i specc.
So dont worry @MauranKilom i know what i am doing:D.(anti nab big map speccing tactic is enabled)

"Ideally people would not know or care about elo at all."

If ELO may be compared to a handicap in golf, then people do care clearly about their handicap... that does not break the sport it seems (and golf can be played in teams).