EPTI do not believe that anything I suggest will actually be implemented in the game, but I would like to just put my thoughts out there in the off chance that I could help make Sc2 a more enjoyable experience.
One of the biggest issues that the Sc2 ladder has it the incentive to play. The only incentives that exist right now are the desire to get better at the game, and or, climbing the ladder up to higher leagues. These are fine incentives, but in the current game market Sc2 is not a game *a lot*people will continuously play when other games offer more or better incentives to play. In a multipart writing exercise I will try to detail a couple major flaws that I believe to exist within Sc2 that could be changed easily. Or in other words, something a second year computer science student could implement in a week or so that would greatly improve the player experience in Sc2. This post will focus on the ranking system in Sc2, or more specifically how I would change it.
**Ranking In Sc2**
One of the best feelings that I have ever experienced in gaming was when I first reached platinum league in WoL back in 2011. I put a commendable amount of effort in trying to improve at the game, and I was rewarded for it. In my opinion this feedback is **ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL** in making a completive game fun to play, and to keep people continuously playing the game. Many people have suggested having a visible MMR as a simple solution, and while I think this could be a good solution I think I may have a better solution. This may sound radical, but I would implore Blizzard to completely remove leagues from Sc2, and implement a ranking system similar to the one used in a game named https://osu.ppy.sh/］Osu![/url].
The simple and elegant system used in Osu! Is the single best system for progression that I have ever have had the pleasure of using. You are not placed in leagues, instead the way that your compare yourself against others is based on you current world ranking. For example if you look my account page on Osu! you will see PP (essentially MMR), my current world ranking, and my country ranking. Every time I get a top score on a song my world rank will change depending on the difficulty of the song. If it goes down I have improved my standing against all of the other players in the world. Knowing that you have improved at a game is great feeling, and knowing that you are now better than 500,000 people at a game is an even better one. You want to keep playing, you want to place better in the world standings, or become the top 1000 players in your country. These are astonishingly profound incentives to play, and are the reason that games are competitive in the first place; you want to be better than everyone else.
Now it is painfully obvious that rhythm games and Sc2 are different genres and function in different ways, and some of the ideas used in Osu! Could not be copy pasted into Sc2, but I think the idea of constant progression, and more importantly constant feedback about your improvement is something that could benefit Sc2 greatly and create a much more enjoyable player experience.
The implementation of such a system would be very simple. A world ranking (which I believe is based off MMR) is already in use for Sc2 at a website called nios.kr. Simply incorporating this rank and visibly displaying it on your profile, and in game lobbies like is done in Osu! would be very simple to implement. The searching for games system would not have to be changed very much as I believe it already searches based MMR, rather than league or division. Divisions would have to be removed entirely, which I’m not sure anyone would miss because they serve almost no function besides as a gating system for promotions. The way people move up and down in their world ranking would be based off wins and losses; whereas this is already handled by the way one loses or gains MMR after a match based off of the skill of your opponent.
The issue of new players being placed in leagues higher than they should, could also be solved simply by starting a new player off with the lowest possible world rank and MMR and let them climb from there. This would allow more constant progression for players, who are naturally better at the game, but more importantly make it less likely for new players to become discouraged by losing a ton of games in a row. To compensate players who come back and are rusty I do think there should be some MMR and world rank decay, but less than it is now. Players should always feel like they have a chance to progress and become better, even if they have taken a month off for any reason whatsoever.
In my eyes the league systems serves two main purposes, to give a player a quick sense of how good they are in comparison to others, and create a sense of progression providing feedback to the player about how much they have improved. I strongly believe that the alternative aforementioned does both of these things better than the current system, and it would be easy to implement. This is one of the few changes that I would love to see in Sc2, as it would give players more incentive to continuously play the game that I love StarCraft 2.
