EPTIn my recent blog post about Ladder Anxiety there are interesting opinions in comments, but this one especially made me think:
http://www.liquiddota.com/blogs/477453-ladder-anxiety-notes#8
If I'm at 2999 MMR I would queue instantly and play the best game of my life. If I lose I'll keep queueing until I hit that 3K mark. And THEN the ladder anxiety starts.
If 3K has been my goal and I hit 3001 MMR, I'd be too afraid to lose it.
...
My account has been sitting at 5015 solo MMR since June, haven't played solo since the day I reached 5K. Largely because I quit Dota after getting addicted to Wildstar, but even if I would still play dota I wouldn't solo ranked. Can't lose those 5K bragging rights yo.
Meaning besides your casual Ladder Anxiety, Dota 2 players get this one as well - it makes total sense why.
And this guy is not alone. I have several friends who attained a specific milestone and stopped playing ranked whatsoever, why would they? The next milestone is ridiculously far away - let’s keep having fun playing unranked games while feeling great because you already achieved 4k for your profile image.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/UGy6Aw6.jpg)
It’s not the terrifying feeling of “I don’t want to get crushed and feel bad about myself” or “I hate being in a stressful situation” or any sort of “usual” anxiety we all experience - it is more about “losing those bragging rights” which is instantaneous after a loss in Dota 2. This theme is going to persist through the entire article as my main thesis.
This can be improved drastically by introducing Seasons, Leagues, Achievements and Trophies - S.A.L.T.
This will shape up as you read through because of how everything is tightly interconnected. Reading is a linear process, so I tried to smoothly link one thing to another providing as much references and images as possible. Have fun.
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Let’s start with the “S”.
Seasons give players another self-defining tool as represented below. The difference in these “time snapshots” of a player MMR / Skill.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/el26Aaf.png)
With this you can compare yourself to others not only Current MMR-wise, but Improvement-wise. Think about the difference between something in 3D and 4D - it’s about change.
It has nothing to do with Seasons by themselves, but with tracking in general. However with Seasons comes tracking.
Other benefits:
Seasons add a tension / relief cycle to the game increasing emotional involvement of a player.
“Will I make it to 4k this season? I had this as my goal, but I’m not sure can I actually make it”
“The season ends in a week, and I still haven’t completed a whatever achievement I've been doing”
“I bet you can’t climb 500 MMR till the season ends”
Seasons add another topic to discuss increasing social involvement.
“My New Season resolution are…”
“Yeah, I did great last season, now I’m on a break”
“How to get 2k MMR in a Season - a guide by TotallyNotAMeepoPlayer”
Two close to 6 months long ones seasons make the most sense: post-TI and pre-TI:
1) Easy to say - “I used to have 5k in pre-TI5”.
You don’t have to memorize a specific patch version or metagames at the time to give your listeners a clue when it happened.
2) Easy to understand when exactly something took place.
The International operates like a beacon and every single player knows where it is.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/fXp8B9s.png)
Now I want to draw your attention towards the fact that there are “community created” marks and milestones such as:
“I torture myself sometimes by playing with 4k plebs”
“3k bracket is most likely the biggest one”
“Toby, as a 7k player”
These are useful to simplify conversations between any parties involved. By using them, people instantly can maroon their thoughts onto the proper island which facilitates comparisons and guide people right into the crux of an argument, because everyone has a certain beacon that helps them recognize their own place in this imaginary world of thought.
The important part here is that no one says stuff like “as a 4541 MMR player...”. No one cares about the exact rating. Even in such facilitations we still round up the number to “4.5k” or “4k”.
Check this out:
“I’m top-Diamond” (sc2)
“I’m Diamond 3” (LoL)
“I’m 4.8k” (Dota 2)
If the second decimal in such rating representation more often than not has its purpose - because at times “2k” is already sufficient enough to project the point - still, nobody cares about those last 2 decimals. Keep this in mind for a minute.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/a0c9lkj.jpg)
how much do you actually miss?
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“L” - Leagues
...That means Dota 2 players essentially use arbitrary “Leagues” when they talk about ratings:
“2k” “2.2k” “2.5k” “3k” etc
which we call “Brackets”.
If you have no idea what [in-game] Leagues are, open the spoiler. I will use Sc2 / LoL for the reference.
+ Show Spoiler +
Starcraft 2 uses the system of leagues: starting from bronze and upto grandmasters, there is no such thing as visible to a player MMR. However you can see your overall rank outgame: http://nios.kr/sc2/eu/1v1/hots/
League of Legends uses a quite similar system - the difference is past Diamond they have this “Challenger” league that resembles Grandmasters. Each league is divided into 5 smaller “levels” or “tiers” like “Diamond 1/2/3/4/5”.
