Ladders in 1.0

I would consider myself a competitive outspoken member of these forums and clearly that means I would love a ladder. Doesn't have to be fancy. Pastats is perfect. Just include it in the downloads. Don't think anyone would mind cola getting the credit he deserves either.

I haven't seen this many Neutrino posts since the debate between real orbit and fake orbit.

I'm okay with a delayed ladder. Just keep being Uber and improving things.

One half-assed thing would be for players to show their skill level by clicking a button and toggling if they are noob/average/pro. Everyone can see this moniker and decide if they want to play with that person. I don't think Uber is about duct-taped solutions, so it might be preferred to wait until they can bake the idea in the oven a little longer to make it fully capable and please the most people, without costing to much time/effort.

Ha, today I was doing a Q&A on reddit so I'm here more than normal. Remember there was I time when I had to be Brad...

Anyway I'm still really waiting to hear a compelling reason why ladders are so important. I have heard some decent arguments for a rating system although there are some downsides to that as well.

I think you could just let the AI float to it's level based on overall games. For ranked I would think we would rank a few combination or maybe just lock it in at a high level.

Only a small minority of the people that buy an RTS will ever play the ladder. However I do think that a ladder is a crucial feature to have at the 1.0 release of a game. The most successful RTS games have had a healthy competitive scene. Even though the competitive players are the minority, having a healthy competitive scene is what promotes the game and is what tells the average gamer that the game is fun and is worth buying (even though most of them will never actually play competitively.) So I think it is important to have a ladder at release in order to have the best possible chance of a healthy competitive player base.

I like the idea of at least a rudimentary rating of players skill level. Hopefully that comes sooner than later to help balance multiplier games. Just my 2 cents.

So this game actually has been available for well over a year without a ladder. What difference does a couple of months make? Do you think it's the craziest idea to do a competitive feature update that's focused on a bunch of cool well thought out competitive features? Don't you think an big update like that would bring players to check it out? In same ways might this not be a better way to introduce the competitive features? Food for thought.

Also remember, we aren't talking about if. We are talking about when and what we call it.

It is more about capitalizing on the promotion of the "Released Game". (It doesn't matter to me personalty since I will play the game whether or not it is "Released". However, the launch will get a lot of new players to try the game. The main question the needs to be answered is how many people will leave after trying the game and realizing that there is no ladder, and is that number of people worth delaying the game.

The only reason a lot of people have had the patience for over a year is the constant updates. You can probably see a huge increase in games hosted around these build updates. Other than that there is nothing to keep players coming back. No chat rooms or ladders and a first pass lobby system which causes the player base to dwindle. I'm afraid without frequent patches and not having these features the competitive scene for one will die, like it has done over the last few months on anticipation for a stable balance and new ladder.

I think people are vastly over-estimating the size of a launch spike. Perhaps that's where we come to different conclusions?

Yes, I already covered that argument earlier. I get it, people think the game will fail without a ladder. That isn't the same conclusion we reached though.

Since we do plan to continue updating the game after launch I don't get why our plan isn't fine.

Ok.....

Can you answer me the opposite question? Why isn't our plan fine?

I wouldn't say fail but won't be as successful. Most game that are successful now have an xp system. When I play new games( I play a lot) I often find myself saying a hill have a couple more games to get to the next level etc. without it there is little insentive to play other than fun. This will also leave more players actively searching for games and keep others players coming back knowing they can get a decent match.

You guys have reached a conclusion and that's cool. It is so obvious for me that something more than we have now should be implemented before release that if you guys can't see it than I don't think I know how to start arguing about it. I will still play the game. Most likely just the day of a tournament and then go play another games in the meantime.

Yea, we might have higher estimations of the launch spike than you guys. This is a unique situation because it has been so heavily promoted already and so many people have already tried the game. It stands to reason though that many of those people who didn't keep playing because of missing features or polish(or lag), will try the game again once the "Released" sticker is on the game. The lack of a ladder could certainly turn them away.

It's definitely possible that a lot of people are overestimating the launch spike, and hoping that the influx of players will be enough to kick-start matchmaking, so that it doesn't seem empty from the very first implementation. As Matizpl said, he believes it could snowball one way or the other based on that. Summer sale player count going by steam charts was around 10x higher than it is now, so I can see where they're coming from if you look at it that superficially and assuming we'll have a spike of the same magnitude around launch. But I have no idea how that really translates when most new players are probably going to be too timid to jump into ladder for quite some time anyway.
Then there's also publicity and expectations that come with 1.0. If some reviewers or youtube personalities with a particularly large audience pick on the lack of a ladder specifically (because they may fall into the same category of involved players as those here who expected a ladder at launch), does that have much of an effect? I really have no idea how youtubers or reviewers of other kinds affect a game's launch or sales.

I think the thing that we have in mind that Release tends to be when every review site/place does its review and what scores/impressions you give then will be what is seen for the rest of the game's lifespan. This same situation can be applied to people's 'knowledge' of the game, which includes things like whether it has a ladder, how it plays, whether the game is 'good'.

While I can see where you're coming from, it looks to me like we're all worried that this initial impression that's given to 'the world' will be less that what the game will be. With every feature that's not there at release there's a distinct possibility that people will never know that it is coming, and each major feature people expect that is missing will be a 'black mark' that they will take into account when deciding to keep playing or recommending it to friends.

To sum up: We're not really worried about the ladder being delayed, we're worried about the ladder being missing from what is likely to be the only feature list people will hear about.

Ok, I get that point of view. I covered it above as one of my basic arguments.

Basically we came to a different conclusion. In fact our conclusion was that rushing competitive features and not taking extra time to do them right was the real risk. We've been moving forward based on the idea that we would do a competitive update in the future and at that point in time promote the game as having those features. The steam ecosystem is generally very receptive to games which get updated often. Although I do expect a spike at launch I also expect there to be opportunities in the future to bring in a lot of new players as we update the game. I think it's clear that this can happen when you look at the growth of quite a few of the successful games on Steam.

What we've been talking about in this thread is a short game delay to add in some quickie ranking and ladder stuff. Certainly not what we would prefer to roll out when pushing competitive features.

So I really do think people are putting too much weight on the "launch" and not enough on our long term strategy of continuing to improve and update the game. Look at how far the game has come since launch and imagine where we are 18 months from now. You don't think people will ever take another look at a game?

Ultimately we have to draw the line somewhere and turn off the early access badge. We need to have a period of low feature development to put a layer of polish on. This means we have to draw the line on certain features. All of these questions are difficult to answer and subjective, there is room for differing opinion.

I have confidence in the game. I think it's a pretty epic twist on RTS. If they want to overlook the good and concentrate on the lack of ladders then I suppose that's their prerogative.

I can't see how a competitive patch later will influence more people to buy the game later considering one if the main arguments not to have it is that new players don't want to be competitive.

Anyhows thanks for talking to us about this. I sincerely hope you guys are right and all the best with the release.

Imo it's more about the gameplay experience they'll have playing against other players of different skill levels. It won't be pleasant, and it'll colour the game the wrong way. I know when i first started playing PA, it was incredibly disatisfying dying to things like kestrel spam because I just didn't know how to play the game.

Ladder fear is a pretty legitimate issue though. I think i might have different opinion to some people by saying not everyone will want to play ladder, so maybe post launch ladder isn't going to be too bad.. maybe?

I dno how you guys are planning to implement it, but sc2 does a good job having training against ai, unranked, ranked, and then custom games to cater to all player segments.