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Mexico2170 Posts
*Opinions expressed here are my own.
Blizzard needs to better support the competitive aspect of the game through bans, a better ranking system and more eSports advertising inside the game.
Heroes of the Storm is an awesome game. From the UI, to the gameplay and the skins, you can clearly see the big amount of work the development team has put into the game. But no game is perfect, and there’s something that’s been bothering me.
There is, as with any other game, a lot of discussion about things that could be improved upon. The most common feedback is regarding matchmaking, observer slots and the reconnect feature. All of this issues have been acknowledged by Blizzard and they are confirmed to be working on them, so I won't focus on that (which doesn't mean they aren't important issues). But there is an issue that has, so far, been largely ignored by most of the community members: There is a lack of support of the competitive aspect of the game. This, in my opinion, is a very important topic, as I’m a firm believer that for eSports to grow outside the game, you have to support competitiveness inside of it.
I will be covering three main subjects, these being the ranking system, the lack of promotion of esports inside the game and the lack of bans, but I want to start this piece with a question: Is Heroes of the Storm a competitive game? And here I’m not talking about the eSports scene, which is growing every day. What I’m really asking is if the game gives you the tools to be competitive inside of it.
As a Player versus Player game, competitiveness is right at the core of Heroes of the Storm. The moment you get into a match, you know the team that plays better is the team that is going to win. Although winning or losing versus an opponent can give you a general idea of who plays better, it doesn’t tell you where you are standing skill-wise in the overall pool of players and that's where a ranking system comes in. Humans, by nature, are competitive beings who like to. not only become better every day, but also become better than the rest. This is the reason why a good ranking system is crucial in a competitive game. This is also where we run into our first issue.
Ranking System. ![[image loading]](http://bnetcmsus-a.akamaihd.net/cms/blog_header/OVCJFFYL1V9A1363024456972.jpg)
The first problem with the competitive aspect of the game is the ranking system. There is no leaderboard to see how are you doing compared to others. If you are rank 2, you know there some players who are rank 1, but you don’t really know who they are, how far are you from them, or how do you compare. You just see your rank and ‘x’ number of points you need to get promoted, but there is no way to know if you are in the top of rank 2, at the bottom, or if your MMR thinks you should be rank 1 but you haven’t played enough games yet.
Another big problem is the feeling of accomplishment. When you get to another rank it feels dull; just another step to take to get into rank 1. There is no sense of accomplishment whatsoever. This is in part because there are so many ranks they become meaningless. Are you rank 25 or rank 20? Is there even a difference in skill? Can you tell a rank 25 player is better than a rank 27? For me, and for a lot of people, there are only two groups of players: those who are Rank 1 and those who are not. The rest of the rankings feel like they don’t serve any purpose but to make the ladder a grind.
The lack of meaning of the ranks is augmented by the fact there’s no true solo rank. If you are rank 1 for example, it could be that you are an outstanding player on your own. Or it could be that you are an average player who mostly plays with a team and simply knows how to follow orders from the party leader.
I’m well aware the reason there are so many ranks is to give players a sense of progress. Because it is easy to go from one rank to another, you want to play more and get to a higher rank. Admittedly, it does give a sense of progression, but it doesn’t cause a sense of achievement. Ranking up feels dull. This is in strike contrast to the ranking system in StarCraft 2, where you can be stuck in one league for months, but when you finally rank up, it doesn’t matter if you went from Bronze to Silver or Diamond to Master, when you ascend to a higher league it truly feels amazing. The Heroes ranking system is lacking in that respect.
A Grand Master League will eventually be implemented into the game, if HearthStone Legend and StarCraft 2 Grandmaster League serve as references, they will include your true ranking in the server and some sort of leaderboard, which is a nice addition as I mentioned previously. However I’ve got the fear it will cause the same situation rank 1 is causing right now: Are you Grand Master or are you not?
Even worse in my opinion, Grand Master League could create the problem of having highly skilled players getting a good ranking system, while most of the player base would get stuck in a second class system. While I believe both a StarCraft-like ranking system, and a Hearthstone-like one have their pros and their cons, I believe there is a middle ground that could be explored which doesn't involve having two different ranking systems in the same game mode.
In the last couple of days there have been suggestions from the community to just show MMR and remove the ranks, but contrary to what most people seem to believe, an MMR ranking system has it’s own flaws. The main virtue of an MMR showing ranking system is that it is the closest representation of your true skill level, so it is the most accurate way to see how you fare against other players. The MMR system however has it’s own flaws, mainly, it lacks both a sense of progression and achievement.
It lacks progression because after your first few games where your MMR varies a lot, you will get placed into a certain MMR range, where you can move a little up or down, but in general you’ll stay in the same range, because that’s where your skill truly is. This happens because to move up in the ranks you need to improve your play, however other players are also improving too, so to really move up you need to play more games and get better faster than the average player in your skill range. As you might guess, only a few players are able to achieve it.
It lacks a sense of accomplishment, because even if you’re one of the players that is moving up through the ranks, if you have 2607 MMR points, and now you have 2679 points, while you can see you advanced, it doesn’t feel like you just achieved something important. Whereas with a league system you might have actually got to a new league with that MMR change which would feel much more meaningful.
Apart from those main issues, there are other not so obvious ones, like the leaver penalty. Right now if you leave a game during the draft, you lose 300 rank points. In an MMR ranking system, what would you lose? 300 MMR points? MMR, more than a rank, is a representation of your skill, so if you remove 300 points, to the matchmaking system that player is worse now, and so he will get matched with and against players of lower skill, while in reality he is still better than them. As you can guess, having a more skilled player in an MMR range of less skilled players would only make the matchmaking worse, and that is something we really don't want, do we?
The way I see it, there is no perfect ranking system, but the more I think about it, the more an hybrid system is appealing.
Finally, to complement the ranking system, the inclusion of automated tournaments every week as Blizzard is doing with StarCraft could also help people from across all levels of play to get into the competitive aspect of the game. Who knows, maybe there could be a new tournament-based ranked system which includes bans now that teamleague is gone.
There are bans in tournaments, but not in the game.![[image loading]](https://bnetcmsus-a.akamaihd.net/cms/content_folder_media/du/DUARAZCEB1M41415212047875.png)
One of the biggest problems of the competitive aspect of the game right now is that there is a disconnection between the game you play and the game you watch.
When Road to BlizzCon 2015 was announced, I was very excited, and still am, to be able to see the best players compete for a 1.2 Million prize pool, the biggest a Blizzard game has ever had. What interested me the most though, is the draft format of the games. Each team would be able to ban two heroes, for a total of four bans. This system would change dramatically the way a match is played.
Having bans available gives the game more strategic depth, as teams and coaches are able to counter certain compositions, force certain picks and be creative with the heroes they choose. When they announced this system I was excited to see bans finally coming into the game bringing more strategy with them. The problem is the Heroes of the Storm World Championship has been going for almost four months and bans are still not even close to being implemented in the game. Since bans aren’t available yet, that means the Road BlizzCon tournament, which includes two bans for each team, is being played in a draft system not available in Heroes of the Storm.
Let me say that again: The official game mode of the premier Heroes of the Storm tournament is not even available in the game.
It makes no sense! Because there are no bans in the game, teams and tournaments are forced to use third party tools to play. Yes, the tools work well but they take valuable time to set up which just makes the breaks between matches longer. Furthermore, professional players can’t practice their drafts in the ladder because there are no bans. Imagine if in StarCraft 2 pros played 1v1 tournaments but that mode wasn’t available in the game so they would need to use third party tools and use a work around in the Arcade to practice. If your competitive scene is based around one game mode, that mode should should be in the game, period.
