[MinaciousGrace]

Originally Posted by Dinglesberry

I find it funny how everything I say makes no sense. I'm a returning player who unfortunately had literally 0 involvement in the community when I did play, and you don't even want to know what my initial impression is of you is, not that you care (I'm an irrelevant new player, after all). Just the fact that people react to when you started to post says enough. I'm happy for you that you are well liked in your small friend group though, congratulations.

That aside, it really is a problem. It's a factor that causes new players to not want to stay, it causes returning players frustration, and it has issues with tournament seeding and makes it so some people are unable to compete UNLESS they make a new account, which is counter intuitive and obviously from other posts, alt accounts aren't wanted. The place where it isn't really an issue is at the very top level where you are at, which is understandable why it seems useless to you.

Isn't the whole intent to have the game grow? Fostering the game for the couple thousand or so active players is great and all, but I think you underestimate how amazing this ranking system is for new lower skilled players.

EDIT: Also, I disagree with the fact that "unless you are d7 you can get your skill back in weeks", do I need to start posting examples?

sigh... fine... ok one thing at a time

First, I'm neither well liked nor do I care about anyone's opinions of me, new player or otherwise. I'm just usually right about everything and even when I'm not i'm fairly good at convincing people I am anyway.

Now let's back up. What you want is a system that attempts to dynamically estimate a player's current level of skill. Fair enough, this is doable.

But let's consider why you want it; ostensibly for the purpose of more "fairly" seeding players into a tournament that has arbitrary divisions to begin with, that is manually seeded to begin with, through a process that already involves firmly aligning the potential skill level of a given player with their maximum observed skill level. This is the prerogative of the tournament organizers and it is the result of years of experience and it's a safe bet.

Game skill is constructed around muscle memory and the physical capacity to execute the given muscle memory and the level at which you have to be in order for physical atrophy to become a serious detriment to play after an extended break is already within the d7 range. Players who haven't played in many years are capable of regaining the bulk of their skill if not entirely surpassing it after a few dedicated weeks of play.

Now let's take a look at the tournament structure. D1-6 are created by drawing arbitrary dividers within the games content. Players are then seeded into those divisions based on the aforementioned methodology.

Let's assume that we didn't want to do this for an upcoming tournament, and indeed we wanted to capture as closely as possible every player's skill level at the point in time in which they signed up for a tournament. Let's also assume that there is no intention of sandbagging from any of the participants.

Now you need to realize that you can never know the true skill level of a player. You can only estimate it. Scores are the primary resource used to estimate levels of skill. More accurate estimations require more points of data. More points of data in this case means that you are expecting every participant in the tournament to be actively playing to the point in time in which they will sign up for the tournament, if of course you give a damn about your estimations being accurate, which apparently you do for who knows what reason.

You're faced with a dilemma. You care about accurately assessing the skill level of players at a specific point in time for which you need a certain amount of scores to have any faith in your result. Not everyone who signs up is going to be actively playing the game up until that point. Are you going to deny entry to all players who are inactive during this period due to an inability to accurately gauge their current skill level, or are you going to cede that the estimation of entrance skill level is not a primary concern of the tournament which would totally invalidate the entire point of this thread..?

But forget that. Let's assume that we have a perfect methodology for estimating the current skill level of a player that is immune to manipulation. Players are seeded into the tournament and placed into divisions that span a range of skill. Now why do we care about accurate seeding based on current skill level in the first place? It's to give players a fair chance at winning the division they have been seeded into relative to the competition they face. Let's for the moment also assume that I don't think the entire division system is an asinine waste of time and resources.

The winners of d1-d6 are most likely going to be the players who fell least short of entering the division above the one they were seeded in, in which case whether or not they were going to win is decided not by how accurately they were seeded, but by where the arbitrary division cutoffs were set.

In the event that the winner is not the player who was the best in his division at the time of seeding, the winner is then the player who has improved the greatest amount from their skill level relative to the highest level in said division. In this case the determinant of the winner is a combination of the arbitrary cutoff lines, the players with which they are grouped, and the relative rates of improvements of all players within the division.

