This is making all players have worse score, people are not playing ranked games as much anymore because they see that they are at risk to lose score (even when they are playing consistenly with a 50/50 w/l ratio or better), and at the same time dont want to lose that 900 rating they have worked for so hard.... This is made worse especially with good players creating smurf accounts making ranking points even harder to obtain, but the smurfs are not the core problem.
One of the problems is that high ranked players go inactive, or start using smurf accounts, for whatever reason and their ranks are untouchable, eventhough they have not played in ages, they still show as the "best" "current players".
We need an inflationary rank system whereby everyone can consistently rise a few points over the long run. This can be done by:
1. Taking points from inactive accounts at a rate of 2.5% a month, which would lead to an inactive 2k rank player losing 500 points in 12 months and making those points available through the pool of points to others.
2. A pool of rank points consisting of number of accounts * point values depending on games played, say an account with 100 games or more adds 0.5 points to that pool per additional game played to that pool to be fought over. At current it says there are 66000 games a month, I assume if this figure is correct, then we would add around 33000 points a month to the pool, that is inflationary. Eventually as the pool grows, people who have been inactive will be surpassed and not add to the pool anymore.
The problem is setting a starting point for every new player coming into the game and how that should affect the pool. If we set it to add 1000 points to the pool after playing its 100th game, then it inflates. Once an account goes inactive, the account loses its 2.5% every month and also that 1000 points being added to the pool goes down 2.5% every month and lets say after 2 years inactivity, the account is set to 0 and what is left of the 1000 points also disappears. If the player returns, the 1000 is fully considered in the pool and the points lost during absense have already been taken back to the pool and given to others. This also means if a player sub 1000 rank goes inactive and leaves completely, generally scores will go down by a tiny fraction and if the player was above 1000 rank the average score would be affected to the upside.
Currently it says 10000 unique accounts were active in the last 30 days, so if we assume that these all have 100+ games and add 1000 points to the pool that is 10mio points, the 3300 points are a small impact per month. (about 0.33% inflation on the pool per month, 4%/year) It means a 1000 rated player inflates to a 1040 player during 1 year.
3. No negative scores (inflating factor as won points are not offset by lost points). This also motivates noobs not to quite after 2 games when they are going -300 (I actually saw a -1200 today, how is that even possible!)
4. Win and loss at same game quality need to be the same amount of points adjusted for the inflow outflow of new players/inactive accounts (not -7 for loss on balanced game and +1 or +2 for a win in a game stacked in the other side's favor for people with more than 100 games, while people with 10 games still get 10 to 30 points for a win)
Any criticisms or points that I did not consider are welcome. Also how the current system works is a mystery, even if there is a wiki somewhere explaining how it should work, I am sure it is outdated because every time there is a patch the score system seems to behave differently, so some input on how it is set and how it works is welcome.
But the most important thing though is to stop this relentless nonsensical unnecassary balance patches that supposedly "fix" imaginative balance issues while at the same time breaking other things that were working properly beforehand!Statistics: Posted by Evildrew — 05 Sep 2016, 00:30
]]>