Don’t get me wrong, I know things require testing and implementing bans in ranked games isn’t as easy as flicking a switch. I know there are difficulties when looking to implement double bans in ranked mode, as this would increase the number of heroes required to play it. Furthermore Dustin Browder has said that bans would come to TeamLeague eventually, but that league doesn’t exist anymore. If Blizzard implements bans for five mans it would create a weird situation where you’d need 10 heroes to play if you are playing solo or with up to four players, and 14 heroes if you are playing in a five-man team.
Yes, things do require testing and there are some difficulties in implementing it, but it makes you wonder, shouldn’t this have been tested before release? Or before announcing the Road to BlizzCon maybe? Blizzard could atleast have given us double bans in custom games when they announced the tournament, you know, just for the mode to be available in the game. If bans in ranked still require more testing, Blizzard could at least implement in those custom games right now, it’s not too late as the World Championship is still going on.
Wait, there is a competitive scene?![[image loading]](http://bnetcmsus-a.akamaihd.net/cms/blog_header/6u/6U91WDFLCM5V1434566334626.jpg)
With Heroes of the Dorm and Road to BlizzCon, we can clearly see how Blizzard is really pushing the competitive aspect outside the game. Recently, Blizzard has created the first official twitter account dedicated to Heroes of the Storm eSports, and it’s going pretty well. The eSports team isn’t taking it slowly, they are going all out with it. The problem is Blizzard isn’t translating that into the game at all.
Think about this: You log in to play Heroes of the Storm, with the way it is set up at the moment, how would you know there is a tournament going on right now? How would you now this weekend there is going to be a tournament? In fact, how would you know there is a pro-scene at all?
Blizzard advertises its events through Twitter, Facebook and other kinds of social media, but the player base is orders of magnitude bigger than the ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ those accounts have, which means most of the players are not getting any news. Now, admittedly the battle.net launcher is a good place where Blizzard has put put info about tournaments, but still there is no info about eSports inside the game at all. Even worse, Blizzard only has advertised the Road to BlizzCon there so far, and other tournaments, like the recent MSI Masters Gaming Arena, weren't publicized.
I think Blizzard can do more to advertise the competitive scene inside the game. In fact, they already do, in StarCraft at least. As you can see from this screenshot, in StarCraft 2 they often put tournaments right in front of you when you log in, just so you can click on them and start watching. I know it’s pretty cool to see the newest character on the home screen, but there is no reason it should always be there as that space could be used to advertise the competitive scene. Right now you log into the game and after three days of a hero being released you just skip the homescreen without even looking at it. Doing what the guys at StarCraft 2 do wouldn’t be that hard and it would be great start, ideally though, you should be able to watch tournaments inside the client, either through in game tools, which admittedly is something hard to implement, or even by just having a stream there, in the otherwise pretty empty and forgotten home screen.
Conclusion
These three topics I bring attention to, in my opinion, are of vital importance to the development of the game. The latter two in particular are incongruent with the philosophy of Heroes of the Storm as an eSport. If the plan was to have competitive Heroes as some sort of extra, an afterthought even, it would make sense. But eSports are a crucial part of the development of the game. In words of Mike Morhaime (CEO of Blizzard Entertainment) in the latest Investors call: “We think that, in this genre, eSports is a big driver and we've already started with our major eSports initiatives underway with our Road to BlizzCon, and so we would expect that eSports will continue to be a driver for us in terms of engagement and growth of the game.“ A philosophy we all agree with, and is already taking place outside the game but that idea is not reflected in any way in the game at the moment.
The development team lead by Dustin Browder does an amazing job creating a fun and exciting game to play. The eSports team lead by Kim Phan do an amazing job at creating awesome eSports events, from Heroes of the Dorm to Road to BlizzCon, that constantly bring us amazing tournaments. But they need to work together, as one is dependent of the other. So far, tournament matches are exciting, the only thing we need now is reflecting the competitive aspect of esports, into the game. Because if Heroes of the Storm, or any game, is to succeed as an eSport, the competitive aspect needs to succeed inside the game too.
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Good stuff. The main issue with ban implementation is that is makes for a very high barrier to entry for hero league. 10 heroes for a F2P is already quite a slog. And that's just to get to the main experience that HOTS advertises--a team-oriented game that requires coordination from draft to play. QM is great for introducing new players to mechanics in a live environment, but hero league should be a progression that is presented soon after.
10 to 14 heroes is a huge requirement jump right now. Blizz's hero pricing kinda has them cornered here.
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If Blizzard implements bans for five mans it would create a weird situation where you’d need 10 heroes to play if you are playing solo or with up to four players, and 14 heroes if you are playing in a five-man team.
is not that hard.
HL lvl 30 & 10 heroes
TL lvl 40 & 14 heroes.
and DB is planning to remove the 3-4 parties from the HL mode.
about esports, dota has dotatv, DB said in 2012 SC2 could have something similar and now we are at 2015. dotatv gives a lot of options to choose and is an easy way to bring player to the esports scene. you can watch games with the game client, look for the info you are interested, or hear just the ingame sound without casters.
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Mexico2170 Posts
I think the old TeamLeague should come back as it was before. There was something pretty cool about having to create a team and commit to it. (Or well, create three teams). As you said, xuanzue, if Blizzard changes Hero League to only let people queue with 1-2 persons and send the rest to quickmatch/teamleague TeamLeague with teams and parties of fives (the original idea Blizz had) can come back, now with bans. If you are in a party or team it is much more probably that you can agree on which hero to ban.
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To me your third point is the most important one, you need to draw people into the competitive part of the scene from within the game itself. That`s where the player base is and even i who are interested in esports find it somewhat difficult to follow the Heroes comp scene atm.
I personally don`t have any big gripes about the ranking system as is, but then again I`m not as opposed to grinds as many people are. (I enjoy mmos and Diablo for example  ) Maybe they could put in some gold awards throughout different tiers of the ranks to make it feel more meaningful to rank up?
Bans is difficult since alot of ppl play the game without spending money on it and QM is, atleast in my opinion, a pretty lackluster experience. I would just buy my way out of the problem, but i already find it difficult to learn enough heroes to not be a complete moron in HL with limited amount of time to play.
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Honestly, for myself, I just play the game because it's fun, I don't really care if it's an eSport or not. It's the same as when I played BW, I just thought the game was really fun, so I played it a lot. While eSports tools and features you describe are all fine and good, so long as the game is fun, I think people will want to play it, and eSports will be fine. All you really need for a successful eSport is people playing your game, the other stuff will work itself out. There's always been third party things like ICCUP etc that the community will create if there's demand. Dont' get me wrong, if Blizzard does the things you say then great, but if not, I think it will be okay as long as the game is fun and people want to play.
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How about "make replays watchable for groups" like they implemented in starcraft ..after 3 or 4 years?
Or, they could actually try to not make me feel alone whenever I start the game. Or, they could stop cross-pushing Diablo III and instead balance out themes.
Also, they could finalize class distribution (same number of classes in each QM match, 2 support vs. 2 support etc. - I've heard it's in but I regularly see contrary things).
Or, they could finally fix QM in terms of facing teams of 3, 4, 5 guys whenever you solo queue.
In general, Blizzard's approach to the game seemed to be a lazy one.
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you feel alone ? ;_; I get invites after every second game D: . I am running out of excuses.
