A while back, Blizzard has made a notice that they are looking at ladder, which is their speak for "we're thinking of making changes". Which sparked, for a while, some thoughts on what's wrong/needs fixing with the ladder system. Reading on them, I noticed a few ideas that, combined, might make for a good ranked system.. or better than what we have now. Thus I'm putting them down here and will be wanting to hear from others. Note, these aren't purely my ideas, but combining a good many people's ideas, some tweaked, some as is, along with some of my own.
Firstly, it establishes that there's three types of people playing on ranked:
Casual players. The dailies-only. The folks who play 'for fun' decks. So on. They want a varied, interesting game where they can mess around, sometimes with imperfect decks.
Competitive players. These are the folks who hang around ranks 5-legend. They want to push and try to win and they want to know that their ability matters, but they aren't putting down the 8+hours-a-day to get to the final group of players.
Professional players. They seek out #1 in legend and/or rank 100 for the blizzcon points. They want a stable meta that lets them outsmart it with a counter deck and take advantage of everything they legally can to get to the top.
Each group's desires contradict the others. Hypervaried metas are great for casual players but it messes with professional players who don't have anything to analyze. That's why when someone says an idea, a batch of people bash it.
The thing is, though, each of the groups tend to separate each other through most of the month. Fun folks stay below rank 5, Compettiive goes from 5-legend. Professionals upper legend and push for 100-1. Thus we can actually tweak the ladder at different points to help all three.
Though first, we need to keep the groups at their particular points. If you're Legend at the end of the month, you start at rank 5.
Pushing them lower only means everyone else suffers a horrible ladder as the upper players equip face decks to slog through the grind to legend while the rest get curb stomped. So if at rank 1, all of the legend players are at rank 5 while everyone else is below then it's legend-vs legend as they quickly push back up to legend again. Everyone else is free to move back up to where they were: by the time they get back ot rank 5, the legends will be back. It'll also give a benefit to REACHING legend: you get an extra BIG boost at your ranking.
From here, we separate the three groups: rank 25-5 ladder, 5-legend, and top 100. So treat them differently.
Rank 25-5: Put in a preference to avoid seeing the same class over and over. NOT a chosen preference like a ban. Just that if you see a warrior then hunter the last two games, it'll try to match you with a non-warrior/hunter next game. If it's having a hard time, then you still get a warrior/hunter.. similar to how it prefers to put you with someone your rank but will expand if necessary. It only goes back 2 games so you can go warrior, hunter, mage, back to warrior.
You aren't pushing for competition at these ranks, so setting something here isn't as bad. it still means you actually have to face the real meta if you play competitively, but have the option of just playing casually with more variety. Also the end of the 'early-month aggro-rush' will help immensely.
Rank 5-legend: I'm not sure NEEDS a change.
it's a grind that separates the folks who can be competitive from the rest still. Just that when a person actually makes the plunge then they do it, go back to rank 16, then go "NOT AGAIN!". Pushing for Legend so that you can effectively cut the grind in half from then on might be enough to make it ok. If it's still grindy, we COULD put Legend players at rank 3 instead: enough so that they have to prove themselves again but not enough to be hypergrindy.
Legend: You get a star on your card back if you've hit rank 1000, another at rank 500, then further changes for 400, 300, 200, 100, 10, and 1.
The competitive players no longer see Legend as any real proof, which makes sense, and I feel is ok. But they don't have an alternative, other than pushing for top 100.. adn most won't even get there. So perhaps a sort of tier system, something to mark further milestones to push for. Make legend no longer THE PROOF OF SKILL people wanted it to be and instead let people, say, go "I'm a 200 player." or a "I'm a top 10". This will bring some groans to some people but the ability to compare yourself, at least to your past and future ability, is important to some and we should offer that. A simple card back change, that will be displayed to others, may be enough. If not then we can do other stuff. But the idea is there. Move the mentality of "Legend or nonlegend" into "legend, better legend".
Top ~200-1: Best of 3 over best of 1. Blizzcon points based on how many days you spent at certain ranks, not just what you get at the last day. And the last match of the season counts even if it goes past the deadline.
This was mostly from hearing professional players talk about their ranked experiences. From what I gather from them, there's an issue with the last few hours being pretty much the ONLY thing that matters: if you play perfectly for 29 days then at the last 5 hours lose 3 games you're OUT of the top 100. Also at this point, there's less of a desire for mass games fo 1 on 1 as it presents higher variance, especially when it's to get points to get into a multi-match tournament which works VERY differently to the ladder.
