Temporary ranking in arenas

Proposal: Ranking system for groups playing in the Competition and Team Arenas

Purpose

The purpose is to give good teams in both the competition and team arenas a bigger challenge, and to allow teams starting out to get their feet wet before getting crushed by a much superior foe.


Feature overview

• Each group is assigned a provisional strength rating on entry into the arena
• Changes in strength rating comes from victories in the arena
• Strength rating and relative position shown for the players
• Separate ranking systems in competition and team arenas, rating is only relavant to one playform

Implementation

The rating system

The implementation of the system is fairly straightforward - Upon entry into the arena, each team recieves a provisional strength rating that will change as the team defeats opponents. The changes in strength rating is quadratic to the difference in strength rating of the defeated team, enabling the rating to go up rapidly on defeat of a skilled team. In this, the temporary rating in the arenas would be similar to the guild ladder rating.

Matching

The truly interesting part would be the changes to the matching system. At every new match pulse, the available teams would be comared for strength, and the closest matches would be thrown together, with the wakest/newest team left with a "no opposing team"-message if the queuing teams are uneven in number.

This would ensure that, as a group rises through the ranking of active teams, they are matched against increasingly difficult opponents. It would also make sure that groups starting out will have some "grace time" to get their teamwork together before being confronted with the best teams.

In the basic suggestion, the rating is reset upon a loss, meaning that each time the team goes into the arenas, they start from scratch, but see also below for another alternative.

Feedback and rewards

After each match, the team strength rating would be shown, as well as the relative position of the team amongst the active teams in the arena. Possibly, the strength of the opposing team could be shown at the start of the team, though this might be intimidating.

On becoming the top team in the arena, a good amount of faction might be handed out to the players of the team, giving a good incentive to get there.

The current top team could/should be advertised locally to the people in the arena/waiting hall (much as the winner of the HoH is done throughout the world) giving an incentive to clamor to the top.


Additional functionality

In the case of the team arena, it would be possible to retain the rating of the group even after a loss, as long as the group members remain the same. This might be somewhat complicated to code and make understandable, but in my opinion, it would be fun to have a possibility of decreasing strength rating. Also, it would avoid the need for skilled groups to "grind" through light resistance after being defeated by a worthy opponent.


Disclaimer

This suggestion may have been posted before, in which case I apologize and hope that this thread can be merged with the predecessor

I agree.
Good idea.

/Signed

I guess my first question would be...how is the intial team rating determined? Based on what you wrote, it sounds as if your ratings don't really start to take effect until after a few rounds. Well what if a poor team comes up against a really good team in the first round and gets crushed? That completely negates the intended purpose of matching teams of similiar ability.

Teams are ever changing. Replace just one person on a 4 man team and you can go from great to worthless, so ratings can only be for a very specific 4 man group as opposed to guilds which can have persistant ratings/rankings. You wouldn't be able to carry over your team rating to another group, so every time a new team is formed, they have some base, provisional rating. That means every new team entering the arena would have the exact same rating, thus pairing stronger teams with weaker teams would be inevitable.

The only other option would be to form a team rating based off of the experience of the individuals that make up the team. Maybe forming a rating based on Fame, Faction, Rank, etc... But then you get the same rank bias that is running rampant in Tombs. Definately don't want that!

It's a noble thought...to match teams of similar ability...but I am afraid it is extremely difficult to implement without creating a ripple effect of other problems.

For RA, this wouldn't make much sense. after 10 games, they are off to TA anyway.

/signed, but i would want them to wait till after expansion to work this, if they even decide to, because i wouldn't want them to have to do a rush job on the expansion and it come out crappy because we asked for too much stuff right now

Well, as you say, we have no a priori information on how strong a team is - It can only be found out by matching it against other teams. But, in the worst case, we have a situation like today, where the matches are random. Hardly a situation in which we are worse off eh?

