League Ideas

I like the idea of rewarding the MM players with exclusive colors/glows!

Maybe make purple for top 10 instead of 5?

Yes yes yes. League refreshment promotes more play, more innovation and ultimately more fun. Newer up-and-comers can finally feel like they have a stab at the big league player's positions without having to first conquer almost a decade of rating acquisition. It also provides me with an incentive and timeframe to produce new maps for each league, to add to the freshness.

I agree with Aquanim's notion that the latter option would be the better of the two, however, you may know that I'm of the fundamental opinion that the way our ladders work is somewhat flawed to begin with. In my model, we have a 1v1, Teams and FFA ladder. Casual rating can remain as for "all gamemodes". The flaw with what we have now is that both ladders represent multiple skillsets - Matchmaker: 1v1/Teams, Casual: Everything.

I've heard the logic behind finding an accurate representation of the player's skill and agree that it's good to have, but it shouldn't need to impose restrictions upon the shape of the ladders.

As a side note, the Battle for larger teams button in matchmaker is completely unused now, hamstrung by Sortie button. Personally, I don't want to risk high-stakes 1v1 rating on an unknown team. Others may feel the same. There's already a mental disconnect between large battle, matchmaker and competitive rating combined and so maybe this is evidence to suggest there should be a ladder disconnect if we ever want to see team games happen outside of casual rating.

Edit: If you go with the glow thing, you'll have to fix the fact that you can't actually get purple in Matchmaker rating. Or at least, I'm not sure you can unless you're #1 or #2 position.

i think its ok to use the blues for matchmaking because if someone can get the matchmaking badge it means they are wayyy bluer than a casual high rank that does not get the matchmaking.
and anyways the shape is there to tell you how good the player can play

Hacking up some 3-cpo boi skins sounds fun.

I think that 128 icons governed by simple and consistent rules is easier to understand than 64 icons governed by complex and less consistent rules.

quote: Let's face it, the icon shape only represents level right? That's nowhere near as useful as the actual colour.

I personally like seeing both the symbol and color.

There can be meaningful differences between a brown star and a brown chevron, even if they have the same elo.

If this thread produces a consensus on what players like. Then, My hope was to kind of get rid of the current ladders and have that one weird league rating that people like to look at and compare themselves with. Then, in the background we can have one more rating to balance teams and determine actual skill. Since it's not on the ladder anymore it doesn't have to follow any weird rules.

As it is I'm unsure anything will happen though, since we're far off from a consensus. The last thing I want is another series of changes to the ranks that leave everyone uncertain of their rank's value, some confused by the changing meanings and myself frustrated by constantly changing objectives.

quote: I've heard the logic behind finding an accurate representation of the player's skill and agree that it's good to have, but it shouldn't need to impose restrictions upon the shape of the ladders.

Following this logic there would only be a single rating as adding all the MM games to all the casual games provable yields more accurate ratings. This isn't the logic I subscribe to, since I don't think finding the most accurate rating is the goal of a rating system. I think MM and casual should be divided because:

• Tying the ladder to the way the game started is easy to understand.
• It lets people play casual without worrying about MM rank.
• There aren't enough non-1v1 MM games for a separate team MM ladder to make sense.
• Desire for non-MM 1v1 that counts towards non-casual rating is rare.

quote: Why would you have an accurate WHR system only to make it inaccurate by introducing further distortions between shown rating and actual rating?

Accuracy isn't the only, or even the most important, purpose of a rating system.

quote: I dislike the added complexity of having both a casual and a competitive rank color, or adding different versions of the color. Right now we already have 64 possible rank icons, adding a shiny option would mean 128 possible combinations that a user should be expected to understand.

The glow would be at most eight extra images, one for each shape. All it would be is some extra embellishment that shows a rank image that is derived from the MM ladder instead of the casual ladder.

quote: Players could have a rating for each of the 3 ladders - 1v1, teams, matchmaker and their casual rating. Instead of showing all 3 on the standard display of a user, we show their highest rating (and ingame, their rating for the game-mode in question as suggested before). However, if you hover over the user or go to their page, you get a clear display of each of their rating icon medals.

This sounds good, apart from the fact that there are two ladders - not three. I'm also not so sure that your ingame rank should be the rank relevant to the game, as having your name look different in different types of games could be weird. The site could display both rank images on the home page and send them both to the lobbies for the purpose of being displayed in a tooltip. The MM versions could have the glow, if the glow also exists.

I've tried to put forth the best version of "reserve the upper ranks for MM" and it still seems far worse than just adding an opt-in glow. The "send and display both" idea put forth by Dregs could even make glow redundant, although glow wouldn't hurt.