In CS:GO there are 18 "badges" which are essentially leagues
If you think about it, the difference is actually minuscule between Leagues and a Raw Number, even if it’s counterintuitive at first: what’s going to happen, I mean, how these leagues will look like if you are to keep dividing them on and on into smaller entities?
Exactly, if you have 8000 leagues essentially you get the exact same MMR representation system Dota 2 has - nothing more than a number.
Nevertheless there is an immense divergence in “feelings” that players don’t even acknowledge.
Here is the main difference between leagues and brackets:
If you have leagues in a game, it opens up the possibility for a player to be Promoted. You can’t be promoted in dota - the only thing you get after a win is merely the MMR number incrementation, and all along the way the process doesn't change:
1) You play a game
2) You lose or get some rating that gets subtracted from or added to your rating number
That’s it. Which in theory looks fine and is actually okay, but this is one of the differences between having distinct, separate leagues to put players in and having imaginary brackets to rely upon.
In short: Leagues are official Brackets + Promotions.
--- As you improve as Dota player, you upgrade your “3k bracket” profile label into “4k bracket” label.
--- As you improve as a Sc2 / LoL / CS player, you are being promoted into the next league, which of course gives you an achievement, profile medal, a neat fringe around your profile icon (compendium like) and the very rare and valuable moment of BEING promoted.
Promotion is a big deal.
Because a player is emotionally invested into the game - it requires to put literally thousands of hours and to deal with stress / enjoyment along the way - when he is being promoted the feeling of “achievement” kicks in - and it feels absolutely remarkable. A great enough achievement might give to a human the full spectrum of emotional joy: pride, excitement, relief, elation, triumph etc.
I kid you not, I looked up on YouTube “sc2 promotion”:
+ Show Spoiler +
Just watching these makes me feel great
Sc2 and League promotion systems are different:
1) In League you sort of have to climb 100 MMR and then your next games are going to be in the “promotion mode” that requires you to win your next 2 games out of 3 like a bo3: meet this requirement and you’ll be promoted.
It has pros and cons:
+ You know you have to win 2 games out of 3
+ Holy damn it’s really exciting because you are playing important matches - feels like a competitive thrill
+ Feels good as long as you are winning
But
- Before the match officially ends you know you are going to be promoted, which is still decent, but takes away all the surprise
- All that excitement soon enough might turn into some formidable stress, and stress is deteriorating to your mental and just overall health. I covered this it in Ladder Anxiety Notes.
- To win 2 out of 3 consequent games in a pub environment with completely random teammates you need some luck. Pure luck. Which is quite retarded for such an important endeavor, because the overall winrate of a player should be about 50%, but this requires 2 out of 3 which is 66%.
- Feels absolutely devastating to know you are not going to be promoted as you lose. And you still have to end the game regardless.
If you played the first DireTide event (RIP), you might remember how people were literally screaming through their mics “I’M GONNA LOSE MY MYSTICAL BADGER BECAUSE OF YOU RETARDS”.
Because at the start the game itself did show to players the rewards they will get if they collect more candy than the enemy team.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/VtjBbJl.jpg)
People knew if they are going to lose - what exactly they are going to lose.
We hate losing: this is why ladder anxiety exists, however the hatred skyrockets when your loss is not directly because of you, but because of your teammates you are ended up matched with - we've are all been there.
Now imagine you actually LOSE an item because of that - Deathwing himself looks like a cute kitten in comparison to how much hatred a person did feel in this circumstance.
No surprises here, Valve had shown how smart they are and concealed the reward - like a magic trick everything in an instant went back to the normal margins of raging. It's almost unbelievable how ignorance is indeed a bliss.
In Starcraft 2 promotions are spontaneous. Obviously, you have to be as good as a player in the upper league to have a chance to be promoted, however you have no idea when you are finally going to be promoted - it’s clear from the videos above how genuinely people are surprised.
I don’t have the full intel of how Sc2 Promotion system works for real, but imagine you have to get 5.3k in Dota 2 for the system to promote you into this “5k” bracket.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kAT0p1H.png)
This might sound a little dumb, however it’s done for a reason - demotions.
Because after you get this “5k” you might as well lose your next game that technically puts you back into “4k” league / bracket. The MatchMaking system in Sc2 makes absolutely sure this won’t happen, thus requires you to prove you are capable of playing in such bracket. You have to lose a lot of games to be demoted back.