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On September 01 2015 01:52 [Phantom] wrote:Ranking System. The first problem with the competitive aspect of the game is the ranking system. There is no leaderboard to see how are you doing compared to others. If you are rank 2, you know there some players who are rank 1, but you don’t really know who they are, how far are you from them, or how do you compare. You just see your rank and ‘x’ number of points you need to get promoted, but there is no way to know if you are in the top of rank 2, at the bottom, or if your MMR thinks you should be rank 1 but you haven’t played enough games yet. Another big problem is the feeling of accomplishment. When you get to another rank it feels dull; just another step to take to get into rank 1. There is no sense of accomplishment whatsoever. This is in part because there are so many ranks they become meaningless. Are you rank 25 or rank 20? Is there even a difference in skill? Can you tell a rank 25 player is better than a rank 27? For me, and for a lot of people, there are only two groups of players: those who are Rank 1 and those who are not. The rest of the rankings feel like they don’t serve any purpose but to make the ladder a grind. The lack of meaning of the ranks is augmented by the fact there’s no true solo rank. If you are rank 1 for example, it could be that you are an outstanding player on your own. Or it could be that you are an average player who mostly plays with a team and simply knows how to follow orders from the party leader. I’m well aware the reason there are so many ranks is to give players a sense of progress. Because it is easy to go from one rank to another, you want to play more and get to a higher rank. Admittedly, it does give a sense of progression, but it doesn’t cause a sense of achievement. Ranking up feels dull. This is in strike contrast to the ranking system in StarCraft 2, where you can be stuck in one league for months, but when you finally rank up, it doesn’t matter if you went from Bronze to Silver or Diamond to Master, when you ascend to a higher league it truly feels amazing. The Heroes ranking system is lacking in that respect. A Grand Master League will eventually be implemented into the game, if HearthStone Legend and StarCraft 2 Grandmaster League serve as references, they will include your true ranking in the server and some sort of leaderboard, which is a nice addition as I mentioned previously. However I’ve got the fear it will cause the same situation rank 1 is causing right now: Are you Grand Master or are you not? Even worse in my opinion, Grand Master League could create the problem of having highly skilled players getting a good ranking system, while most of the player base would get stuck in a second class system. While I believe both a StarCraft-like ranking system, and a Hearthstone-like one have their pros and their cons, I believe there is a middle ground that could be explored which doesn't involve having two different ranking systems in the same game mode. In the last couple of days there have been suggestions from the community to just show MMR and remove the ranks, but contrary to what most people seem to believe, an MMR ranking system has it’s own flaws. The main virtue of an MMR showing ranking system is that it is the closest representation of your true skill level, so it is the most accurate way to see how you fare against other players. The MMR system however has it’s own flaws, mainly, it lacks both a sense of progression and achievement. It lacks progression because after your first few games where your MMR varies a lot, you will get placed into a certain MMR range, where you can move a little up or down, but in general you’ll stay in the same range, because that’s where your skill truly is. This happens because to move up in the ranks you need to improve your play, however other players are also improving too, so to really move up you need to play more games and get better faster than the average player in your skill range. As you might guess, only a few players are able to achieve it. It lacks a sense of accomplishment, because even if you’re one of the players that is moving up through the ranks, if you have 2607 MMR points, and now you have 2679 points, while you can see you advanced, it doesn’t feel like you just achieved something important. Whereas with a league system you might have actually got to a new league with that MMR change which would feel much more meaningful. Apart from those main issues, there are other not so obvious ones, like the leaver penalty. Right now if you leave a game during the draft, you lose 300 rank points. In an MMR ranking system, what would you lose? 300 MMR points? MMR, more than a rank, is a representation of your skill, so if you remove 300 points, to the matchmaking system that player is worse now, and so he will get matched with and against players of lower skill, while in reality he is still better than them. As you can guess, having a more skilled player in an MMR range of less skilled players would only make the matchmaking worse, and that is something we really don't want, do we? The way I see it, there is no perfect ranking system, but the more I think about it, the more an hybrid system is appealing. Finally, to complement the ranking system, the inclusion of automated tournaments every week as Blizzard is doing with StarCraft could also help people from across all levels of play to get into the competitive aspect of the game. Who knows, maybe there could be a new tournament-based ranked system which includes bans now that teamleague is gone.
So the solution is to reduce the ranking system precision, making it up to 16 times worse, from 2% to up to 32%, like SC2's league system? No.
Your post is contradictory.
You claim that if you are in rank 2, you don't know how far you are from rank 1 (you are 2% from rank 1 on average), yet you want leagues. But with leagues, you will have even less information, up to 16 times less information about how far you are from gold to platinum.
And if that answer isn't good enough for you because you want to narrow that down further than just 2%, then have 1000 ranks, so that the distance from one rank to the next is 0.1%. Yet in another contradiction, you complain about having more precision.
The solution is not less information and more obfuscation like SC2's rank system. HotS ranks, unlike SC2 ranks, is the percentile of MMR. The solution is more accuracy and precision, not less, and that's what HotS gives. And yes, HotS ranking system can be improved. Improved by increasing accuracy and transparency, not by creating artificially imposed and arbitrarily chosen league buckets that destroys accuracy and transparency.
Is SC2 a competitive game? Given how it's league system is design, the answer is a resounding NO. It's about sugarcoating and distorting ranks. Infantilizing its players because Blizzard thinks they can't handle the truth. The only thing that is competitive is WCS.
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Nothing prevents a league system where you have an in-league ladder or gauge to fill before you go to the next league. League system does not mean loss of informations or precision, if it is implemented well.
I'm more for a simple MMR display, but I'll be ok with league system similar as the SC2 one, as I always love to see me climbing the ranks in SC2 and get promoted in the end (well, it's been a while, but still :-) )
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United States4883 Posts
On September 02 2015 19:23 paralleluniverse wrote:Show nested quote +On September 01 2015 01:52 [Phantom] wrote:Ranking System. The first problem with the competitive aspect of the game is the ranking system. There is no leaderboard to see how are you doing compared to others. If you are rank 2, you know there some players who are rank 1, but you don’t really know who they are, how far are you from them, or how do you compare. You just see your rank and ‘x’ number of points you need to get promoted, but there is no way to know if you are in the top of rank 2, at the bottom, or if your MMR thinks you should be rank 1 but you haven’t played enough games yet. Another big problem is the feeling of accomplishment. When you get to another rank it feels dull; just another step to take to get into rank 1. There is no sense of accomplishment whatsoever. This is in part because there are so many ranks they become meaningless. Are you rank 25 or rank 20? Is there even a difference in skill? Can you tell a rank 25 player is better than a rank 27? For me, and for a lot of people, there are only two groups of players: those who are Rank 1 and those who are not. The rest of the rankings feel like they don’t serve any purpose but to make the ladder a grind. The lack of meaning of the ranks is augmented by the fact there’s no true solo rank. If you are rank 1 for example, it could be that you are an outstanding player on your own. Or it could be that you are an average player who mostly plays with a team and simply knows how to follow orders from the party leader. I’m well aware the reason there are so many ranks is to give players a sense of progress. Because it is easy to go from one rank to another, you want to play more and get to a higher rank. Admittedly, it does give a sense of progression, but it doesn’t cause a sense of achievement. Ranking up feels dull. This is in strike contrast to the ranking system in StarCraft 2, where you can be stuck in one league for months, but when you finally rank up, it doesn’t matter if you went from Bronze to Silver or Diamond to Master, when you ascend to a higher league it truly feels amazing. The Heroes ranking system is lacking in that respect. A Grand Master League will eventually be implemented into the game, if HearthStone Legend and StarCraft 2 Grandmaster League serve as references, they will include your true ranking in the server and some sort of leaderboard, which is a nice addition as I mentioned previously. However I’ve got the fear it will cause the same situation rank 1 is causing right now: Are you Grand Master or are you not? Even worse in my opinion, Grand Master League could create the problem of having highly skilled players getting a good ranking system, while most of the player base would get stuck in a second class system. While I believe both a StarCraft-like ranking system, and a Hearthstone-like one have their pros and their cons, I believe there is a middle ground that could be explored which doesn't involve having two different ranking systems in the same game mode. In the last couple of days there