Ideas for making the ladder more popular

[SeraphimLeftNut]

Discuss your ideas or comments on others' ideas about way to make the ladder more active.

EXCLUDE ANY IDEAS ABOUT MAP POOL - This is an ongoing issue that will hopefully be solved eventually.

One possible idea is to have ladder standings only for those who have played within the week, in addition to the standings we have now.

Ideas with avatars - the biggest mover in the last 24 hours, most games in the last 24 hours, etc.

Thoughts...

[S_SoulReaver]

Would be great to see some anymation with cassino-like sounds showing your rating number going up. Like when you lvl up on Tetris Battle game, or some other cool effect, like when you lvl up on Dota. Place achievments for winning on each map, winning 5 games on each map, winning with all the factions on each map.... Achievments for rating reached would be nice like we have on iRacing.

[Apofenas]

Ladder madness week tourney: Add possibility to pick game mode like map(nomads, black ops, equilibrium, claustrophobia, ect). By the end of the week, give separate avatarts to people with most games won in different game modes, something to 2d and 3d places and special ladder week tourney participant to people who gave feed back for one of played mods. I think it would help both ladder and featured mods.

[nine2]

more prestige:

- dedicated casting for ladder games. one game a week from each division. gyle mainly casts 4v4
- make a minor announcement whenever a player moves division or breaches a new rating for the first time, beats someone totally out of their league. in some minor automated news feed at top of faf client
- make a tiny ladder symbol and put it next to players who are ladder-active. this is in addition to avatars.
- remove inactive ladder players from leaderboard ... eg: must have 10 games in last month. i am #30 on the ladder at the moment (when did that happen btw?!) but if you remove the inactives maybe i am #20 or something = more prestige.
- encourage competition. single out rivalries and emphasise/cast/newfeed about them. i have enemies, friends and peers. all that drama stuff is cool.
- keep a running score board of players vs players and put it on the front page somehow. It will have to be interactive so you can drill into it. When I click a replay in the vault it should show me a player vs player analysis for this ladder season.
- make a 'replay for casting' thread that is only for ladder.
- make a reward for players who cast their point of view on ladder games. eg: promote their live streams/youtube on the home page/client
- perhaps rework the division system to make it simpler

basically you just need to emphasise ladder ... at the moment team games have all of the emphasis because all of the high profile casts are for them. latch on to the concepts of personal development and rivalry ... these are the long term motivators to play, and also they add drama. And that drama does exist! I can tell you the players that hate me and show you games where I smash them and you can watch their sulky little replies. (and vice versa). Maybe we can have players indicate their nemesis's and then we can auto-report about their interactions.

truth is that ladder is very exciting for me ... but im highly invested in it.

also, i feel that i get matched against noobs too often. some nights i feel like i play 6 games and 5 were vs noobs and 1 was a real game and i stuff it up - kinda demoralizing

[Lu_Xun_17]

Vanilla award system

[speed2]

Vanilla award system

can you sum it up for people like me who missed this era?

[Col_Walter_Kurtz]

Vanilla award system

can you sum it up for people like me who missed this era?

Avatars for x units air / land / naval built, x experimentals from y faction, x amount of kills, x amount of games etc. etc. Varying in color depending on how hard it is to achieve a certain number.

[Mad`Mozart]

Already said it in suggestions but here goes again:

Selective random faction. Instead of random from 4 factions as we have it now, give the ability to choose 2-3-4 desired factions and random one of those when game starts.

[Hascins]

I strongly support what Anihilnine is suggesting! By putting more emphasis on ladder and the players and stuff, more people will get engaged.

In order to make it more interesting for casters etc.:
I would suggest to use fixed seasons (like 2 month) and reset ladderpoints after that. In addition i would suggest to move e.g. the first 10 people up to the next division. Rank 20-30 have to play a relegation tourney against the last of the higher division in order to move up.

You could even do a tourney after each season among the top 10 of each division....

Cast it...put emphasis on it...create stories arround it.

[Sheeo]

I propose to allow players to optionally select which map size they would like to play, in addition to the faction.

Two categories should do "Small" <= (5x5) and "Large" >= (10x10). The matchmaker can take this into account when selecting matches and maps, favouring matches that want to play the same map size and limiting the map pool selection when both matched players have selected the same map sizes.

It doesn't have to be a hard restriction, and there could be a chance that you will play a map in the other category even if you didn't select it -- I'm not sure which is best.

The motivation here is that I don't always have time to play a drawn out match, so being able to restrict it to small maps limit the potential time needed for the match.

Sometimes it's the other way around and you would prefer a longer match, so a small map works against that goal.