So the idea is to change it to those who are pushing that hard. At around the point where people really push for top 100 (guessing 200, though real professionals probably have a better number to use), the game shifts from best of 1s to best of 3. The people at this point are typically playing for HOURS anyway, so they are probably ok with staying longer with one opponent. Meanwhile, making it so that you get points depending on how long you last at the top ranks should make the entire month important and not just the last day. The last idea is due to an exploit used currently at that level that can be dropped.
I'm thinking with this, the for fun players get their varied experiences without ruining the competitive environment, the competitive players can keep having new things to prove themselves under and can stop focusing on JUST **LEGEND** while the professionals can have a better experience overall and the ladder winners who get to the grand tournaments can have prior experience in the format.
So what do you think, or what other ideas do you have. Try to be positive and note that MANY people are trying to have fun their own way and the game should try to work for them as well as you.
MMR should be public and permanent between seasons. Public means 1) visible for player and 2) public leaderboard let's say Top 1000 or even more.
Chest could be awarded based by win count in that season, for example.
And I even like separate divisions more then monthly reset. But flat ladder is better then divisions for sure. Actually I prefer system like in Dota 2.
MMR should be public and permanent between seasons. Public means 1) visible for player and 2) public leaderboard let's say Top 1000 or even more.
Chest could be awarded based by win count in that season, for example.
And I even like separate divisions more then monthly reset. But flat ladder is better then divisions for sure. Actually I prefer system like in Dota 2.
Oh yes, MMR NEEDS to get public. A LOT of data needs to get public for the individual. I'd REALLY like to not have to run a 3rd party program or pull out excell just to track my wins/losses with a deck.
Chest based on win count though.. there's enough reasons to push for fast aggro/farming. Anything that benefits from win-counts would push that even harder.
As for systems.. not familar with Dota 2. I am familiar with SC2 so that's where I'm based around. Mind an image of how a HS version of the Dota 2 system would work out?
MMR should be public and permanent between seasons. Public means 1) visible for player and 2) public leaderboard let's say Top 1000 or even more.
Chest could be awarded based by win count in that season, for example.
And I even like separate divisions more then monthly reset. But flat ladder is better then divisions for sure. Actually I prefer system like in Dota 2.
Oh yes, MMR NEEDS to get public. A LOT of data needs to get public for the individual. I'd REALLY like to not have to run a 3rd party program or pull out excell just to track my wins/losses with a deck.
Chest based on win count though.. there's enough reasons to push for fast aggro/farming. Anything that benefits from win-counts would push that even harder.
As for systems.. not familar with Dota 2. I am familiar with SC2 so that's where I'm based around. Mind an image of how a HS version of the Dota 2 system would work out?
No monthly reset, that's it. Game could collect statistics data for a month and give reward based on it (I like win caout but it can be win rate, time spent in game or anything else).
And aggro chest farmers...they will just farm their chest fast and go away rather then curse ladder for whole month on their way to Rank 5.
Best is muti tier division play......people jockeying for position to move up. People get more well known... Noobs face noobs.....until more experienced. People trying to knock off pros....no early grind... Just battling for placement.
8+ hours a day for legend?....... are you kidding me
more like 1-3 hours a day if you need that much time.
so these are your 3 brackets of players:
rank 25-5(97% of players base) / rank 5-legend(2% of player base) / top100 legend to top10legend (.0001) 97%/2%/.0001
seems illogical and just as non rewarding as the last system was. ive been top300 legend and couldn't really care less about some stars on my cardback, I'd rather get a golden legendary or just a normal one. it hardly even takes that long to grind to legend I think the rewards just need tweaking. people who need 8+hours a day to legend must be making some pretty awful missplays frequently and deserve to have to spend that much time if they want the rewards. if it was anything less I would probably stop playing just because this game would just become to easy, and would feel like the community cried a little to much until the bike got hooked up with training wheels. or somebody pulled the bumpers up for bowling.
8+ hours a day for legend?....... are you kidding me
more like 1-3 hours a day if you need that much time.
so these are your 3 brackets of players:
rank 25-5(97% of players base) / rank 5-legend(2% of player base) / top100 legend to top10legend (.0001) 97%/2%/.0001
seems illogical and just as non rewarding as the last system was. ive been top300 legend and couldn't really care less about some stars on my cardback, I'd rather get a golden legendary or just a normal one. it hardly even takes that long to grind to legend I think the rewards just need tweaking. people who need 8+hours a day to legend must be making some pretty awful missplays frequently and deserve to have to spend that much time if they want the rewards. if it was anything less I would probably stop playing just because this game would just become to easy, and would feel like the community cried a little to much until the bike got hooked up with training wheels. or somebody pulled the bumpers up for bowling.
