Seasons, anti twink, reward long term players

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kumarpr228

Dear Shuffle IT

Love the game.

I was wondering if you could implement a season option.  Where your ranking gets reset at the start of each season.  Length of a season, 1 month-6 months.

When I check the leader board most of the players in the top have less than 200 games played, I have even seen some with 20 games played.  This does not bother me.  It's your money, if you want to start a twink account go ahead.  However, I paid in advance for a 2-year gold subscription.  I would love to start a twink account.  I am a better player now than I was last week, last month, last year, etc.  However, since I paid in advance for 2 years it seems that Shuffle IT punishes me and other players that have paid in advance.  I should have instead only paid month to month and start a new account each month.  I was wondering if you could give some kind of reward (cosmetic in nature) for players that have large number of games played.  Maybe a reward when you reach 1,000 games played, 5,000, 10,000, etc.  At least his way I don't feel like I have wasted money by paying two years in advance.  As a business, it seems that you should rewards those customers that pay in advance since it's a guaranteed revenue stream for you company.

Implementing seasons would decrease the incentive for players to only pay month to month and start new accounts.  If you implement some kind of cosmetic reward for long term players then you would give incentive for your customers to pay in advance.  I know this is a small company and you are limited to the number of programmers to make changes to the game.

Don't want to sound like I am complaining.  I have a score rank of about 50 with 600 games played.  I am proud of this because if I play well i can see rank slowly increase.  When I go see the leader board it gets a bit disheartening by seeing so many twinks. 

Thanks in advance for all your future work on dominion online.  Love this game so paid for a 2-year gold subscription in advance.



markus

An important purpose of ratings is being able to find equal matches. So I don't see a point in completely resetting the leaderboard.

Note that already now you lose levels on a daily basis if you don't play / play less than before: in your case, it would be 0.12 levels after one day, and 2.7 levels after a month. So you can't stay on the top without playing.

Also, if you play more with the same average results, you will get a higher level already. Somebody that only plays 1-2 games per day will be 2 levels below you with the same average result.

If you become a better player, your rating will adjust quickly in the current system. (Implicit assumption of the parameters is that one third of players should win/lose at least 2.5 levels per month.)
For example, if you improve from 50% to 60% win rate against the same opponents, you should gain 3 levels. In the current rating system, you'll gain 1.5 levels after 10 days (60 games) and 2.5 levels after 1 month (180 games), even without resetting the leaderboard.

kumarpr228

Thanks for the ranking information.

I think you might have misunderstood how a season works.

Let say a season lasts 3 months.  You would have 3 choices, ranked game, unranked game, or season game.

The ranking in the season game gets reset ever 3 months, the ranked never gets reset.

No the player has a choice to play a ranked or a season game but now not longer needs to start a new account each month.


jsh


markus

I don't see the point of dividing the player base into "permanently ranked" and "temporarily ranked" games. I would rather implement some tournaments that don't have to be organized externally.

What would be easy, however, is to calculate an additional leaderboard using the same rated games but only of the current month. The outcome at the end of the month would be quite similar for the above reasons. In the early days of a month it would be more swingy of course.

WhiteRabbit1981

Ranking aside - I would love an icon next to my username, so everyone sees that i did 500+ or 5000+ games  8)

I would also love trophies ... even fake ones, like the funny achievements isotropic had.


Backtopic: I shudder when i think about resetting my rank and playing lvl 20-ish opponents again.

kumarpr228

Not a fan of the dominion tournament.

It requires you to have 2 hours free to play 6 games.  Part of the fun of the online version of the game is the speed, Just a pain for me to arrange a 2 hour block a week to play and being in China time zone differences don't help.

Also don't have the patience to play Dominion for 2 hours straight, the best part of dominion online is if I have 20 min to kill I can jump on and play a game.

The idea of having two rankings, one ranking system is life time, and the other ranking system resets every month.

I agree with trophies and icons to show how many games you have played.  Having cosmetic based rewards I feel will decrease the incentive for twinks.

