Rankings Proposal

In light of the recent discussion about elo rankings and some of the various opinions of the problems and merits, I have the following design proposal. I want to make everyone happy while also especially considering the UI complexity. I am willing to contribute artwork for this but I don't have the skills do implement the code. Although considering implementation is looking too far ahead; this is mostly a brainstorm.

Elo is split up according to game type, for example between 1v1, Team, and FFA.

Elo as a number becomes almost entirely invisible. Instead, you are in a 'league' based on your elo ranking. Instead of the number, you get an emblem representing your league. Since you may be in different leagues depending on the different game types, there are some rules are to when each ranking is displayed:

--- Visibility Rules ---

General Lobby Chat: No league ranking is visible

Battleroom/Ingame: League is visible relevant to the game type (i.e. team tanking shows in team games)

Website Forums: No league ranking is visible

Website User Pages: All rankings are visible, similar to SC2 battle.net pages (i.e. )

Top Players Pages: Potentially the only place where the numbers themselves should be visible. There could be individual top player lists for all game types.

My hopeful goals with this are to keep the feeling of fun from competitive ranking and the feeling of personal progression while hoping to reduce some of the smurfing and other behavior.

(Also worth noting I think that a league system has been on the to-do since about when elo was first implemented)

As 1v1 is the purest form of competition and measurement of individual achievement, I would think that individual 1v1 rankings would be the highest priority over the others. Besides which, there should be plenty of room for several rankings with this proposal. I would almost recommend splitting Team into Small Team and Large Team, adding a Novelty category for Duck/Trololo games, or other possibilities. It would be good to get some feedback towards this.

And by leaderboard do you mean the 'Top 10' on the front page? I think is unnecessary altogether, but there are options around that also. A simple option would be to simply default it to one game type.

I like the idea of leagues.
Im afraid that any form of visible ranking for normal pub team games leads to undesired behavior - increases chances of raging etc.

the majority will always be silent and go with whatever they are presented with.

And really, this entire smurf issue has been blown completely out of proportion. You take way too much upon yourself with these type of changes (licho's changes). The effects of the non-troll smurfs on team games is minimal.

I do really like the idea of leagues but the community is too small to support it. We could of course anticipate on it for when it happens. (well, it doesnt hurt to dream about a huge ZK community :-) )

Also have to agree with Lucky when he wonders if the pub-games need a ranking at all. We could make games up to 5v5 ranked and leave the bigger ones unranked. You simply use the smaller teamgames ranking for the biggame balance.