EPTLeagues, Divisions, Elo, and Where SC is Headed
So before patch 13, divisions were just numbered. This was kind of useful since people liked to misleadingly advertise themselves as "top 10 in my division." Well, turns out a top 10 player from platinum div 1 is probably much, MUCH better than a top 10 player from platinum div 30.
The ELO rating system is supposed to help clear this up since a 2200 player from div 1 should theoretically be as good as a 2200 player from div 30. But at the same time, this makes the division separation kind of pointless. When the rank 80 player in platinum div 1 is 1800 and the rank 1 player in platinum div 30 is 1800, saying you are "rank 1" or "rank 80" in your division is totally meaningless. Why have divisions at all when ranks don't make any sense outside your division and ratings don't make any sense when people are more focused on relative ranks?
But now we have a whole new level of obfuscation. Instead of having numbered divisions, we have named divisions. The scheme seems to involve mashing together a starcraft unit name and a greek letter. So now if you're trying to compare a player from Roach Zeta to a player from Marine Bravo, you really don't get any information out of ranks because you have no idea what the relative caliber of players is between the two divisions. Instead you have to look to their ELO rating...
...which now starts at 0 instead of 1000. My guess is they just fished the WOW Arena people out of their cubicles and had them copy paste their code here because now the rating systems are practically identical. The rating system was not zero-sum to begin with (due to bonus pool) so it already encouraged players to play extremely large numbers of games. You could go 3-5 and your net rating would actually increase. At the lower leagues/divisions, the rank 1 player could actually have more losses than wins but just have an astronomically high ELO rating because they had 400 games played.
So if you have a rank 1 player at 2000 rating in division roach zeta and a rank 1 player at 2000 rating in division marine bravo, you STILL don't get enough information about the players because it's possible the former has a W/L record of 50-10 and the latter has a W/L record of 400-500. Clearly the first player is better than the second player but neither rank nor rating would indicate that. Now starting the base rating at 0 instead of 1000 just encourages spamming games played even more, making relative player strengths even less clear.
What this means for the game, the company, and you
What this basically comes down to is a reflection of Blizzard's (Activision's?) new multiplayer gaming philosophy: "players are children and we should hold their hands as much as possible and try to satisfy everyone at the same time." Why? Because having players spam games played and feel good about their rank/rating means more money for the company. Toss in some easy mode achievements/rewards (they nerfed the solo/team crusher achievements... LOL) and just keep the pacifiers in their mouths.
In the end, players are really experiencing only a superficial level of challenge/reward from Blizzard's new games. They try so hard to make it impossible to lose that winning just means so little. Outside of tournaments, exhibitions, and in-house games (which are currently impossible to set up thanks to the bnet 2.0 geniuses and god damn FACEBOOK), you just don't get that much satisfaction out of winning. Sure it's nice to win games against random strangers, but after a while you realize that beating those random opponents has diminishing returns. Achievements, portraits, decals, rank, and rating all lose their worth when everyone can get them.
I'll grant that Starcraft 2 is still a lot of fun and even I get at least some mild enjoyment out of finishing achievements for vanity rewards. But most of me feels like this isn't the direction video games should be taking. Remember when just beating a megaman game meant you were the freakin gaming god of your neighborhood? Forget speed runs or any of that other stuff; just FINISHING THE GAME was a huge challenge.
As time went on, companies realized that easier games would mean more customers and more cash. So by the time Nintendo 64 came out, games were already on their way to easy mode. Finishing a game still meant something, but it was easier on average to do. Instead, gamers could find challenge doing things like collecting all 120 stars (Mario 64) or getting a gold medal on every planet (Star Fox 64) or breeding a GOD DAMN GOLDEN CHOCOBO when you didn't have a guide for it.