The fluid nature of the MM percentiles, in addition to the 20% over-rank requirement to make it into the next bracket, makes the rank system a bit opaque. Players can rank up simply because more players joined the pool. This effect would be exaggerated in a league so perhaps we'd be better off fixing the ranks at some nice round numbers. Here is an example based on the current percentiles and MM population:

• purple: Top 5 MM
• dark blue: Top 20 MM
• light blue: Top 50 MM
• yellow: Top 100 MM
• bright orange: Top 150 MM
• dark orange: Top 225 MM
• red: Top 300 MM
• grey: everyone

The rule for assigning rank images would be very simple:

• Players gain a rank image when their ladder position reaches the required threshold.
• Players lose a rank image when their ladder position drops below 1.2*Threshold. This means someone in position six can be purple, and someone in position 120 could be yellow.

This is similar to the current system in that there is a buffer before you lose a rank. The difference is that the requirements for ranking up and down are spelled out explicitly, rather than existing as unseen thresholds.

Detailed Structure

I'll now propose a system to combat loss aversion and promote activity in the league. Players gain and lose MM rank images using the system in the preceding paragraph.

The first month of the league acts like a normal ladder with none of the following systems. This period could even be presented as not really part of the league, but rather as the pre-league period, or as the seeding period. The aim is to give the ladder some time to settle before the ranks people attain are 'locked in'.

The whole league (including the pre-league month) lasts four months (three months would also be reasonable).

The league keeps track of your highest ladder position, as well as its corresponding rank image, and displays it alongside your current ladder rank and position in places such as the home page and community tab. This position is recorded as your final league position, in essence your personal best, for the league. The aim here is to make players feel like they can keep playing games without risking their current position.

Players in the top five gain league points for playing games. Whoever has the most league points at the end of the league is the winner of the league, even if they never reached the top of the ladder. Every time a top five player finishes a full game (ie, one that was scored for rating purposes) they receive the following league points:

• 16 points for position 1.
• 9 points for position 2.
• 5 points for position 3.
• 3 points for position 4.
• 2 points for position 5.

For the purpose of determining points, a player's position is the best of their position when they started the game and their position after the rankings were updated after the game, just to be generous. It is good to reward people when they make the top 5 and there is no reason to make someone who lost a position while playing sad.

Every player will, at the end of a league, receive some sort of trophy or indicator of the best position they reached during the league. This metric is intended to be a more of a personal incomparable achievement, something that they can strive to improve upon for the next league. Players that accrued league points should appear on a league points leaderboard, and it is the position on this leaderboard that determines the winner, runner up, and third place of the league. Players with league points should also receive a trophy (or similar thing) that reflects their position on the league points leaderboard. If we decide to add something like a forum badge that displays your previous league achievement, then the player's position on the points leaderboard would be displayed instead of their highest position, as having any league points already shows that a player reached quite a high rank.

Ties on the league points leaderboard are broken by rank at the end of the league, as ties seem like they would be rare and final rank is a tiebreak that cannot result in a further tie.

The aim of the league points system is to encourage activity at the top of the ladder, and to give the league a definite winner that isn't just dependent on the ranks at the end. If the activity at the top of the ladder is spread evenly between players then league will be won by whoever spent the most time at the very top. However, if the top player doesn't expose themselves to de-throning then they will fall behind on points, as the second or third player will overtake them in points by playing more games. Ideally this incentive would trickle down the league:

• The top 1 and 2 positions play to reap the points of their lucrative position.
• The top 3,4 and 5 play to make some points and attempt to unseat those at a higher position.
• The top 6 to 10 can try to make it onto the league points leaderboard by gaining a few points.
• The other players now have access to better opponents, to play in their attempts to climb as high as they can during the league.

Perhaps the points system would be better with more players involved. To extend the system I would do the following:

• 32 points for position 1.
• 20 points for position 2.
• 12 points for position 3.
• 7 points for position 4.
• 5 points for position 5.
• 3 points for position 6.
• 2 points for position 7.
• 2 points for position 8.
• 1 points for position 9.
• 1 points for position 10.

I love the amount of effort being put into this discussion and am so glad to see it get invested in. Sounds like a good system GoogleFrog, although those League point numbers may need evaluating based on upper-ladder gameplay patterns. There's a very strong chance that a certain two players are going to be able to farm some disproportionately high gains if the gaps are that big - Although, that's IF they can re-gain their former thrones without a decade's worth of skulls to perch them upon.

I like Google's concept, but not sure about those league point awards:

16 points for position 1.
9 points for position 2.
5 points for position 3.
3 points for position 4.
2 points for position 5.

With values given, the income from position 1 and 2 playing each other repeatedly would basically allow them to reach a position that no-one can catch up with (net 25 league points per game, 500% income compared to net 5 league points per game for position 4+5).

Also: YES for obnoxious gold commander skins for winners, as a 1 time prize for winning a league. Could see a prize like that even getting sfire interested.