Now, even if you could argue that a player may not necessarily be able to recoup a given level of skill they previously held quickly, you will not find a single player who would argue that it's just as easy for a player to improve to a level they have never attained as it is for another player, all other things being equal, to improve back to a level they have previously attained.

Imagine your system results in a previous d6 level player being seeded into d3, and over the course of the tournament they had effortlessly regained a skill level somewhere in mid d5. No other players in the said division have ever pushed beyond d3 in their past and even the players who improve the most struggle to find themselves at a d4 level by the end of the tournament.

In this scenario the very system that you insist should be implemented has monumentally failed in your touted goal of producing a fair environment for competition in a totally random splicing of players with vastly different ranges of skill.

What if the previously d6 player didn't win? Well then they didn't win despite having a massive advantage over every other player within their division.

In the best possible scenario involving a large number of assumptions that will never be the case in practicality your proposed system is either useless and has no bearing on the outcome of the tournament or is entirely antithetical to the supposed purpose of its existence.

And remember when I said we'll skip over the fact that I think divisions are a stupid waste of time? I do think that. Winners are not determined by the merit of their abilities they are determined by a predisposed set of conditions that either give them massive advantages or disadvantages. Sure each player has a degree of control over how well they play and how hard they practice but in the end what you want is just going to exacerbate a pre-existing problem.

Even if we assume that for some reason a universe exists in which nothing I just said is logically true, even if we assume that your proposed system produces seeds that provide for the most "fair" divisions, the overwhelming influential factor in determining who wins a given division is still how the divisions are arbitrarily spliced.

So even in a universe in which there is nothing wrong with what you want and it works perfectly it's still pointless.

Let's continue.

You think the AAA equivalency system convoluted by at least one dynamically scaling modifier to your player rank based on your activity, not just play activity, your activity specifically concerning your capacity to continually improve your top 15 scores is somehow appealing to new players? Dude i can't even work with this. You might as well tell me that you think chocolate is a periodic element.

Ok, you possibly have a valid point with causing returning players frustration. Nobody likes playing like shit, least of all, nobody likes playing like shit when they used to be awesome. Nobody likes looking at old scores and wistfully remembering the days in which they achieved them. Nobody likes seeing their legacy as a player slowly diminish in the eyes of a ranking system because they didn't spend every week grinding out scores and improving at the game just to upkeep a ranking on a website. Oh no wait, that's what you want.

You really honestly think players who have moved on from the game would be less frustrated when the achievements that they rightfully earned in due past are diminished below the level of some other player that has just been grinding out scores worse than theirs more recently? Returning players are already frustrated by the fact that they are playing like shit, and what you want to do is tell them "haha remember that time you were good, well if you don't get there again you were never really good in the first place".

Retired players don't deserve that. Returning players don't deserve that. People have the right to take pride in their achievements and to showcase them to others.

And to your last point, players aren't able to compete? What is stopping you? Nobody is stopping you from trying. Nobody is banning your account. Nobody is removing you from a tournament. Nobody is chopping off your hands. What are you just going to give up just because someone else is better than you right now? You're just going to stop trying because clearly there's no point since the outcome is a foregone conclusion?

Then you don't know what competition is.

You had it good when you caught me misreading what you said. But you pushed yourself into an untenable position and now it's my turn to make rash assumptions about you.

You took a break from the game. You come back to the game. You're bad compared to what you used to be and you want to be told you're a special snowflake and that it's all going to be ok. That and you want to implement a confusing, cumbersome, inefficient and ineffective system that singularly benefits players in your current situation in order to validate your effort into the game under the guise of creating a fairer play environment in a tournament setting that is essentially a lottery in the first place.

You think you're hot shit and that your opinion matters and that everyone else is just brainlessly circle jerking over a status quo because change is scary and hard. When people don't listen to you, you think it's because they're just lazy or dismissive to anyone new with an opinion. But you're so desperate to be the initiator of change to the degree that you would offer a suggestion with no forethought placed into it without an understanding of the system you're trying to change in the first place.

Or don't.

Mod Edit: I get where the anger is coming from, but lets keep it to a dull simmer please?