Well, nowadays we don't have any of that. There ARE unlocks and achievements but the overwhelming majority of them are incredibly easy to get. XBOX games actually give you an achievement for finishing the tutorial stage... then beating the first level... then beating the second level... and so on. You actually get achievements for doing things you can't avoid doing. And then these achievements get turned into points, and those points go on public display in your profile, and then you have a pissing contest to see who has the most points among your friends, and then you just keep paying your money to the companies who just keep making achievements easier and easier to get because god damn it you need those points, don't you?
Does that sound familiar? Achievement showcase, anyone? Put your 5 favorite achievements on display! Get a decal for spamming games played! Show off your achievement points because it's on display as a big ass font number next to your name when people look at your profile. TELL YOUR FREAKIN FACEBOOK FRIENDS YOU WON FIVE GAMES AS ZERG!!!
Great...
Well, I would gladly turn in all those empty features for a challenging, rewarding gaming experience.
If I'm not as good as another player, give him a CLEAR AND DEFINED reward/rank/rating to indicate that. I'm not 8 years old, I can handle it. If I'm rank 8354 out of 25000 players then that's fine. I'll focus on getting to 8300 then 8200 and maybe I'll get to 8000 some day. At least I know where I stand. Trust me, I won't care about the players up at rank 200. To me, the rank 1 player is the guy at 8000 because he is within the reasonable scope of my ability to defeat.
It's like playing on ICCUP. You straight up get told you are a fucking D player and if you've ever been to school you know D is a pretty bad grade. Well, when you are a D player, do you get depressed about your rank being so far away from A+ players? No. You just focus on getting to D+. To you, the best player may as well be the C- guy because he is within the reasonable scope of your ability to defeat. Nobody's holding your hand or trying to find ways to convince you that you are awesome at the game. You find satisfaction in the slow and steady climb up the ladder, not because the game or the system is giving you achievements and rewards and any external motivation, but because you feel self-improvement as an internal reward.
Lastly, the simplest and most practical reason you should care
Some people just want to play a fun game. They pay 60 bucks for it and want 60 bucks worth of fun out of it. They don't care about being #1 as long as they have a fun time. This means they get lots of great, immersive gameplay with a lot of polish.
Well it turns out this game has a lot of features you don't care that much about. You don't really need achievements to enjoy a game, you don't need to connect to facebook, you don't want 100 portraits or decals, and rank/rating isn't a big deal to you.
Unfortunately, the gaming industry and Blizzard/Activision in particular likes to have those things because they generate more profits (see: World of Warcraft). And those companies have a limited number of employees, and those employees have a limited number of working hours, and those working hours need to be distributed across 100 different features of the game. So when Blizzard has 50 people working on achievements and portraits and decals, that's 50 people NOT WORKING ON THE GAME ITSELF. 50 people not helping to balance the game, test corner cases, find bugs, try to design and detect map hacks, make good maps, design more singleplayer missions, create awesome art, etc etc etc. Then on patch day there is insufferable lag, they have to bring the servers down for 10 hour maintenance... because why? BECAUSE THE FACEBOOK FEATURE DOESNT WORK ANYMORE?!!??!
So yes you might think it's not a big deal that we have messed up leagues, divisions, rankings, ratings, etc. You might think it's not a big deal there are 50 portraits and decals and achievements and useless shits in the game.
Well, I GUARANTEE the next Blizzard game will have EVEN MORE of those things because people bought Starcraft 2 and Starcraft 2 had a lot of that crap in it so hey it must be good right? And then the game after that will have more and more of it, and so on and so forth, until video games are just pretty-looking "dress up and look in the mirror" games.
You'll be happy you beat a game because the game just told you to be fucking happy about it by giving you achievements and rewards. The game wasn't hard, any noob could have done the same thing you did, and you didn't really even have that much fun because it was so easy.
It's like having a shit job. Would you have fun shoveling elephant shit every day? No? Well what if I paid you $100k per year to do it? Hey now it's not that bad is it?
But after a little bit of that, you have to wonder about the guy that gets to go surfing every day you are shoveling shit. Nobody pays him to have a good time and you have more achievement points (er... money) than that guy, so according to the system, you should be having more fun.
