Moving On Up - Improving Planetary Annihilation's Ranking System

There have been a number of posts on the forum recently regarding the ladder:

• Rank Visibility, Leaderboards and Seasonal Rewards
• 'Smurfing' on the ladder... very un sporting!
• Ladder Statistics?
• If we're gonna revise the ladder, this is where its gonna happen.

Quitch struck up a discussion with @elodea, @Yaegz and @lokiCML about what was really wrong with the ladder (if anything) and how it could be resolved.

The result is Moving On Up - Improving Planetary Annihilation's Ranking System, an article which covers the following:

• Glicko
• Limitations of Glicko
• The Planetary Annihilation ladder
• Problems with the Planetary Annihilation ladder
• The Starcraft 2 ladder
• Suggested changes to
  • Improve participation
  • Resolve ladder anxiety
  • Provide better match making accuracy
  • Prevent smurfs interfering with other players' progress

We hope you'll take the time to read through this. The intention is not just to point out problems, but to justify why they should be considered problems and then to provide actionable solutions.

I want to take a moment to thank elodea, yaegz and especially lokiCML for their input. Without it this article wouldn't be able to go into anything like the kind of depth that it does.

Interesting article, where can i find the suggested changes to prevent smurfs interfering with other players' progress?

Suggested changes, items 2 and 3.

Good article.

It misses the #1 key point from the smurfing thread however:

*The top players were creating new accounts, due to the very long waiting time when playing on their primary account.*

We are talking in excess of 1 hour waiting times for players like Yaegz.

The thing is, the system is capable of accommodating the rank differences such that from my perspective I'm not worried if I play Yaegz even if I'm likely to loose (I usually have a decent game against him actually).

Uber need to relax the matchmaking a bit so the top few can actually get games. I think anyone in platinum and up should have enough skill to give these guys a worthwhile game (these are the players after all that the smurf accounts allow them to play against).

Which is why the suggestions focus on items which encourage continued play. These incentives should work as well for top players as low level ones. Right now a lot of the top 10 aren't very active because there's nothing there to make them be. Get more players to play more often, you get faster matchups.

I like the idea 'rank' and 'rating' are decoupled. That way the #1 player in terms of rank isn't necessarily the highest rated- the system rewards active players and allows players to climb by winning. It should ensure there is some more turnover of who the 'top' players are on the leader-boards.

Except I think in the case of @Yaegz in particular, there are players active *near him* but the system isn't matching him with them. As I say I think uber have made the 'match positive' requirements a bit too stringent.

The article touches on points without actually addressing them. Ideas like decay, saying yaegz is better off not playing on his main account, rewards achievements will all help stop players smurfing. I smurf in most games I play. The two I don't are lol and cod. That is mainly due to their ranking systems and prestiges/awards. Add the stuff mentioned in the article and you will see a major drop in smurfing, faster waiting for game times and a much more active ladder.

By decoupling points and rating and introducing bonus pools you remove the need for systems such as decay, because to climb you need to keep playing. Inactivity will lead to a natural fall in ranking, but without messing up an element of the rating system which RD already handles.

The article addresses all the points it raises, but I don't bullet point ITEM 1 WILL RESOLVE THESE THINGS. I leave that as an exercise to the reader. BAsed on the feedback I will be more explicit next time.

With the ratings hidden it's impossible to know how near anyone is to anyone else.

Well I'm inferring this on the basis that the rank appears to be very closely tied to rating. Yaegz is #1, i'm currently #40 (haven't played for a bit) and I know I'm decent enough to give him a decent game albeit one he's very likely to win. Thing is, I have him on my friends list and I've been in the matchmaking queue when he's on- if he's been waiting over an hour for games chances are I've been queuing when he has but no game.

That would suggest the system isn't pairing him against other Uber level players. I guess the system should widen the search more quickly if anything.

