More forum badges

Hey,

Since we have a long history of using country flags in lobby, how about adding badges for top 3 players in each country? The more badges the merrier and more reason for people to feel better about themselves (happy).

Yay/nay?

quote: how about adding badges for top 3 players in each country?

Due to VPN users, this idea does not make sense.

Better to group people by the 4th dimension rather than the three. Ideally anybody with infra mana would make ladder seasons first.

in my knowledge there is like two active taiwan players :D

quote: Even if we're a small game, the amount of mental, physical and emotional energy any given player has to burn through to maintain competitive play is huge. It's a very demanding game.

Maintaining top3 is hard, maintaining top20 is trivial.

Numbers are in 2021 elons and for myself. I guess maintaining top3 may be trivial to godde :)

Maintaining casual purple may actually easier if you play less often because you become unstuck from the harmful rote and can emerge from the long slumber to snipe the meta with your ancient knowledge.

quote: A high casual elo can be maintained as long as you don't 1v1 or, godde forbid, FFA. Getting there is the hardest part.

Can confirm, I don't play and for some unexplained reason I am on top. Actually the best way for me to loose some whrs was to play some zero-wars when they were considered ranked, and nobody gave a shit cause they affected casual rank.

quote: Even if we're a small game, the amount of mental, physical and emotional energy any given player has to burn through to maintain competitive play is huge. It's a very demanding game.

Yeah, it takes a lot of stress to perform at your best in this demanding game, with quite hard counters and being able to loose just by not paying attention in right place for few seconds.

quote: Take your time, take it step by step, but things will improve.

This is a bit missing this point, as it's not about being unable to improve, but rather the increasing amount of effort and stress it takes to maintain the high level of competitive play whilst trying to improve. I took a break from ZK for quite a while to finish my degree mostly, and many times I thought about coming back and then I was mostly remembering how stressful it often was - that was mostly keeping me from getting back. Also I'm avoiding 1v1 for the same reason, as the elevated amount of stress is above my tolerance to enjoy playing regularly.

Nevertheless these points are derailing what I originally wanted to discuss - badges based on ranking and countries (or maybe time zones? Better countries, they have more comradeship associated with them than time zone). It's not meant to be very serious, mostly a feel good curiosity. I agree that 3 people in 100+ countries (possibly 6 with 2 ladders) is quite a bit, so maybe just the currently best one?

Yes, I'm aware the system could be cheated by using a VPN or something, but it's not really important to prevent this. If people are willing to do that just to get a badge that would mean that they are working as intended (giving reasons for people to feel better).

Just a mention - I also support the idea of seasons with promotion of competitive gameplay intertwined with calm periods - maybe in 50-50 ratio. I would dig in some of those seasons to see how high can I get in competitive 1v1 if I knew that it does not mean that I have to worry about maintaining whatever I achieved in that period (staying as high as possible indefinitely) and rest.

Can't wait for random people looking like ballers and then turning out to be top1 in zimbabwe or something