Except, of course, you are not.
You are shoveling elephant shit.
A note to beta deniers
I work in the video game industry. I won't say what studio I work for, but I can make one statement of absolute fact about Blizzard's SC2 development team.
If you think "this is just beta and the release game will fix all these problems and be perfect" then
YOU
ARE
WRONG
No company could possibly fix all the leaks the game has between now and launch. In fact, I'd estimate the developers have known about today's major problems since 2 months ago and have been working on it since then but have failed to find a good non-bandaid solution.
Blizzard is not a magical company with magical developer elves that will swoop in at the last moment and make everything better with their magical game design pixie dust. The engineers are all human and they have stupid bosses who have stupid company executives who like your money and know how to cut costs & development to maximize profits. That's just how it works. Sorry...
tl;dr
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ i miss good video games QQQQQQ
after word
Yes the post is incredibly long. Trust me, I've got nothing better to do right now. And frankly if 1 person reads this and agrees and repeats it somewhere and Blizzard hears 1 sentence of it and just THINKS a little bit more about what they're doing, then that'll be worth the 15 minutes it took to write this wall of text.
I apologize in advance if some of this has been said in other topics, I don't read as much of TL as I would like and I post even less.
edit:
clarifying some confusion
Some readers misunderstand why I said division 1 players are better than division 30 players. Hopefully this clears it up.
On May 24 2010 04:26 joolz wrote:
You misunderstood my analysis. I realize that there is no inherent aspect to division numbers that makes division 1 players "better" than division 30 players.
However, the players themselves (not the system itself) adds to that dynamic. During the first half of the beta, the lower divisions actually were--on average--populated by better players than the higher divisions. This was simply due to the fact that hardcore players got their placements done very quickly and placed into the first ever platinum leagues. I remember seeing Idra, qxc, and a whole slew of other pros in divisions 1-5, but only a small handful of pros scattered throughout divisions 20 and beyond.
Another factor is that newly-created platinum divisions are fed players from gold league. The players who place directly into platinum (and thus into a low-numbered plat division) are arguably better than the players who get promoted to platinum from gold (and thus into a high-numbered plat division).
I assumed this would be obvious but I now realize some people might misunderstand what I meant by the division numbers. No, players can't be moved across divisions so the system doesn't force better players into older divisions. Yes, better players tend to place quickly into the top league while worse players do it slowly or get promoted from a lower league.
You misunderstood my analysis. I realize that there is no inherent aspect to division numbers that makes division 1 players "better" than division 30 players.
However, the players themselves (not the system itself) adds to that dynamic. During the first half of the beta, the lower divisions actually were--on average--populated by better players than the higher divisions. This was simply due to the fact that hardcore players got their placements done very quickly and placed into the first ever platinum leagues. I remember seeing Idra, qxc, and a whole slew of other pros in divisions 1-5, but only a small handful of pros scattered throughout divisions 20 and beyond.
Another factor is that newly-created platinum divisions are fed players from gold league. The players who place directly into platinum (and thus into a low-numbered plat division) are arguably better than the players who get promoted to platinum from gold (and thus into a high-numbered plat division).
I assumed this would be obvious but I now realize some people might misunderstand what I meant by the division numbers. No, players can't be moved across divisions so the system doesn't force better players into older divisions. Yes, better players tend to place quickly into the top league while worse players do it slowly or get promoted from a lower league.
), you want casual guys (you those jerks who only spend 3 hours a week playing SC2) to be able to log on to Bnet and find enjoyment. Which means playing among similar guys (you know being able to play the game without being rushed by any 8 poolers), having a sense of progression, getting some 'easy' rewards, that kind of stuff. And i don't see how anybody would have the right to say : "No Starcraft is for us and not for your kind". Especially as the game cares also about the whole range of competitive way of playing, up to very very top players as we can see in matches like the Zpux vs Dayflight one i'm watching while writing this (props to day[9] & Gretorp, great comments as always folks 
