Rank icons

How do they work?
I know of ingame time, elo and level. How are they related to

-the big icon left of your name on your page
-a smaller rank icon in between your name and clan.
-the different portraits in the lobby

The big icon left of your name on the web page is "a graphical representation of your level" as the mouseover states.
for 25 levels
for 5 levels
for 1 level
There's a star too, but apparently no gold one. It's WIP, for further information check out the wiki page LevelRankBadge.



The small icons are another way of describing your level. They change every 10 levels. (9 for the first one)




Portraits in the lobby are elo based, with some exceptions:
Jimmi Hendrix means "this is you".
Pink means "friend of yours".
Cop means "admin/moderator".
Napoleon means "top player", I think 1800+.
Veteran (green) means "good player", probably 1600+.
Black shirt means "average", I suppose 1400+ elo.
Blue shirt means "newbie", cuddle them, teach them, cuddle them again.
Robot head means "bot". Not human. They're our slaves.

so there are 2 icons that indicate level, ok!
what really got me confused are the small rank icons since those are also used by TASclient to indicate in-game time.

Having both elo and level icons is confusing.

No one really cares what level you are.

I always told everyone those rank icons should be used for elo and shirt color should be used for level, but nobody listens to me. :(

Elo's more important in the long run and elo being "overwritten" by admin/friend portraits is worse than level being overwritten. Just my thought.

That's ok, pushing uphill against licho isn't exactly something I'm a stranger to.

I agree, a single rank icon would be much better. I like the idea of shape for rank, color for elo though for the sake of the casual/semi-casual players, because it will keep them feeling like they are moving forward and advancing. Something to keep a simple 'single player' kind of objective in the multiplayer.

Edit: I guess I can admit that I would also feel terrible whenever my elo fluctuated around and my ranking symbol dropped. :D

I don't know that we need the custom tiny icons for -every- level (Say, the pips won't show up well and we'll run out of space for bars eventually). That cuts down on the number of possible icons, so we can probably generate them all without a script.

I don't think we can roll all of that info into one icon. I think if we are having multiple stripes, bands, maybe even stars to show rank, it will be too visually busy to be able to show much beyond that. You are basically left with colour, and maybe a background (like the stripes above the stars). That starts to become really ambigious what it means though (the current icons are -already- really confusing), so I seriously think seperate icons for friend state or moderator state would be better.

Level's a 2-digit number. A 2-digit number takes up just as much space as an icon.

Well I think we're at least going to have more modules, and maybe kudos related stuff (like paying utterly ridiculous XP fees for some of the cosmetic kudos unlocks like skins or custom colored weapons). So the levels might be relevant at some point.

Either way, using a two digit number there would be sorta lame and defeat the purpose of having a flashy icon at all.

Ok, so we need to prioritize the kind of information to be displayed in icons. We have:

Country of residence
Clan emblem
XP Level
Elo level
Friend status
Admin status
Self status
Kudos

Now it seems to be the general consensus that ideally there would only be 1 icon, or two at the most. What kind of information can be axed and what must absolutely be included? I'm sure there are going to be disagreements but it is kind of silly to try to show all of this at once.

I'm going to say that country can probably be removed. It is only very occasionally to tell if a player might not understand English, but 99.9% of the time it serves no purpose.

Clan emblem, meh. People put the clan tag right in their name anyway. I would say to get rid of it unless it suddenly gets some large importance. Even in PW the only real important thing was faction and you can see that in name color.

I think elo is important but I'm interested in what other people think. If it's important it should probably be way more obvious than whatever the obscure shirt-color system is. Think of SC2, much of the motivation is from trying to improve league ranking. "Wow, I advanced from gold league to platinum league." You won't find anybody getting excited about advancing from "black shirt guy" to "green shirt guy."