eSports?

Yeah, the FAF system is decent, as is the Zero K system, which is very similar. Again, neither is too in-your-face about whether you increase or decrease in rank, though ZK has that nice incentive of increasing in level as a player, which only goes up. It's mostly a measure of seniority than skill (as well as a way to access custom commander builds, but . . . that's another topic altogether), but players tend to enjoy having something like that even if it is somewhat meaningless to actual gameplay.

Like achievements?

. . . **** move, bro. -_-

But sure, why not. As long as I don't have to see them.

I jest good sir.

As ranking actually have a purpose of pitting similar skill players against each other.

I wonder what would happen if you had a multiplayer segment that just hid your truskill or whatever ranking and matched you up with other players.. voila no more ladder anxiety!

I've also tossed around the idea of a karma ladder - players rate each other and the nicest players play with each other. Not really sure how that'd work though.

I do think some kind of pre-qualifying set of matches is a good idea to get players ranked and avoid the crushing defeat - you could make it optional if you wanted to. Heck, I suppose you could even just have a question 'How good do you think you are? Pro, Experienced, Noob'...

Afaik SC2 is supposed to get such a "unranked" matchmaking in the future.
I think it is a great idea to just play around with stuff.

I dont think that will work, since it might easily result in a nice noob playing vs a nice "pro".

I'd agree that some kind of introduction-games are a good idea. SC2 is a good example of such a thing can be implemented: The player has the choice to first try out the game at "easy" (slow gamespeed, extra rocks to create a bit of a rush protection) settings with other total newbies for 50 games or just skip it and go straight to the real ladder.

Though, you can't exactly base matchmaking on friendliness, I wonder if the simple option of rating a player after the game is done as 'bad manner' or such, which feeds into a 'manner ranking' could be at least motivate people to be less of an asshat online.

I wouldn't put too much of a consequence on the whole thing, simply a list public list of the top 100 asshats could be enough, and perhaps every personal profile also has a 'manner ranking', so everyone has an idea of how their current opponent is ranked in the grand scheme of things and how they themselves have faired in the public eye.

There will probably be a few outliers who WANT to be asshat No. 1, but overall it might be a positive thing. On the otherhand there might be people who rate players badly too often, so some weights need to be put on how heavily a vote from someone who uses it sparingly against someone who spams it at (nearly) every opponent.

I think it makes a lot of sense to have a hidden ranking that tracks your 'skill' whether you play ranked or unranked and share it between the two. Just to ensure you always tend to play against appropriate opponents.

Though, I wonder, would you have matchmaking be separate for both types or have ranked players play unranked players for the sake of speeding up matchmaking? On the one hand having people who play for points and those who don't play games against each other seems like a bad idea, but if one type sees a lot more play than the other it could really hurt matchmaking quality and/or waiting times.

StarCraft 1 and 2 failed both of these test, and became a national pastime in Korea. Need to re-evaluated your criterions.

except they didn't

I think the biggest things that make an e-sports game are
A) Some sort of skill involved

B) Some method of keeping track of almost everything that is happening (This isn't always possible ofc if there are two things going on at once at either side of the map but with Sc2 and LoL as examples most fights occur in one place so its easy to follow what is happening)

C) A decent time scale. Games need to last from 15 minutes to 45 minutes. If anything either end of that scale is extremely common the game either doesn't last long enough to be interesting or stretches out too long and becomes tiring to watch (There is more than one reason sports have half-time)

D) A good display of the game. This doesn't mean much on its own but effectively the game needs to either display a lot of different items/characters/abilities/units/skills etc. in one match. That is why TA or SupCom matches weren't popular amongst lower level players because they were into the game because of the awesome units, the epic fights, the scale. So 15 minute games with T1 units was boring as hell to them. This brings me on to the final point.

E) The game needs to be enjoyable for people of all skill levels. Sure it may not allow for lower skilled players to full understand what is happening but if it looks cool then its fine. SupCom and TA 15 minutes 1v1 games were generally not very cool to watch.

Thus I doubt PA will ever likely become an E-sports aired online to massive crowds however it does have the potential to be a popular game played competitively

You are probably watching very poor match ups. Check these out.

http://www.youtube.com/user/felixlighta?feature=gb_p13n_ch_rec

SupCom 15 minute 1v1 were really fun to watch if played on high level, tbh. Thats a very subjective thing...

I quote everything you say. Especially the 15-45 min duration mark

From that video I think FA is still very hard to watch. The units are indistinguishably small so I can't easily tell the difference between arty, normal tanks and engineers. There is the same problem with types of factories.

I think it is dangerous to think that small units = epic scale. Units should have large models. This may look silly from a realism perspective but that is far outweighed by the ability for anyone to come in and appreciate that there are different units with different roles fighting within a game. If you look at a SCII stream it is easy to tell the difference between units.

I could instantly tell you what every unit on the screen was, and that's after not having played for a couple of years. I think it's harder to enjoy a replay for a game you're unfamiliar with.

My point is for eSports you need people to watch eSports. This often means new people. An eSports game has to try hard to be enjoyable to watch for new people. Although I am also not a fan of FA's particular implementation of unit icons. Of course they are possible to learn but I think they could be easier to distinguish as well.

If the units in SupCom have much slower travel speed, then the small unit size would be necessary to make the game not looks silly, and the scale would be much more epic.
But the actual ratio of travel speed to unit size in SupCom is just too high, it almost make the unit movements a bit unrealistic, this was pointed out in a old youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSUL3TjSg84

Do new people really come in to watch e-Sports?

I just wonder where the largest amount of watchers come from. Wouldn't you naturally first be a fan of the sport before you start to watch it? I'm pretty sure people don't come to watch the pretty explosions.

It would be enough to have a playerbase of a few thousands players of whom some will naturally also watch stuff.

Haha, I remember that when it was first put up. Epic sinking battleship ftw!
I'm not sure if slowing things down like that would have worked out, now that I think about it. FA is pretty slow in comparison to most RTSs, and although it seems fast at first, the player has enough time to make important decisions for that scale.

As for the icons, I really do prefer the FA icons to ZK, from an aesthetic standpoint. It's much more uniform, and in the FA engine, they're pretty easy to see. That said, ZK has a lot more information it has to convey in its icons, and it pulls it off well. I don't think PA will be as reliant on icons, though, since the devs are trying to make the units more easily visible. That means that for spectators, it won't become too much of a game of dots. (Though I think icons will definitely help visibility.)