New SWTOR Arena Ratings and Token Rewards Suggestion Thread.

Based on the metrics already mentioned -- specifically granting bonus rating for winning streaks and marginal rating loss -- that first player should still be rated higher than the second.

We're working on a new system, one that covers all aspects of competitiveness and participation. I wish you would have included my entire post before the "facepalm". Lmao, It went...

"This fellow you've mentioned no doubt displayed dedication to the game, and would here find himself the recipient of the 500+ wins participation end of season reward. Now, the real question(with a new rating system) is how many games did he actually lose, and in this case how many "Consecutive Wins" did he achieve."

In other words, this fellow played a lot of arenas, had a lot of loses, but before the season was up, he earned his way to the 500+ wins participation award. His rating might be in the toilet compared to a great player that earned 500+ wins, but there would be separate awards for those with the Highest Ratings. Players achieve higher ratings by NOT losing, and by successfully completing "Three Win Consecutives". The participation awards would be on a different tier. How is that so hard for you to fathom?

If you need me to repost the entire updated System Post, I will. Now, Like I replied to Cap', this is a suggestion thread that will aim at delivering a great system, one that we would eventually like Bioware to implement. You said it yourself, you're disgruntled with the current ELO system, and the way people are taking advantage of it.

Please keep yourself in the loop with the updates. I sense great ideas could come from you if you could get passed the apparent failures of "applied ELO theory".

And I agree that ELO isn't a flawed system, but things need to be clear in terms of SWTOR. The population isn't enough to make this work for lots and lots of various reasons:

simple ones:
1) random queue - having your ranking determined by who you get grouped with, thus not any indication of skill
2) population in queue - the number of people queueing at any given time is likely less than 20 making matching pretty much non-existant
3) no gate for entry - thus anyone, people in pve gear and people who just dinged 60 for the 1st time and have never stepped foot in a wz can queue. Thus losing when you are in a match WITH them has nothing to do with your skill.
4) class balance - 2 classes dominate the top 100. basically 70% is PT/VG and Sin/Shadow. Thus if you are one of the other classes and get grouped with the lesser classes, you are likely going to fail, and it has extremely little to do with the skill of the players, unless the other side has mouth breathing, keyboard turning pve heroes.

but that's not really how ELO works.

1. Yes, any given game will be heavily influenced by luck of teammates and opponents, but over time the luck should even out statistically.

2. The solution to low population is increasing the population. No change to the rating system can fix the problem. There just needs to be more people (x server?).

3. These kinds of players will drop to low ratings if there's sufficient population. I certainly wouldn't mind a required expertise level to Q though.

4. The solution is better class balance...

Thus, all of this points to.....

the need for a higher population in pvp, and in ranked. Thus, the current way of doing business isn't really working. So a change is needed. And the only realistic way to do it is x-server, and I would suggest x-faction, Let's face it, only 17k toons have played games in yolo, and how many of those are alts of mains, probably at least half. And I say half because there are going to be lots of people with more than just 1 main and 1 alt. There are some with 4+ regularly doing ranked.

Probably another 10% of that 17k are people that just decided to try arena and played there 10 games are done, whether that's due to having a great record for their 10 games and done, or lost the majority, hated it and left. Hell, there's basic 30% of the total has ZERO wins.

Again, I don't have an issue with ELO per se, just that in terms of yolo queues with the state of SWTOR pvp, I have to ask if there is a chance that it will work. And I can't see a scenario with the current state of the pvp ranked solo game that it does, and further that even x-server/x-faction would/could fix the problem.

There would have to be big changes in the game in order for it to work, the basics of which I have already stated. And as thus the main reason I support, FOR YOLO, a more participation based rating/ranking. And in that, by keeping things simple, implement something like the token system from wins that favors those that win matches.

Which is also where I'm basically disagreeing with OP, in that, while it was much simpler earlier, he's now adding stuff that make it that much more complicated and difficult to implement. Just keeping it simple, if the state of the game stays the same, 10pts for a 1, 1pt for a loss, 1 ranked token for a win in yolo, 2 ranked tokens for a win in grouped, and 1 ranked GROUP token for a win in grouped. Thus giving an incentive for those that do grouped and rewards that are only group, where the best should be playing.

edit note: keep ELO for grouped, but also keep the tokens as a bonus.