have been suggestions from the community to just show MMR and remove the ranks, but contrary to what most people seem to believe, an MMR ranking system has it’s own flaws. The main virtue of an MMR showing ranking system is that it is the closest representation of your true skill level, so it is the most accurate way to see how you fare against other players. The MMR system however has it’s own flaws, mainly, it lacks both a sense of progression and achievement. It lacks progression because after your first few games where your MMR varies a lot, you will get placed into a certain MMR range, where you can move a little up or down, but in general you’ll stay in the same range, because that’s where your skill truly is. This happens because to move up in the ranks you need to improve your play, however other players are also improving too, so to really move up you need to play more games and get better faster than the average player in your skill range. As you might guess, only a few players are able to achieve it. It lacks a sense of accomplishment, because even if you’re one of the players that is moving up through the ranks, if you have 2607 MMR points, and now you have 2679 points, while you can see you advanced, it doesn’t feel like you just achieved something important. Whereas with a league system you might have actually got to a new league with that MMR change which would feel much more meaningful. Apart from those main issues, there are other not so obvious ones, like the leaver penalty. Right now if you leave a game during the draft, you lose 300 rank points. In an MMR ranking system, what would you lose? 300 MMR points? MMR, more than a rank, is a representation of your skill, so if you remove 300 points, to the matchmaking system that player is worse now, and so he will get matched with and against players of lower skill, while in reality he is still better than them. As you can guess, having a more skilled player in an MMR range of less skilled players would only make the matchmaking worse, and that is something we really don't want, do we? The way I see it, there is no perfect ranking system, but the more I think about it, the more an hybrid system is appealing. Finally, to complement the ranking system, the inclusion of automated tournaments every week as Blizzard is doing with StarCraft could also help people from across all levels of play to get into the competitive aspect of the game. Who knows, maybe there could be a new tournament-based ranked system which includes bans now that teamleague is gone. So the solution is reduce to ranking system precision, making it up to 16 times worse, from 2% to up 32%, like SC2's league system? No. Your post is contradictory. You claim that if you are in rank 2, you don't know how far you are from rank 1 (you are 2% from rank 1 on average), yet want leagues. But if leagues, you will have even less, up to 16 times less information about how far you are from gold to platinum. And if that answer isn't good enough for you because you want to narrow that down further than just 2%, then have 1000 ranks, so that the distance from one rank to the next is 0.1%. Yet in another contradiction, you complain about having more precision. The solution is not less information and more obfuscating like SC2's rank system. HotS ranks, unlike SC2 ranks, is the percentile of MMR. The solution is more accuracy and precision, not less, and that's what HotS gives. And yes, HotS ranking system can be improved. Improved by increase accuracy and transparency, not by creating artificially imposed and arbitrarily chosen league buckets that destroys accuracy and transparency. Is SC2 a competitive game? Given how it's league system is design, the answer is a resounding NO. It's about sugarcoating and distorting ranks. Infantilizing its players because Blizzard thinks they can't handle the truth. The only thing that is competitive is WCS.
I think you're missing the point here. His suggestion is somewhere along the lines of implementing a league system on top of ranks in order to give you a sense of progression and achievement while also giving you a more accurate reading of where you are in relation to others.
To be honest, I actually think the League of Legends ranking system is one of the best out there. You're placed into a division of 100 people in any given league, and you're goal is to make it to 100 points before you can play a Bo5 series to place for the next league. Not only does this allow you to see your progress versus other people (albeit with arbitrary League Points), but it also greatly distinguishes players from League levels (Plat I vs Plat V) but also between leagues as well (a Plat player is WAYYYYY better than a Gold player, unlike SC2 where Bronze to Platinum players are all fairly even skill level). You don't have to deal with the frustration of MMR directly, you can feel confident as you begin to level up and make progress, and most of all, you are actually distinguishing yourself from other players instead of playing in an MMR-less vacuum.
Sidenote: Also, SC2 was specifically designed to be an ESPORT to the fault of its makers, and that's readily obvious. Go play on your elitist carousel and stop posting useless, misguided posts.
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I wouldn't be opposed to a league system in conjunction with a visible MMR. I'd have to think about that more to determine if the inclusion of MMR would make the leagues meaningless, but it seems to me initially that that could give meaningful progression and an understanding of your own skill level over time.
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On September 03 2015 00:26 SC2John wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2015 19:23 paralleluniverse wrote:On September 01 2015 01:52 [Phantom] wrote:Ranking System. The first problem with the competitive aspect of the game is the ranking system. There is no leaderboard to see how are you doing compared to others. If you are rank 2, you know there some players who are rank 1, but you don’t really know who they are, how far are you from them, or how do you compare. You just see your rank and ‘x’ number of points you need to get promoted, but there is no way to know if you are in the top of rank 2, at the bottom, or if your MMR thinks you should be rank 1 but you haven’t played enough games yet. Another big problem is the feeling of accomplishment. When you get to another rank it feels dull; just another step to take to get into rank 1. There is no sense of accomplishment whatsoever. This is in part because there are so many ranks they become meaningless. Are you rank 25 or rank 20? Is there even a difference in skill? Can you tell a rank 25 player is better than a rank 27? For me, and for a lot of people, there are only two groups of players: those who are Rank 1 and those who are not. The rest of the rankings feel like they don’t serve any purpose but to make the ladder a grind. The lack of meaning of the ranks is augmented by the fact there’s no true solo rank. If you are rank 1 for example, it could be that you are an outstanding player on your own. Or it could be that you are an average player who mostly plays with a team and simply knows how to follow orders from the party leader. I’m well aware the reason there are so many ranks is to give players a sense of progress. Because it is easy to go from one rank to another, you want to play more and get to a higher rank. Admittedly, it does give a sense of progression, but it doesn’t cause a sense of achievement. Ranking up feels dull. This is in strike contrast to the ranking system in StarCraft 2, where you can be stuck in one league for months, but when you finally rank up, it doesn’t matter if you went from Bronze to Silver or Diamond to Master, when you ascend to a higher league it truly feels amazing. The Heroes ranking system is lacking in that respect. A Grand Master League will eventually be implemented into the game, if HearthStone Legend and StarCraft 2 Grandmaster League serve as references, they will include your true ranking in the server and some sort of leaderboard, which is a nice addition as I mentioned previously. However I’ve got the fear it will cause the same situation rank 1 is causing right now: Are you Grand Master or are you not? Even worse in my opinion, Grand Master League could create the problem of having highly skilled players getting a good ranking system, while most of the player base would get stuck in a second class system. While I believe both a StarCraft-like ranking system, and a Hearthstone-like one have their pros and their cons, I believe there is a middle ground that could be explored which doesn't involve having two different ranking systems in the same game mode. In the last couple of days there have been suggestions from the community to just show MMR and remove the ranks, but contrary to what most people seem to believe, an MMR ranking system has it’s own flaws. The main virtue of an MMR showing ranking system is that it is the closest representation of your true skill level, so it is the most accurate way to see how you fare against other players. The MMR system however has it’s own flaws, mainly, it lacks both a sense of progression and achievement. It lacks progression because after your first few games where your MMR varies a lot, you will get placed into a certain MMR range, where you can move a little up or down, but in general you’ll stay in the same range, because that’s where your skill truly is. This happens because to move up in the ranks you need to improve your play, however other players are also improving too, so to really move up you need to play more games and get better faster than the average player in your skill range. As you might guess, only a few players are able to achieve it. It lacks a sense of accomplishment, because even if you’re one of the players that is moving up through the ranks, if you have 2607 MMR points, and now you have 2679 points, while you can see you advanced, it doesn’t feel like you just achieved something important. Whereas with a league system you might have actually got to a new league with that MMR change which would feel much more meaningful. Apart from those main issues, there are other not so obvious ones, like the leaver penalty. Right now if you leave a game during the draft, you lose 300 rank points. In an MMR ranking system, what would you lose? 300 MMR points? MMR, more than a rank, is a representation of your skill, so if you remove 300 points, to the matchmaking system that player is worse now, and so he will get matched with and against players of lower