Indeed. One could say that a match implicates that one will pit a stronger opponent against a weaker - The basic premise of the whole match concept is to determine who is the stronger. In my proposal, all rankings are remporary, valid only as long as the team is INSIDE the arena (unless one wants to keep it in the team arena waiting zone, as outlined above). This means that you generally have to rise through the ranks after every time you are thrown out, in effect proving the build and cooperation of the current team - There will be no profit from previous victories. Not perfect, perhaps, but I hope an improvement of the present situation.

On the other hand, once a team has won one match, the likelyhood of facing a team with one or several consecutive win rises with this system, whereas in the current, the likelyhood of meeting a weak team remains the same all the time.

Thanks! But I actually fail to see what kind of ripple effects there would be, apart from the fact that racking up an absurd amount of consecutives in the team arena would be harder, as you are likely to be matched against others also on a winning streak. Could you perhaps elaborate a bit?

mmm yeah cool
/signed

I don't like this idea.

I think this because of game population.

Played TA as of late? 8 pm PST last night and my team ran into many instances of the count down server having to be restarted for lack of teams. While I don't really have any numbers to back up the lack of population- your theory will segregate the population even more. Your process could quickly become something like World of Warcraft where you have to wait 45 minutes for another team of equal skill as your team. I quit WoW and started playing GW because it was a lot quicker to jump into the matches. I want to PvP- not wait.

I also disagree on a philosophical level. What is the big deal if you have a new team and get crushed by an experienced one? You pick yourselves up, talk about what you did wrong/right, and go at it again. It isn’t like there is any penalty or losing these matches. You don’t lose items, you don’t lose exp, and you don’t get punched in the face through the monitor. The only thing that happens when you lose is that you get sent back to town with a bruised ego… not a big deal to someone who PvPs. The learning process in this game is already pretty easy- I don't think it needs to be dumbed down any more.

What would be cool is if ranking points were given for 4v4. Like a poster above said: I don't really want to spend a ton of time looking for 7 other players that can fit the builds necessary to run a successful 8v8 team. But it is really easy for me to find 3 other players to run with in the 4v4.

well i think he means that if you are sitting ther ewith a really high rating you dont have to wait for a team of exactly equal calibur, you just get to face the highest whether they are 2 levels below you or 25. So 45 minute waits wouldnt really be an issue.

the problem with that though is that it would be very hard to have multiple different teams with high ratings, since the high level teams are always eliminating eachother. It would actually be one team with a high rating picking off teams that have won maybe 1 or 2, until it loses and then the other team has the uber high ranking. i dont think king of the hill is what anet had in mind for ta...

Neo-LD is absolutely correct, the matching would be just as fast as it currently is.

True - This would be a problem, especially in a sparsely populated arena. But on the other hand, this is not unlike the current situation at all.

Let me illuminate two scenarios:

- In a deserted arena, a good team can meet the same opponents time and time again, crushing them every time. This will not be changed in the least by the system i proposed...

- In a densely populated arena, the "top dogs" will be busy with matches most of the time, being free for challanges some (wild stab in the dark) 10% of the time. At those times when the top team is looking for an opponent, many other teams are competing in their own matches, and will be ineligable for a matchup against them. One can thus expect teams to, on average, be able to build some strenght rating before being matched against the team with the highest ranking.

There still remains the fact that if the top team is better by a wide margin than any others in the arena, they will still win all the time, amassing a big strenght score (reflecting their relative strength compared to the other competing teams) - But this big rating will have no true effect on the matching. In this kind of scenario the top team will, sooner or later, terminte the winning streaks of the other (semi-strong) teams. With the proposed system, the difference from now is that it will happen (statistically) a bit sooner.

What does this mean for the top team? It means they will be matched more often against opponents with winning streaks. What does it mean for teams with winning streak, but still not on top? It means that after every win, the likelyhood of meeting the top team rises. What will it mean for a team just jumping in to the arena? It means that there is a higher likelyhood they will meet a team with a short winning streak.

The proposed system is not a failsafe guaranteeing interesting matches, nor is it inteded to adress the issue of strong teams crushing weak ones. It does not solve these problems. What it intends to do is to give more incentive for strong teams to compete in the arenas, and to match them against each other.

Wow, I'm being way to verbose. Back to work!