Leagues, Divisions, Elo, and Where SC is Headed - Page 5

On May 24 2010 00:25 TheElitists wrote:
On Divisions:

I understand actually the reasons for divisions int he context of the hinted end of season tournaments. I know it isn't perfect, but the fact that they intend for some end of season tournament including the top 8 of every division amkes sense to me. It feels more accessable than a giant ladder where the top 128 or whatever are chosen to participate. This way at least makes you feel like you might have the opportunity a little more in your grasp.

I am in support of a global ladder, but I also know the limitations it had (ie if you were not at the top, being rank 1014562 meant nothing, especially when you jump up 75 ranks every win, yet in the higher circles it is great.)

On Leagues:

I think the leagues were a great borrowed from ICCup's playbook. It instantly can give you a general idea of a player's skill level and gives a player some concrete feelings of accomplishment and progression beyond simple numbers. I do however wish they approached it in a more percentile based system instread of what seems to be linear.

The logic I have for this is if you make it linear you will have what we have now, a system where the top league is going to eventually be flooded with people and the meaning of Platinum (or now diamond) becomes less and less meaningful. In a percentile based system, where diamond divisions are created, but designed to be exactly for the top 0.5% of the player-base and so on downward to Bronze, you will actually see a very cool occurrence in the long term where being a Diamond payer will actually become harder and harder to do with stronger competition. I think this makes the competitive nature that drives laddering feel much better than in a few years where any player who's been playing online for more than x months will likely be in Diamond and then no progression from thereon out.

On Facebook:
I am honestly surprised by the amount of crying about facebook. Like it or lump it is has become a staple of the online experience. Battle.net 2.0's RealID system is designed to be a social network of all your friends online and offline who play Blizzard games, any blizzard games from SC to Diablo to Warcraft. What easier way to find the most amount of friends for the most amount of people than to sign up for a deal with Facebook, the same deal Facebook has been making with many other sites and services. There are issues with the friends list, but the facebook integration is benign leave it alone.

On Friends:

Honestly, this new system for friends list is a bit of a clusterfuck, but I can see why it happened and the logic behind it. I think Blizzard will see the huge negative reaction here and find a new way to fix it.

Blizzard is trying to find a workaround to this social network and eliminating the unique naming requirement that in the years to come will result in wonderful names like StorkFan35i578463563534846756735735. I think this was to facilitate the same connection to your chosen name (since you can only make one) that many associate with the Korean pro-scene today. (Flash, Stork, Jaedong). They tried using identifiers, and people bitched, honestly I thought the idea worked and I would prefer identifiers to this but whatever. So instead of using identifiers as a background uniqueness database tag, they use Battle.net emails which is a big privacy issue when making online friends who aren't real life friends. Honestly, I would prefer the compromise of the name.identifier scheme they had before, and while some people didn't like it, I think it was a strong compromise for famous players who didn't want to be harassed, ensuring names are unique, and that names and emails can be private if you so wish. It was a little annoying with people impersonating others, but it was the best solution for pleasing the most people and I think that most people were grudgingly accepting the name.identifier system.

On the Descent of Gaming:

I sadly do agree with you on this, I had a talk once with a nameless progamer and he basically explained that with the market trends and the fact that game studios have needed to dumb down their games to keep in the black means that most games can no longer be hard enough to be competitive anymore. But I do have to say, that out of all the games I've seen, SC2 has to be the best attempt at trying to make an accessible but competitive game, and I really commend them for it.

I think that competitive gaming's future might have to rest on indie titles that cater to this exact demand or we might see a death of really competitive esports in the long term future.