skill, while in reality he is still better than them. As you can guess, having a more skilled player in an MMR range of less skilled players would only make the matchmaking worse, and that is something we really don't want, do we? The way I see it, there is no perfect ranking system, but the more I think about it, the more an hybrid system is appealing. Finally, to complement the ranking system, the inclusion of automated tournaments every week as Blizzard is doing with StarCraft could also help people from across all levels of play to get into the competitive aspect of the game. Who knows, maybe there could be a new tournament-based ranked system which includes bans now that teamleague is gone. So the solution is reduce to ranking system precision, making it up to 16 times worse, from 2% to up 32%, like SC2's league system? No. Your post is contradictory. You claim that if you are in rank 2, you don't know how far you are from rank 1 (you are 2% from rank 1 on average), yet want leagues. But if leagues, you will have even less, up to 16 times less information about how far you are from gold to platinum. And if that answer isn't good enough for you because you want to narrow that down further than just 2%, then have 1000 ranks, so that the distance from one rank to the next is 0.1%. Yet in another contradiction, you complain about having more precision. The solution is not less information and more obfuscating like SC2's rank system. HotS ranks, unlike SC2 ranks, is the percentile of MMR. The solution is more accuracy and precision, not less, and that's what HotS gives. And yes, HotS ranking system can be improved. Improved by increase accuracy and transparency, not by creating artificially imposed and arbitrarily chosen league buckets that destroys accuracy and transparency. Is SC2 a competitive game? Given how it's league system is design, the answer is a resounding NO. It's about sugarcoating and distorting ranks. Infantilizing its players because Blizzard thinks they can't handle the truth. The only thing that is competitive is WCS. I think you're missing the point here. His suggestion is somewhere along the lines of implementing a league system on top of ranks in order to give you a sense of progression and achievement while also giving you a more accurate reading of where you are in relation to others. To be honest, I actually think the League of Legends ranking system is one of the best out there. You're placed into a division of 100 people in any given league, and you're goal is to make it to 100 points before you can play a Bo5 series to place for the next league. Not only does this allow you to see your progress versus other people (albeit with arbitrary League Points), but it also greatly distinguishes players from League levels (Plat I vs Plat V) but also between leagues as well (a Plat player is WAYYYYY better than a Gold player, unlike SC2 where Bronze to Platinum players are all fairly even skill level). You don't have to deal with the frustration of MMR directly, you can feel confident as you begin to level up and make progress, and most of all, you are actually distinguishing yourself from other players instead of playing in an MMR-less vacuum. Sidenote: Also, SC2 was specifically designed to be an ESPORT to the fault of its makers, and that's readily obvious. Go play on your elitist carousel and stop posting useless, misguided posts.
There is no difference between "Plat I, Plat 2, Plat 3, Plat 4, Plat 5, Diamond 1, Diamond 2, ..." and "18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, ...".
It's just renaming labels.
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Mexico2170 Posts
On September 02 2015 19:23 paralleluniverse wrote:Show nested quote +On September 01 2015 01:52 [Phantom] wrote:Ranking System. The first problem with the competitive aspect of the game is the ranking system. There is no leaderboard to see how are you doing compared to others. If you are rank 2, you know there some players who are rank 1, but you don’t really know who they are, how far are you from them, or how do you compare. You just see your rank and ‘x’ number of points you need to get promoted, but there is no way to know if you are in the top of rank 2, at the bottom, or if your MMR thinks you should be rank 1 but you haven’t played enough games yet. Another big problem is the feeling of accomplishment. When you get to another rank it feels dull; just another step to take to get into rank 1. There is no sense of accomplishment whatsoever. This is in part because there are so many ranks they become meaningless. Are you rank 25 or rank 20? Is there even a difference in skill? Can you tell a rank 25 player is better than a rank 27? For me, and for a lot of people, there are only two groups of players: those who are Rank 1 and those who are not. The rest of the rankings feel like they don’t serve any purpose but to make the ladder a grind. The lack of meaning of the ranks is augmented by the fact there’s no true solo rank. If you are rank 1 for example, it could be that you are an outstanding player on your own. Or it could be that you are an average player who mostly plays with a team and simply knows how to follow orders from the party leader. I’m well aware the reason there are so many ranks is to give players a sense of progress. Because it is easy to go from one rank to another, you want to play more and get to a higher rank. Admittedly, it does give a sense of progression, but it doesn’t cause a sense of achievement. Ranking up feels dull. This is in strike contrast to the ranking system in StarCraft 2, where you can be stuck in one league for months, but when you finally rank up, it doesn’t matter if you went from Bronze to Silver or Diamond to Master, when you ascend to a higher league it truly feels amazing. The Heroes ranking system is lacking in that respect. A Grand Master League will eventually be implemented into the game, if HearthStone Legend and StarCraft 2 Grandmaster League serve as references, they will include your true ranking in the server and some sort of leaderboard, which is a nice addition as I mentioned previously. However I’ve got the fear it will cause the same situation rank 1 is causing right now: Are you Grand Master or are you not? Even worse in my opinion, Grand Master League could create the problem of having highly skilled players getting a good ranking system, while most of the player base would get stuck in a second class system. While I believe both a StarCraft-like ranking system, and a Hearthstone-like one have their pros and their cons, I believe there is a middle ground that could be explored which doesn't involve having two different ranking systems in the same game mode. In the last couple of days there have been suggestions from the community to just show MMR and remove the ranks, but contrary to what most people seem to believe, an MMR ranking system has it’s own flaws. The main virtue of an MMR showing ranking system is that it is the closest representation of your true skill level, so it is the most accurate way to see how you fare against other players. The MMR system however has it’s own flaws, mainly, it lacks both a sense of progression and achievement. It lacks progression because after your first few games where your MMR varies a lot, you will get placed into a certain MMR range, where you can move a little up or down, but in general you’ll stay in the same range, because that’s where your skill truly is. This happens because to move up in the ranks you need to improve your play, however other players are also improving too, so to really move up you need to play more games and get better faster than the average player in your skill range. As you might guess, only a few players are able to achieve it. It lacks a sense of accomplishment, because even if you’re one of the players that is moving up through the ranks, if you have 2607 MMR points, and now you have 2679 points, while you can see you advanced, it doesn’t feel like you just achieved something important. Whereas with a league system you might have actually got to a new league with that MMR change which would feel much more meaningful. Apart from those main issues, there are other not so obvious ones, like the leaver penalty. Right now if you leave a game during the draft, you lose 300 rank points. In an MMR ranking system, what would you lose? 300 MMR points? MMR, more than a rank, is a representation of your skill, so if you remove 300 points, to the matchmaking system that player is worse now, and so he will get matched with and against players of lower skill, while in reality he is still better than them. As you can guess, having a more skilled player in an MMR range of less skilled players would only make the matchmaking worse, and that is something we really don't want, do we? The way I see it, there is no perfect ranking system, but the more I think about it, the more an hybrid system is appealing. Finally, to complement the ranking system, the inclusion of automated tournaments every week as Blizzard is doing with StarCraft could also help people from across all levels of play to get into the competitive aspect of the game. Who knows, maybe there could be a new tournament-based ranked system which includes bans now that teamleague is gone. So the solution is reduced to ranking system precision, making it up to 16 times worse, from 2% to up 32%, like SC2's league system? No. Your post is contradictory. You claim that if you are in rank 2, you don't know how far you are from rank 1 (you are 2% from rank 1 on average), yet want leagues. But if leagues, you will have even less, up to 16 times less information about how far you are from gold to platinum. And if that answer isn't good enough for you because you want to narrow that down further than just 2%, then have 1000 ranks, so that the distance from one rank to the next is 0.1%. Yet in another contradiction, you complain about having more precision. The solution is not less information and more obfuscating like SC2's rank system. HotS ranks, unlike SC2 ranks, is the percentile of MMR. The solution is more accuracy and precision, not less, and that's what HotS gives. And yes, HotS ranking system can be improved. Improved by increase accuracy and transparency, not by creating artificially imposed and arbitrarily chosen league buckets that destroys accuracy and transparency. Is SC2 a competitive game? Given how it's league system is design, the answer is a resounding NO. It's about sugarcoating and distorting ranks. Infantilizing its players because Blizzard thinks they can't handle the truth. The only thing that is competitive is WCS.