That would be indeed silly if the system would promote and demote a player within one game range like 4987 -> 5012 -> 4985 -> 5008. And this is exactly what we have in Dota: this is the reason people will stop playing ranked whatsoever after a milestone - so easy to lose. Not worth it.
Bragging rights > Ranked.
The drawback of this threshold is sometimes it feels just flat-out unfair, thus depressing and off-putting for the players: the ones who are close to their respective promotions in reality are actually way better skill-wise than a lot of players that populate the league itself.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/FZ7nSU8.png)
5300 > 5001
5300 > 5002
5300 > 5003 etc
This brings us to the last piece - Mandatory New Season League Purification (I’ve no idea how this is “officially” named)
The process is crucial for several reasons:
1) It sure enough contributes into the feeling of the “novelty” of a season
2) Helps clearing “dead” accounts
3) It solves the problem of that poor “5299” player not being promoted into “5k” league as shown in the picture above due to aforementioned purifications of leagues from those dead accounts.
This feature works as soft “recalibration” [that a lot of dota 2 players really want], because it essentially adjusts your “league” to your MMR.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kJ2LrcP.jpg)
But because in Dota 2 MMR is fully transparent to a player and there is no leagues to clear from in the first place - you are always at your proper MMR as long as you play the game.
Let's see how it works:
1) A new person creates a steam account and starts playing dota
2) The system initially has no clue how good this player is
3) Hence prevents him from playing ranked whatsoever, because he is going to inevitable ruin all the games due to
a) how good he is OR
b) how bad he is
compared to the people with whom he’ll end up being matched at first
4) The system forces him to play ~100+ unranked games, and by the time he unlocks ranked it gathers all of the needed information to finally provide to this player an okay match, since now the MatchMaking system is able to place this person correctly in the overall MMR pool which in the end makes teams balanced by their collective rating.
If you do consider MMR Inflation as a problem - the very existence of Leagues eliminates that as well - instead of numbers continuously growing, there is a constant increase in density of skill, due to overall improvement of the entire player-base with time. Which collaterally works as Soft MMR Decay - Top Diamond 4 years ago is merely Platinum today.
As you see, a system of Leagues has a lot of advantages over the current dota 2 relative nothingness. Add to that Seasons and you’ll get the time axis to follow as well. However the last piece of the entire picture is currently missing.
The “A” - Achievements / Accomplishments
Being promoted feels good.
Although it’s not about the promotion itself, but about the accomplishment. The achievements you've got "along the way" don't matter, because you didn't want them anyway, but a thing you truly desired gives a valuable sense of pride and honor and even fulfillment - just look how many “I worked so hard and I got the _next milestone_!” posts there are in Sc2 / Dota sections. Hell, people post videos of themselves on Youtube how they got their respective promotions - clearly there is something to it.
The difference between achieving Dota 5k MMR and Starcraft Masters is the fact there is no shiny badge for you to remember and, obviously, to show off.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/CBcBu1v.jpg)
I lose one game at 5003 MMR - bam, 5k is gone.
I lose one game after breaking into Masters - not a big deal, I am still in Masters.
And even if I lose 10 games in a row, odds are I’m still going to be in Masters, if not till the very end of a current Season, because I believe Blizzard removed mid-season Demotions whatsoever.
AND EVEN THEN when I finally get demoted I have “those bragging rights” in a form of an achievement / label / trophy / mark / you name it, to be able to say “I've been to Masters”.
Because of how easy it is to lose the rating you've obtained in dota at the moment, people are legitimately scared of playing a videogame (notice how ridiculous this sounds) - they don’t want to lose what they’ve been working for. “Can’t lose those bragging rights”.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/C5Dkk8e.jpg )
Every single [other] game nowadays has an achievement system - these badges solidify the progress you've done no matter of how big these accomplishments actually are.
![[image loading]](http://doghousenetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/achieveheaderz.jpg )
Most of these naturally become outdated with time. Even if it is about an immense accomplishment like The International Championship pretty much everything is irrelevant right now: patch, meta, teams, balance, skill, strategies, etc, but the names who got the main trophy adorn the in-game Aegis till this day.
![[image loading]](http://www.cyborgmatt.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Dota2_UI_Aegis.jpg )
“T” - Trophies
Valve not so long ago introduced the “Trophies” window for player profiles in Dota 2.
![[image loading]](http://www.dota2-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Gallery-of-Triumphs-550x295.jpg )
Unfortunately, there are not so much to put on the shelf in the first place: fantasy leagues are irrelevant, compendium level is not that amazing and the other things are just not as exciting at all.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ft90Elx.jpg )
And because the game itself places these “Triumphs” - not the player - soon enough it will become an unorganized heaped mess and finally reworked.