Post deleted due to system update.

Tell you what Kaki, how about a compromise? How about a system that rewards skill and participation?
(Ummm, I'll use green to differentiate.)

1) Rewards by Participation:
--Players receive rewards by meeting certain victory milestones.

--Presumably Bronze will be crystals, Silver weapons, and Gold either armor or a mount.

--Those milestones would be 20, 50, and 100 wins* in the solo queue; 10, 30, and 70 wins for grouped.**
*If these numbers seem low it's for two reasons. First, I want people who have alts to have a chance to get them for multiple characters. Second, my ultimate hope is that proper war zones will eventually be added to ranked and when you start talking about ten to fifteen minute matches those numbers get a lot steeper.
**Group milestones are smaller because the group population is typically smaller, the competition more fierce. The smaller numbers should hopefully coax more players into grouped and, if unsuccessful, at least reduce the number of matches required to reach said milestones.

2) Rewards by Rating:
--All players whose active rating fall within a given bracket receive all the rewards of the corresponding win bracket regardless of how many matches they've completed.

--In addition, these players will receive a bonus reward not given to those in the same win brackets. These rewards will include an appropriate level decoration (gold, silver, or bronze) and title unique to the season.
Exs: A player who achieves gold rating but only has reached the bronze victory milestone would receive all the victory rewards up to gold and the appropriate rating rewards. A player who has earned the gold victory rewards and a bronze rating would only receive the bronze skill rewards.

--Those milestones are the top 5% of players for gold, 15% for silver, 30% for bronze.

The Top 96 rewards would function similarly to how they do now. The numbers given are open to manipulation within the proposed guidelines. Rating function on the present Elo system. All rewards are distributed at the end of the season.

Best of both worlds. Players who start late can still earn rewards by playing well. Players concerned with skill still get something to lord over players who underperformed. Players who don't win as much still have something they can work toward attaining. Since the whole system is participation based in encourages players to queue up early and often to get as many rewards as possible.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if you include Milestone Rewards to the present ELO system, you are still left with the problems that plague it. Granted you might see people queing up longer than a few days before quitting, but once those "milestones" were met, the poorly rated players would probably stop queing. On that note, your scenario would be "milestone heros" just grinding out their time served to attain a reward, but for dedicated players who keep trying despite their luck, there would be something to earn. That would be a good thing no doubt, and a hell of a lot better than what the devs have in place right now.

I like your suggestion to a point, but my answer would be undecided. This suggestion alone would not remedy our deteriorating ranked scene the way that it should. A revamped system complete with tokens would encourage more players to get in the ring and stay there.

Oh, I'm under no delusion that the present Elo system is anything other than horrible. I'm just proposing something quick and easy that could probably be implemented next season. I'm Sure people would still call for a better rating system. There are just two problems with that:

First, while people say they want a better rating system than what we have, threads like this make it abundantly clear that what people actually want is a perfect rating system. I'm not sure such a thing exists. If the rating system rewards wins more than losses then people complain that the system just rewards players who can play more (and some nonsense about how it disregards actual skill blah blah meh blah ). If you assign rating by individual performance (ie medals) the argument shifts to there being no decent metric to judge it (like medals ). Mind you, all these systems are arguably better than Elo but people get hung up on the imperfections. Meanwhile, BW just likely focuses on the disagreements and concludes Elo is perfectly fine as well.

Which brings up the second issue: Elo is perfectly fine -- for groups. You see, Elo was designed for one-on-one contests but it can still probably be applied to organized groups -- ie guilds. Where it falls apart is when you try to apply it to individuals -- solo. And Alex Modney has made it perfectly clear he has nothing but contempt for solo players. We were outright denied access to ranked for almost two years and now they see fit to just gut the solo bronze tier of any substantial rewards. That's why Elo will never get fixed: doing so would be beneficial to solo players and he's consistently made it clear he views us as garbage.