I agree on some things you say however you missed a very important point: I never explicitly said I wanted leagues or they were the better system, instead of that what I said was the following:
The ranking system in heroes of the storm has the virtue of giving you a sense of progress, as getting to a better rank takes you 2-3 games on average. This helps gives player give a sense of progression and that ranking up isn't impossible so they play more. However it has two drawbacks: it is not an amazing representation of your skill level, and you can't even compare it with others through leaderboards. The second drawback is that it doesn't give you a sense of accomplishment. When you go up in a rank you don't feel the kind of satisfaction you feel on sc2, unless you are getting to rank 1, because there are so many ranks they kinda lose meaning.
What I said about the leagues is that they solve the second drawback, while maintaining the first virtue. In a system like the sc2 one, you get a sense of progression when you are in a league and you rank up from rank 100 to 1 (most ranks are meaningless there too, though, with people caring mostly about the top8-top25, but you do feel progress.) And then you get a sense of a really big achievement when you get promoted from Gold to Platinum.
Where I agree is that it isn't that accurate either. While a Gold player is a Gold player and that skill level is pretty accurate, a gold rank 8 could be better than a gold rank 1, and you don't have a way to really compare yourself with most other Gold players. A very big part of that is because the bonus pool and the different sub-leagues.
Having 1000 ranks would make it more accurate yes, but it would have basically the same problems as just showing MMR.
I purposefully didn't share how I think the ranking system would be so people would focus on the idea itself instead of how I think it should be, and then people shared their own ideas, like what you did. Now that we are talking about it, this is my idea (feel free to agree or disagree with it).
I think they should just mix all the systems.
I like the sc2 league system, however I agree that in some leagues it is not as accurate as the league's can hold players from very different skill levels and they wouldn't know where they really stand agaisnt each other. Because of that in my idea leagues would be separated (sort of what LoL does) in sub-tiers. Like Gold 3, 2 and 1. Each of them would hold a certain range of MMR players.
Talking about MMR, it would be visible, and there would be a leaderboard so you could see where you really stand, however, there would still be ranks.
Let's say you get placed into gold 3. That's what you are, that's your league. Now, as you play games and win more than you lose and get bonus for winning streaks and lose points for leaving drafts, you would rank up/down in your league rank's leaderboard, however there would be another leaderboard who would show you where you are MMR-wise. You would see that maybe that rank 50 gold 3 player is actually better than you.
I think, while a kinda not-so-elegant solution, it's a pretty good one. Having sub-leagues in every league (gold-III) in reality, is just like simply adding more leagues. It would make each one of them more accurate by having shorter MMR-Ranges. It also gives some tiers more importance than others (Platinum I is more important than Gold III even if they hold the same ammount of players simply because it has a different name). This would cause that when you get from Gold II to Gold III, you feel great, but when you go from Gold 3 to Plat 1, you'd feel amazing.
The sense of progression is given through the ranks. You begin at the bottom and you are ranking up inside a league, however you cannot be promoted if your MMR doesn't improve. To not make rank meaningless there would need to be rewards. Portraits, mounts or something.
That way, players who like to grind and like to get this feeling of achievement, would feel it, while at the same time those players who want to know their real standing would be able to thanks to the MMR leaderboard.
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On September 03 2015 01:46 [Phantom] wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2015 19:23 paralleluniverse wrote:On September 01 2015 01:52 [Phantom] wrote:Ranking System. The first problem with the competitive aspect of the game is the ranking system. There is no leaderboard to see how are you doing compared to others. If you are rank 2, you know there some players who are rank 1, but you don’t really know who they are, how far are you from them, or how do you compare. You just see your rank and ‘x’ number of points you need to get promoted, but there is no way to know if you are in the top of rank 2, at the bottom, or if your MMR thinks you should be rank 1 but you haven’t played enough games yet. Another big problem is the feeling of accomplishment. When you get to another rank it feels dull; just another step to take to get into rank 1. There is no sense of accomplishment whatsoever. This is in part because there are so many ranks they become meaningless. Are you rank 25 or rank 20? Is there even a difference in skill? Can you tell a rank 25 player is better than a rank 27? For me, and for a lot of people, there are only two groups of players: those who are Rank 1 and those who are not. The rest of the rankings feel like they don’t serve any purpose but to make the ladder a grind. The lack of meaning of the ranks is augmented by the fact there’s no true solo rank. If you are rank 1 for example, it could be that you are an outstanding player on your own. Or it could be that you are an average player who mostly plays with a team and simply knows how to follow orders from the party leader. I’m well aware the reason there are so many ranks is to give players a sense of progress. Because it is easy to go from one rank to another, you want to play more and get to a higher rank. Admittedly, it does give a sense of progression, but it doesn’t cause a sense of achievement. Ranking up feels dull. This is in strike contrast to the ranking system in StarCraft 2, where you can be stuck in one league for months, but when you finally rank up, it doesn’t matter if you went from Bronze to Silver or Diamond to Master, when you ascend to a higher league it truly feels amazing. The Heroes ranking system is lacking in that respect. A Grand Master League will eventually be implemented into the game, if HearthStone Legend and StarCraft 2 Grandmaster League serve as references, they will include your true ranking in the server and some sort of leaderboard, which is a nice addition as I mentioned previously. However I’ve got the fear it will cause the same situation rank 1 is causing right now: Are you Grand Master or are you not? Even worse in my opinion, Grand Master League could create the problem of having highly skilled players getting a good ranking system, while most of the player base would get stuck in a second class system. While I believe both a StarCraft-like ranking system, and a Hearthstone-like one have their pros and their cons, I believe there is a middle ground that could be explored which doesn't involve having two different ranking systems in the same game mode. In the last couple of days there have been suggestions from the community to just show MMR and remove the ranks, but contrary to what most people seem to believe, an MMR ranking system has it’s own flaws. The main virtue of an MMR showing ranking system is that it is the closest representation of your true skill level, so it is the most accurate way to see how you fare against other players. The MMR system however has it’s own flaws, mainly, it lacks both a sense of progression and achievement. It lacks progression because after your first few games where your MMR varies a lot, you will get placed into a certain MMR range, where you can move a little up or down, but in general you’ll stay in the same range, because that’s where your skill truly is. This happens because to move up in the ranks you need to improve your play, however other players are also improving too, so to really move up you need to play more games and get better faster than the average player in your skill range. As you might guess, only a few players are able to achieve it. It lacks a sense of accomplishment, because even if you’re one of the players that is moving up through the ranks, if you have 2607 MMR points, and now you have 2679 points, while you can see you advanced, it doesn’t feel like you just achieved something important. Whereas with a league system you might have actually got to a new league with that MMR change which would feel much more meaningful. Apart from those main issues, there are other not so obvious ones, like the leaver penalty. Right now if you leave a game during the draft, you lose 300 rank points. In an MMR ranking system, what would you lose? 300 MMR points? MMR, more than a rank, is a representation of your skill, so if you remove 300 points, to the matchmaking system that player is worse now, and so he will get matched with and against players of lower skill, while in reality he is still better than them. As you can guess, having a more skilled player in an MMR range of less skilled players would only make the matchmaking worse, and that is something we really don't want, do we? The way I see it, there is no perfect ranking system, but the more I think about it, the more an hybrid system is appealing. Finally, to complement the ranking system, the inclusion of automated tournaments every week as Blizzard is doing with StarCraft could also help people from across all levels of play to get into the competitive aspect of the game. Who knows, maybe there could be a new tournament-based ranked system which includes bans now that teamleague is gone. So the solution is reduced to ranking system precision, making it up