Edit: I'm basing the assumption that the search parameters widen with time based on @cola_colin 's implementation for the PA Stats ladder. I imagine Uber have done something similar. At any rate I think there needs to be a point that is accepted as "waited long enough" by which point the waiting person will get paired with anyone irrespective of rank. 15 minutes is probably a sensible limit for anyone to have to wait, with say 5 minutes relaxing it enough for even #1 to play anyone in Uber or Platinum.

I understand that it might discourage smurfing the top 10 full of your accounts. But a top 10 player casually smurfing around will not be stopped at all by this i think. Therefor we keep the big part of the problem. It does seems like Smurfs are considerd a problem (this is good, we can work to a fix), but the right solution that fixes it all isn't quite there yet. Its not bad that something is done, but im more of a ''do nothing untill you do it right'' kind of person.

For me the extra slot the smurf account fills is the #1 key point. Who are you to take more then you need? Who are you to claim its okay to move thousants of people down the ladder because you needed the extra account? Who are you to say that 1 spot doesn't matter? I can tell you from my experience with most people (not the top 10, but like everyone else) that they won't thank you for it and that they wont agree with you that it doesn't matter because it does to them.

I don't want a new topic with madness like the previous but i wanted to say this because to me its what the topic came down to and i think it should be aproached a bit more seriously then this.

Also i agree with CDRKF that Yaegz should be matched more easily because otherwise he will just buy a new account again.

I love the article. I believe uber comes back today. So I hope they take the time to read. Also I want to get a batman skin for my invictus please.

Please correct me if i am wrong, but for Smurfing another account, ie. Game copy is required, correct? Isn't that in itself giving him the right ? Also I can't see a technical way to prevent it reliably and with no risk to be detriment to the game, thats probably the reason why other games went with incentives (ie. Motivation) instead.

In that regard I found the article quite interesting and definitely the right direction to go.

Ratings are rankings are joined at the hip, but without visibility of the ratings we have no idea of the gap. yaegz could be at 5000 and the next player down at 2000. They'd look close by ranking but be a mile apart by rating, leading to long search times. Rankings are useful as a relative "better than" measure, but not as a measure of closeness.

It also depends at what times he searches. This is why I focus on increasing ladder activity because that is the way to resolve this, a problem which affects only a handful of people.

I don't think you've understood the article or its suggestions. Holding the number 1 slot now doesn't require you to play, with the changes I propose you would have to, and playing means you can drop as well as rise. Bonus points means you need to be active, which makes managing multiple accounts much harder. Introduce more than one division to Uber and there isn't even a #1 slot any more. Nor does that account "move people down" because the ranks of those individuals is completely unrelated to the ranks of players in other leagues or divisions under the proposals in this article.

That'll never get added because it doesn't help anyone. Some poor bronze queues at the time yaegz's time limit kicks in, the bronze guy gets a match he couldn't win due to poor luck, while yaegz gets a match he couldn't lose against an opponent so low his rating doesn't move. All it does is mean yaegz misses an opportunity for a real match, and then the rating boundaries get reset and he's queueing for ages again.

This is a problem for top players in every game. Only greater activity on the ladder can fix it.

What if the queueing screen gives an option to only expand the search to the group one below you, or two below? Give the player the choice whether they want to accept ranked games from unranked, low-ranked, all-ranks, etc?

why?

you guys should have written up on the FAF 1v1 ladder instead.

it's notably the most fair in the world

weras the Starcraft ladder hasn't changed since it was put out in SC1.

The word "fair" is extremely subjective. In fact, I'd go as far as to assert that the use of the word "fair" causes more arguments over its definition than any other word.

This line of conversation brings up an interesting point about the ladder that I have been thinking since the smurf thread. Ladders are often seen as the perfect way of measuring a player's skill, but this isn't true at all. Just looking at the old ladder shows how different even just two ranking systems can be. since the choice of ranking algorithm is so arbitrary, matchmaking can at best be used for finding reasonably even matches. I don't think it should really be considered when trying to determine with any accuracy the actual skill of a player.