That wasn't' 8-hours a day for legend. That was people who GOT to legend, but can't do 8-hour a day runs to push for top 100. It's not so much saying you NEED 8 hours a day for it but more that folks who are playing only 1-3 hours probably aren't even considering top 100 as an option and those that do seriously push for top 100 play pretty close to that amount by natural design.
As for the size of the brackets, that seems normal considering that 50k people regularly show up to watch those .0001% of the population play. Millions of dollars cycle around companies purely to support or gain from those .0001%. It's the bed we made when we decided to turn a small-time side project into one of the biggest esports scenes so w emight as well lay in it.
And I bet if you pull the numbers from any Esports scene, you'll see a similar odd distribution between 'the masses' and 'the few'. So making a bracket for such a small population should be fine so long as everyone is happy it.
But the whole concept banks around the idea that it's NOT that hard really to get to legend if you are the competitive type and there's no reason to make it any easier or harder. It serves right now as a good separation between casual and competitive players and that's fine enough. The only changes I made for those getting to legend, assuming that getting ot rank 5 is a cakewalk for them, is that they don't have to keep grinding through casual players every single month to do it. There's NO benefit for a legend player to have to go to rank 16. It's a waste of a few hours with nothing meaningful to them and there's newer players who flat out run away from the ladder for about 10 days a month because of the pounding.
The card back thing is really meant to be nonsense.. less a way to reward anyone and more of a way to get people to stop thinking about Legend as THE PROOF OF SKILL (which is why so many get pissed when "idiots with top decks" get there) and get them thinking about actually taking note of their rank on ladder. Top 300 IS pretty impressive and I'd rather the folks whostep right off of legend stop fussing about who's in there and start thinking about who's in the ranks above them.
if the player get bad rng in placement game, then will end up in low mmr and very hard to catch up.
ie pro mmr is arond 2k . the player bad placement end up with 1 k mmr. if mmr gain is low such as 10 mmr. how many game will take to go to 2k mmr? unless blizzard tweak mmr gain. 1 game 50 mmr etc. but sometime will be too easy.
some player also will found that mmr does not consistence with time per games. ie 5 min games gain 10 , 15 min game also gain 10. they will end up play aggro deck. if blizzard design long game gain more mmr, the player will abuse by play slow deck and wait until 80 s to play the card.
if the player get bad rng in placement game, then will end up in low mmr and very hard to catch up.
ie pro mmr is arond 2k . the player bad placement end up with 1 k mmr. if mmr gain is low such as 10 mmr. how many game will take to go to 2k mmr? unless blizzard tweak mmr gain. 1 game 50 mmr etc. but sometime will be too easy.
some player also will found that mmr does not consistence with time per games. ie 5 min games gain 10 , 15 min game also gain 10. they will end up play aggro deck. if blizzard design long game gain more mmr, the player will abuse by play slow deck and wait until 80 s to play the card.
MMR is already in HS. It's a main factor in how Casual matchups work and it actually has some determination for your ranked and arena matchups. Good or Bad, it's the reality. THe only issue is that we don't know what we actually have which at this point doesn't matter to average players but is VERY important to the high end competitive scene so they know how well they are doing.
The rewards is meanwhile already on the aggro-benefit side due to what you said. They play aggro to climb up ranks fast. Without gutting ranked and turning it into a competely different format I'm not sure what to do to stop that without presenting more problems. The best I can see is soften it by no longer forcing players to rerun the same rank rushes at the start of the season.
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One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
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A while back, Blizzard has made a notice that they are looking at ladder, which is their speak for "we're thinking of making changes". Which sparked, for a while, some thoughts on what's wrong/needs fixing with the ladder system. Reading on them, I noticed a few ideas that, combined, might make for a good ranked system.. or better than what we have now. Thus I'm putting them down here and will be wanting to hear from others. Note, these aren't purely my ideas, but combining a good many people's ideas, some tweaked, some as is, along with some of my own.
Firstly, it establishes that there's three types of people playing on ranked:
Casual players. The dailies-only. The folks who play 'for fun' decks. So on. They want a varied, interesting game where they can mess around, sometimes with imperfect decks.
Competitive players. These are the folks who hang around ranks 5-legend. They want to push and try to win and they want to know that their ability matters, but they aren't putting down the 8+hours-a-day to get to the final group of players.
Professional players. They seek out #1 in legend and/or rank 100 for the blizzcon points. They want a stable meta that lets them outsmart it with a counter deck and take advantage of everything they legally can to get to the top.
Each group's desires contradict the others. Hypervaried metas are great for casual players but it messes with professional players who don't have anything to analyze. That's why when someone says an idea, a batch of people bash it.
The thing is, though, each of the groups tend to separate each other through most of the month. Fun folks stay below rank 5, Compettiive goes from 5-legend. Professionals upper legend and push for 100-1. Thus we can actually tweak the ladder at different points to help all three.