to 16 times worse, from 2% to up 32%, like SC2's league system? No. Your post is contradictory. You claim that if you are in rank 2, you don't know how far you are from rank 1 (you are 2% from rank 1 on average), yet want leagues. But if leagues, you will have even less, up to 16 times less information about how far you are from gold to platinum. And if that answer isn't good enough for you because you want to narrow that down further than just 2%, then have 1000 ranks, so that the distance from one rank to the next is 0.1%. Yet in another contradiction, you complain about having more precision. The solution is not less information and more obfuscating like SC2's rank system. HotS ranks, unlike SC2 ranks, is the percentile of MMR. The solution is more accuracy and precision, not less, and that's what HotS gives. And yes, HotS ranking system can be improved. Improved by increase accuracy and transparency, not by creating artificially imposed and arbitrarily chosen league buckets that destroys accuracy and transparency. Is SC2 a competitive game? Given how it's league system is design, the answer is a resounding NO. It's about sugarcoating and distorting ranks. Infantilizing its players because Blizzard thinks they can't handle the truth. The only thing that is competitive is WCS. I agree on some things you say however you missed a very important point: I never explicitly said I wanted leagues or they were the better system, instead of that what I said was the following: The ranking system in heroes of the storm has the virtue of giving you a sense of progress, as getting to a better rank takes you 2-3 games on average. This helps gives player give a sense of progression and that ranking up isn't impossible so they play more. However it has two drawbacks: it is not an amazing representation of your skill level, and you can't even compare it with others through leaderboards. The second drawback is that it doesn't give you a sense of accomplishment. When you go up in a rank you don't feel the kind of satisfaction you feel on sc2, unless you are getting to rank 1, because there are so many ranks they kinda lose meaning. What I said about the leagues is that they solve the second drawback, while maintaining the first virtue. In a system like the sc2 one, you get a sense of progression when you are in a league and you rank up from rank 100 to 1 (most ranks are meaningless there too, though, with people caring mostly about the top8-top25, but you do feel progress.) And then you get a sense of a really big achievement when you get promoted from Gold to Platinum. Where I agree is that it isn't that accurate either. While a Gold player is a Gold player and that skill level is pretty accurate, a gold rank 8 could be better than a gold rank 1, and you don't have a way to really compare yourself with most other Gold players. A very big part of that is because the bonus pool and the different sub-leagues. Having 1000 ranks would make it more accurate yes, but it would have basically the same problems as just showing MMR. I purposefully didn't share how I think the ranking system would be so people would focus on the idea itself instead of how I think it should be, and then people shared their own ideas, like what you did. Now that we are talking about it, this is my idea (feel free to agree or disagree with it). I think they should just mix all the systems. I like the sc2 league system, however I agree that in some leagues it is not as accurate as the league's can hold players from very different skill levels and they wouldn't know where they really stand agaisnt each other. Because of that in my idea leagues would be separated (sort of what LoL does) in sub-tiers. Like Gold 3, 2 and 1. Each of them would hold a certain range of MMR players. Talking about MMR, it would be visible, and there would be a leaderboard so you could see where you really stand, however, there would still be ranks. Let's say you get placed into gold 3. That's what you are, that's your league. Now, as you play games and win more than you lose and get bonus for winning streaks and lose points for leaving drafts, you would rank up/down in your league rank's leaderboard, however there would be another leaderboard who would show you where you are MMR-wise. You would see that maybe that rank 50 gold 3 player is actually better than you. I think, while a kinda not-so-elegant solution, it's a pretty good one. Having sub-leagues in every league (gold-III) in reality, is just like simply adding more leagues. It would make each one of them more accurate by having shorter MMR-Ranges. It also gives some tiers more importance than others (Platinum I is more important than Gold III even if they hold the same ammount of players simply because it has a different name). This would cause that when you get from Gold II to Gold III, you feel great, but when you go from Gold 3 to Plat 1, you'd feel amazing. The sense of progression is given through the ranks. You begin at the bottom and you are ranking up inside a league, however you cannot be promoted if your MMR doesn't improve. To not make rank meaningless there would need to be rewards. Portraits, mounts or something. That way, players who like to grind and like to get this feeling of achievement, would feel it, while at the same time those players who want to know their real standing would be able to thanks to the MMR leaderboard.
How is this in any way functionally different from simply renaming "18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, ..." to "Plat I, Plat 2, Plat 3, Plat 4, Plat 5, Diamond 1, Diamond 2, ..."?
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The way I read it, a small reduction in tiers, call the tiers leagues instead of ranks. Have leader boards within the tiers and give some small reward when you climb a tier. Oh and display mmr.
To me that sounds like a good idea, although there`s a bunch of other things i would see fixed before this. Like the horrid QM.
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Caldeum1977 Posts
On September 03 2015 17:43 paralleluniverse wrote:Show nested quote +On September 03 2015 01:46 [Phantom] wrote:On September 02 2015 19:23 paralleluniverse wrote:On September 01 2015 01:52 [Phantom] wrote:Ranking System. The first problem with the competitive aspect of the game is the ranking system. There is no leaderboard to see how are you doing compared to others. If you are rank 2, you know there some players who are rank 1, but you don’t really know who they are, how far are you from them, or how do you compare. You just see your rank and ‘x’ number of points you need to get promoted, but there is no way to know if you are in the top of rank 2, at the bottom, or if your MMR thinks you should be rank 1 but you haven’t played enough games yet. Another big problem is the feeling of accomplishment. When you get to another rank it feels dull; just another step to take to get into rank 1. There is no sense of accomplishment whatsoever. This is in part because there are so many ranks they become meaningless. Are you rank 25 or rank 20? Is there even a difference in skill? Can you tell a rank 25 player is better than a rank 27? For me, and for a lot of people, there are only two groups of players: those who are Rank 1 and those who are not. The rest of the rankings feel like they don’t serve any purpose but to make the ladder a grind. The lack of meaning of the ranks is augmented by the fact there’s no true solo rank. If you are rank 1 for example, it could be that you are an outstanding player on your own. Or it could be that you are an average player who mostly plays with a team and simply knows how to follow orders from the party leader. I’m well aware the reason there are so many ranks is to give players a sense of progress. Because it is easy to go from one rank to another, you want to play more and get to a higher rank. Admittedly, it does give a sense of progression, but it doesn’t cause a sense of achievement. Ranking up feels dull. This is in strike contrast to the ranking system in StarCraft 2, where you can be stuck in one league for months, but when you finally rank up, it doesn’t matter if you went from Bronze to Silver or Diamond to Master, when you ascend to a higher league it truly feels amazing. The Heroes ranking system is lacking in that respect. A Grand Master League will eventually be implemented into the game, if HearthStone Legend and StarCraft 2 Grandmaster League serve as references, they will include your true ranking in the server and some sort of leaderboard, which is a nice addition as I mentioned previously. However I’ve got the fear it will cause the same situation rank 1 is causing right now: Are you Grand Master or are you not? Even worse in my opinion, Grand Master League could create the problem of having highly skilled players getting a good ranking system, while most of the player base would get stuck in a second class system. While I believe both a StarCraft-like ranking system, and a Hearthstone-like one have their pros and their cons, I believe there is a middle ground that could be explored which doesn't involve having two different ranking systems in the same game mode. In the last couple of days there have been suggestions from the community to just show MMR and remove the ranks, but contrary to what most people seem to believe, an MMR ranking system has it’s own flaws. The main virtue of an MMR showing ranking system is that it is the closest representation of your true skill level, so it is the most accurate way to see how you fare against other players. The MMR system however has it’s own flaws, mainly, it lacks both a sense of progression and achievement. It lacks progression because after your first few games where your MMR varies a lot, you will get placed into a certain MMR range, where you can move a little up or down, but in general you’ll stay in the same range, because