Mine isn’t up yet
I think the original plan I read for skill rating was a good one:
Run automated weekend tournaments, the winners of which get placed on a leaderboard somewhere
I thought this was valve’s stated plan but it’s from a while ago so maybe it was just made up/ theoretical
What ranked can 100% ruin games. It encourages you to play aggro (shorter games = faster climb), it encourages everyone to just net deck, and it makes trying different things fucking awful in high ranked
Quick games are the ones ruined the most by having a ranked ladder
There are like 6 different modes though
Even if there weren’t ranked people would still eventually start running optimal decks
Yeah it just makes it happen way faster. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with running optimal decks but ranked ladder 100% encourages only running optimal decks
It changes the community and people’s attitudes if built wrong
Attracts different set of (unappealing) players and pushes existing players in that direction
I think wanting to win encourages running “only optimal decks” and if there’s zero iteration on the “optimal decks” then the game is just bad.
my anecdotal experience is that there’s far more interesting variety in “high level ladder environments”.
all ladders are ranked, ranked ladders are only an issue in team games.
moreover it’s far better to have it in-client than some third-party website that will sprout up in two weeks.
when vladimir dumbfuckchinko pays the subhuman polish owner of ArtifactRankElo.com to remove losses so he appears #1 on the New European Republic leaderboard.
There’s too few heroes in artifact.
Jones with the big brain comments
Ranked ladder can’t ruin an already trash single player game
Fantastic insight as always
This isn’t exclusive to ranked, it’s a function of wanting to maximize your wins to losses as JONES mentioned
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But that’s encouraged by having ranked. It matters more to more people and brings in the type that only care mmr. Especially since you don’t earn anything by playing artifact, there’s really no reason to play besides that you want to or to practice a deck for tournaments. There’s no number to grind or ladder to climb. At least not visual
the game has been marked, justly or not, as a “low RNG, skillfull game” by the “card playing community”, the dominating social aspect of this will be twitch streams, which will be completely dominated by people streaming it in a competitive manner (because the game’s unparseable and bland); I have no idea what you’re expecting.
the only real argument to entertain is whether a ranked ladder splits the playerbase between ladder/daily tournaments, which isn’t an actual issue.
the main issue is that the game takes 30(?) minutes to play, matchups will be b01, and you’ll get free-rolled while playing BH tinker against Ogre Magi Lycan.
note, I have watched 45 minutes of the game and don’t plan on playing it.
I was going to suggest some sort of “Draft Leaderboards” where you rate people by winrate or even have 5-0ers keep their “best draft deck” and match it up against other “best draft decks” in a continuous round robin system to rank skilled players
But Lifecoach made a funny point the other day which stuck with me and I think counters this
Paid draft costs $1, right
So all of reddit is super mad and Richard Garfield is saying “We have to make it cost something or people will just abandon and redraft decks”
Meanwhile Lifecoach is on stream saying “I think many draft players will just redraft in the paid draft until they get a good deck.” His point was that he didn’t care about his $1 at all and could see people just drafting until they get a winner
And I think it’s a valid thing to think about - and more so, that there’s a massive randomness element here for any “Draft Leaderboards” in that if you pull like 2 gondars (that’s bounty hunter for you dota 2 noobs) and a Lich (that’s lich) your deck is going to outperform and there’s also the factor that sample size is pretty small when all you need is like 5 wins. You can randomly be matched against a hard counter or just luck your way through to 5