Engineering interesting trophies for a “casual” player base is not an easy task either. Your average player can’t have a lot of trophies just for the reason of him being average. Basically, this is what achievements are for.
![[image loading]](http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs38/f/2008/318/8/5/85a4a424890d1124f82b3e8344b90dc7.png)
once you get to 7k
This sounds rude, but let me explain.
For this type of Gallery, there are 2 exclusive possibilities: every trophy is rare and valuable OR every trophy is a meaningless “just another hat trophy”.
As it stands in Dota 2 we have the second one. Not only that, even if you would actually have an amazing trophy on your shelf - it would be buried amongst others. In addition current Trophies are highly vague unless you've already remembered what each of these things represents.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/SsJDoFK.jpg )
And because no one cares, no one remembers.
There is no requirement for them to make sense, however this property only contributes into further mayhem of the Gallery.
To avoid this, the Gallery needs some kind of sorting and a proper, preferably a player controlled highlighting and featuring.
In reality, Valve already done this very thing with all that “Featured Hero” and “Featured Items” stuff at profile screen: you highlight (feature) your hats (trophies).
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/AOE8i5P.jpg)
The intention is clear - everyone is going to have an ability to show off some stuff. And someone might get a sudden urge to buy a certain hat. You can draw a parallel how the Gallery might look like.
Cool Achievements can contribute into further personalization and involvement of a player as well as the culture of the game. The amount of what can be done is enormous:
My little Zoo: “Collect 25 couriers”
Filthy rich: “Get to own every arcana”
Eazy game: “Comeback from 30k deficit 5 times in a [ranked team] game”
Maelk Award: “Win a [ranked team] game with 0/20+/20+ scoreboard stats”
Headcase hoarder: “Collect 25 unique Sven swords”
MMR Thief: “Win 100 games with Meepo and TA in 4k bracket or higher”
Pajkatt club membership: “Lose a [ranked team] game possessing 10 000 gold”
Here is another amazing usage of trophies that works as an additional remedy to anxiety and unwillingness to actually continue playing after a “milestone”: put some of them at the front page.
In Starcraft 2, each profile has this kind of thing:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0FZzUob.jpg)
It highlights the highest rank a player has achieved in his lifetime career.
For instance if you've achieved “ended a season with 5k MMR” - it will be highlighted just like that. It can easily be made as a form of achievement or as a trophy to give to a player to show it off like a hat.
But the way how it is done in Sc2 right now has several flaws:
1) no timeframe (when)
2) ...hence, might be completely irrelevant. For example if you achieved GM rank 3 years ago, the game is going to highlight this till this day, which is flat-out misleading.
3) There is also an issue with “boosted” accounts for the same exact reason, but that’s to be expected.
digressing into Sc2 UI
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+ Show Spoiler +
To be fair, you can go to Profile - Ladders - Career Summary to see the full range of information about when and what rank a player had, but that’s highly inconvenient navigation-wise.
http://i.imgur.com/ffvQ7Ul.gifv
In fact, Blizzard can easily fix this: just allow to go that deep by clicking on the Trophy icon itself - boom, done.
http://i.imgur.com/v2fr77x.gifv
http://i.imgur.com/ffvQ7Ul.gifv
In fact, Blizzard can easily fix this: just allow to go that deep by clicking on the Trophy icon itself - boom, done.
http://i.imgur.com/v2fr77x.gifv
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To seal the deal, let's say there is this new trophy “5k milestone!” that lasts for some time - till the end of the ongoing season for example. No player will be scared about “losing those 5k bragging rights” anymore.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/C5Dkk8e.jpg)
this screenshot is so relevant again I can’t believe
Imagine as you accomplish 5k, the game gives you a profile border of a specific shiny color - “the bragging rights”. That would be definitely a great trophy to have and especially to manually put onto a profile shelf.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/tLgwf0x.png )
a quick sketch:
a) "Gallery of Triumphs" is simultaneously a button as the entrance to the “shelf”.
b) I can put my previous “bragging rights” (like hats featuring) to show them off within 0 click range.
c) Notice how the background of the “leagues” representing the time a player got them to instantaneously get the idea of “when”.
In conclusion - pretty much everything in dota 2 about user experience can be improved by correct usage of S.A.L.T. What a catchy name it is.
Thanks for reading.
/etofok
Message me all the grammar mistakes (not a native) or improvements via PM to keep the comment section discussion related. If you have any suggestions or questions - just post them. This blog will be buried in a week, meaning there is not a lot of time to ask.