that’s where your skill truly is. This happens because to move up in the ranks you need to improve your play, however other players are also improving too, so to really move up you need to play more games and get better faster than the average player in your skill range. As you might guess, only a few players are able to achieve it. It lacks a sense of accomplishment, because even if you’re one of the players that is moving up through the ranks, if you have 2607 MMR points, and now you have 2679 points, while you can see you advanced, it doesn’t feel like you just achieved something important. Whereas with a league system you might have actually got to a new league with that MMR change which would feel much more meaningful. Apart from those main issues, there are other not so obvious ones, like the leaver penalty. Right now if you leave a game during the draft, you lose 300 rank points. In an MMR ranking system, what would you lose? 300 MMR points? MMR, more than a rank, is a representation of your skill, so if you remove 300 points, to the matchmaking system that player is worse now, and so he will get matched with and against players of lower skill, while in reality he is still better than them. As you can guess, having a more skilled player in an MMR range of less skilled players would only make the matchmaking worse, and that is something we really don't want, do we? The way I see it, there is no perfect ranking system, but the more I think about it, the more an hybrid system is appealing. Finally, to complement the ranking system, the inclusion of automated tournaments every week as Blizzard is doing with StarCraft could also help people from across all levels of play to get into the competitive aspect of the game. Who knows, maybe there could be a new tournament-based ranked system which includes bans now that teamleague is gone. So the solution is reduced to ranking system precision, making it up to 16 times worse, from 2% to up 32%, like SC2's league system? No. Your post is contradictory. You claim that if you are in rank 2, you don't know how far you are from rank 1 (you are 2% from rank 1 on average), yet want leagues. But if leagues, you will have even less, up to 16 times less information about how far you are from gold to platinum. And if that answer isn't good enough for you because you want to narrow that down further than just 2%, then have 1000 ranks, so that the distance from one rank to the next is 0.1%. Yet in another contradiction, you complain about having more precision. The solution is not less information and more obfuscating like SC2's rank system. HotS ranks, unlike SC2 ranks, is the percentile of MMR. The solution is more accuracy and precision, not less, and that's what HotS gives. And yes, HotS ranking system can be improved. Improved by increase accuracy and transparency, not by creating artificially imposed and arbitrarily chosen league buckets that destroys accuracy and transparency. Is SC2 a competitive game? Given how it's league system is design, the answer is a resounding NO. It's about sugarcoating and distorting ranks. Infantilizing its players because Blizzard thinks they can't handle the truth. The only thing that is competitive is WCS. I agree on some things you say however you missed a very important point: I never explicitly said I wanted leagues or they were the better system, instead of that what I said was the following: The ranking system in heroes of the storm has the virtue of giving you a sense of progress, as getting to a better rank takes you 2-3 games on average. This helps gives player give a sense of progression and that ranking up isn't impossible so they play more. However it has two drawbacks: it is not an amazing representation of your skill level, and you can't even compare it with others through leaderboards. The second drawback is that it doesn't give you a sense of accomplishment. When you go up in a rank you don't feel the kind of satisfaction you feel on sc2, unless you are getting to rank 1, because there are so many ranks they kinda lose meaning. What I said about the leagues is that they solve the second drawback, while maintaining the first virtue. In a system like the sc2 one, you get a sense of progression when you are in a league and you rank up from rank 100 to 1 (most ranks are meaningless there too, though, with people caring mostly about the top8-top25, but you do feel progress.) And then you get a sense of a really big achievement when you get promoted from Gold to Platinum. Where I agree is that it isn't that accurate either. While a Gold player is a Gold player and that skill level is pretty accurate, a gold rank 8 could be better than a gold rank 1, and you don't have a way to really compare yourself with most other Gold players. A very big part of that is because the bonus pool and the different sub-leagues. Having 1000 ranks would make it more accurate yes, but it would have basically the same problems as just showing MMR. I purposefully didn't share how I think the ranking system would be so people would focus on the idea itself instead of how I think it should be, and then people shared their own ideas, like what you did. Now that we are talking about it, this is my idea (feel free to agree or disagree with it). I think they should just mix all the systems. I like the sc2 league system, however I agree that in some leagues it is not as accurate as the league's can hold players from very different skill levels and they wouldn't know where they really stand agaisnt each other. Because of that in my idea leagues would be separated (sort of what LoL does) in sub-tiers. Like Gold 3, 2 and 1. Each of them would hold a certain range of MMR players. Talking about MMR, it would be visible, and there would be a leaderboard so you could see where you really stand, however, there would still be ranks. Let's say you get placed into gold 3. That's what you are, that's your league. Now, as you play games and win more than you lose and get bonus for winning streaks and lose points for leaving drafts, you would rank up/down in your league rank's leaderboard, however there would be another leaderboard who would show you where you are MMR-wise. You would see that maybe that rank 50 gold 3 player is actually better than you. I think, while a kinda not-so-elegant solution, it's a pretty good one. Having sub-leagues in every league (gold-III) in reality, is just like simply adding more leagues. It would make each one of them more accurate by having shorter MMR-Ranges. It also gives some tiers more importance than others (Platinum I is more important than Gold III even if they hold the same ammount of players simply because it has a different name). This would cause that when you get from Gold II to Gold III, you feel great, but when you go from Gold 3 to Plat 1, you'd feel amazing. The sense of progression is given through the ranks. You begin at the bottom and you are ranking up inside a league, however you cannot be promoted if your MMR doesn't improve. To not make rank meaningless there would need to be rewards. Portraits, mounts or something. That way, players who like to grind and like to get this feeling of achievement, would feel it, while at the same time those players who want to know their real standing would be able to thanks to the MMR leaderboard. How is this in any way functionally different from simply renaming "18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, ..." to "Plat I, Plat 2, Plat 3, Plat 4, Plat 5, Diamond 1, Diamond 2, ..."?
Did you read what he wrote? He never claims that it's different, and he says his idea is to mix the systems and have the leagues AND show MMR on another leaderboard.
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Did not read this 100% word for word, but I know what you are getting at and mostly agree.
I agree with the writer on the visible MMR system personally. I played LoL in S2. Unless you were a top player (which I wasn't, just had started LoL), MMR actually made you feel pretty shitty. Once the system determined you were at the right MMR, it felt impossible to escape. +2pts when you are 1200~ mmr does not feel like you are going anywhere. I basically played ranked to just hit the bare ass min for season rewards stuff then just didn't touch it again. I know VERY well how MMR systems work too, and knew if I got better and won more my MMR gains would eventually go higher, but yet I still felt trapped.
I was not alone, I had about 75-100 ppl on LoL when it was visible MMR. All but about 4-5 were unranked. Would ask them to play ranked and they had no interest. LoL then jacks the SC2 system (smart move) and overnight a sizable portion of those ppl playing ranked quite often, most it becomes their main play mode.
I get why Blizz is hesitant, the SC2 system caused "ladder anxiety" but it feels to me like LoL has shown it's not as big an issue in a team game, because every loss is not 100% on you like a 1v1 game.
I don't get why we don't have bans yet, even if just in TL.....
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On September 01 2015 04:19 xuanzue wrote:Show nested quote + If Blizzard implements bans for five mans it would create a weird situation where you’d need 10 heroes to play if you are playing solo or with up to four players, and 14 heroes if you are playing in a five-man team. is not that hard. HL lvl 30 & 10 heroes TL lvl 40 & 14 heroes. and DB is planning to remove the 3-4 parties from the HL mode. about esports, dota has dotatv, DB said in 2012 SC2 could have something similar and now we are at 2015. dotatv gives a lot of options to choose and is an easy way to bring player to the esports scene. you can watch games with the game client, look for the info you are interested, or hear just the ingame sound without casters.
Or you stream cheat your own pubs with a second computer...
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EPT