Though first, we need to keep the groups at their particular points. If you're Legend at the end of the month, you start at rank 5.
Pushing them lower only means everyone else suffers a horrible ladder as the upper players equip face decks to slog through the grind to legend while the rest get curb stomped. So if at rank 1, all of the legend players are at rank 5 while everyone else is below then it's legend-vs legend as they quickly push back up to legend again. Everyone else is free to move back up to where they were: by the time they get back ot rank 5, the legends will be back. It'll also give a benefit to REACHING legend: you get an extra BIG boost at your ranking.
From here, we separate the three groups: rank 25-5 ladder, 5-legend, and top 100. So treat them differently.
Rank 25-5: Put in a preference to avoid seeing the same class over and over. NOT a chosen preference like a ban. Just that if you see a warrior then hunter the last two games, it'll try to match you with a non-warrior/hunter next game. If it's having a hard time, then you still get a warrior/hunter.. similar to how it prefers to put you with someone your rank but will expand if necessary. It only goes back 2 games so you can go warrior, hunter, mage, back to warrior.
Rank 5-legend: I'm not sure NEEDS a change.
it's a grind that separates the folks who can be competitive from the rest still. Just that when a person actually makes the plunge then they do it, go back to rank 16, then go "NOT AGAIN!". Pushing for Legend so that you can effectively cut the grind in half from then on might be enough to make it ok. If it's still grindy, we COULD put Legend players at rank 3 instead: enough so that they have to prove themselves again but not enough to be hypergrindy.
Legend: You get a star on your card back if you've hit rank 1000, another at rank 500, then further changes for 400, 300, 200, 100, 10, and 1.
Top ~200-1: Best of 3 over best of 1. Blizzcon points based on how many days you spent at certain ranks, not just what you get at the last day. And the last match of the season counts even if it goes past the deadline.
I'm thinking with this, the for fun players get their varied experiences without ruining the competitive environment, the competitive players can keep having new things to prove themselves under and can stop focusing on JUST **LEGEND** while the professionals can have a better experience overall and the ladder winners who get to the grand tournaments can have prior experience in the format.
So what do you think, or what other ideas do you have. Try to be positive and note that MANY people are trying to have fun their own way and the game should try to work for them as well as you.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
MMR should be public and permanent between seasons. Public means 1) visible for player and 2) public leaderboard let's say Top 1000 or even more.
Chest could be awarded based by win count in that season, for example.
And I even like separate divisions more then monthly reset. But flat ladder is better then divisions for sure. Actually I prefer system like in Dota 2.
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One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
Hall of Fame (ignore list): aleathas, Baylith, cendol, DiamondDM13, Dominieq, doomr, glitterprincess, hamtarofr, Heck, Jwigg33, Kaladin, Krewger, Legend_Entomber, libertyprime, Maukiepaukie, PandarenHero, randjob, s2mikey, SchruteBucks, The_Giratina, TheWamts, ticandtac, tictactucroc, tsudecimo, WaffleMonstr
Best is muti tier division play......people jockeying for position to move up. People get more well known... Noobs face noobs.....until more experienced. People trying to knock off pros....no early grind... Just battling for placement.
8+ hours a day for legend?....... are you kidding me
more like 1-3 hours a day if you need that much time.
so these are your 3 brackets of players:
rank 25-5(97% of players base) / rank 5-legend(2% of player base) / top100 legend to top10legend (.0001)
97%/2%/.0001
seems illogical and just as non rewarding as the last system was. ive been top300 legend and couldn't really care less about some stars on my cardback, I'd rather get a golden legendary or just a normal one. it hardly even takes that long to grind to legend I think the rewards just need tweaking. people who need 8+hours a day to legend must be making some pretty awful missplays frequently and deserve to have to spend that much time if they want the rewards. if it was anything less I would probably stop playing just because this game would just become to easy, and would feel like the community cried a little to much until the bike got hooked up with training wheels. or somebody pulled the bumpers up for bowling.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
mmr is the bad idea for card game.
if the player get bad rng in placement game, then will end up in low mmr and very hard to catch up.
ie pro mmr is arond 2k . the player bad placement end up with 1 k mmr. if mmr gain is low such as 10 mmr. how many game will take to go to 2k mmr? unless blizzard tweak mmr gain. 1 game 50 mmr etc. but sometime will be too easy.
some player also will found that mmr does not consistence with time per games. ie 5 min games gain 10 , 15 min game also gain 10. they will end up play aggro deck. if blizzard design long game gain more mmr, the player will abuse by play slow deck and wait until 80 s to play the card.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.