Accatitippi

I just want to point out that I recognize many of the names at the top of the leaderboard from the leaderboard in the old implementation, so I don't think they are twinks as I would define the term in this context - experienced players making multiple accounts to shoot up the leaderboard, then abandoning them to stay on top.

The old leaderboard used to hide players that hadn't played in more than one month. A similar system might be helpful to clear the leaderboard if the natural decay isn't enough.

Another solution could be to hide every player with a phi (Rating Deviation) above a certain cutoff, such as 1, for example. This means that new players would need to play a bit (5-20 games, I believe) before appearing in the leaderboard, and that players not playing for a long time would eventually disappear from it.

Incidentally, it appears that beating luser 3 times brought one player to 26. While it may be a decent estimate (aaaasan is a good player), it detracts from the credibility of the leaderboard. My proposed solution would also prevent this.

Just a thought. The leaderboard definitely needs to settle a bit before people start messing with it.

Stef

Hi kumarpr228,


To me, it seems like you have made some assumptions that aren't entirely correct about the rating system. This comes at no surprise at all, I wouldn't dare say I fully understand the rating system even though I implemented it.

Your assumption is that you are significantly punished for your early losses, because there is no reset. This would be true if the rating system is based on win/loss ratio. Suppose we'd just put the player with the highest winrate on top, then you would probably never be able to overcome those experimental games in your early career.

However, the whole point of the complexity behind the rating system is to deal with this. And it seems to be doing a very good job at it too. Suppose the #1 and #1000 both play on a daily basis and decide to swap accounts - two weeks later that #1000 account would be on top of the leaderboard.


What I'm trying to say is this: you are suggesting a different system (with the seasons) because it has some properties (not being punished for old results) while in essence the current system already has those properties, it's just a bit hard to see exactly how/why.

AdamH

Quote from: kumarpr228 on 02 June 2017, 01:52:40 AM
Not a fan of the dominion tournament.

It requires you to have 2 hours free to play 6 games.  Part of the fun of the online version of the game is the speed, Just a pain for me to arrange a 2 hour block a week to play and being in China time zone differences don't help.

This is one of the most common complaints of the league (although I can come up with several others, but I won't do that here). It's one of the biggest reasons I organized my own tournament last summer -- a low-commitment tournament. I'm really hoping I can do another one this summer.


As for the seasons discussion, I think most of the reason that other games like Hearthstone have seasons is because they hand out rewards at the end of each season based on your rank or whatever. It also reflects the idea that certain cards rotate out of the "standard format" and so you really are playing a different game between seasons sometimes. It seems neither of these apply to Dominion, though one day maybe online rewards will come up (doubtful, but I can dream) and this discussion might be worth having at that time.

Sadly, there isn't that much money to be made by professionally playing Dominion. Although I believe there is still a $1000 cash reward for winning the Dominion World National tournament at GenCon each year. You can totally qualify for that tournament by winning the IRL tournament I'm hosting at the end of July in Cincinnati! /shamelessplug

kumarpr228

Dear Stef

Thanks for the reply

I just checked the leader board and about 5-8 have over 400 games played, and one had 37 games played.  I am sure that not all of them are twinks, but there are a few.  Maybe some players are just joining from years of table top play they are great players.  I play Overwatch casual but twinks will happen in any game that has a rating system.

My main reason that I have bat taste in my mouth is that it feels that I have been punished by paying for a 2 year gold subscription.

Hindsight is 20/20.  If I could go back I would have only paid for a 1 month subscription and made a new account each month.

As it stands there is an incentive in the game to not pay in advance and instead pay month to month.  There is no incentive to pay in advance other then the hassle of imputing your payment information each month and starting a new account each month.

If the game could implement some kind of cosmetic rewards for long term players I think this would give great incentive for players to pay in advance and not make twink accounts. 

Maybe I am using the term "Twink" incorrectly.  For me it refers to players that are experienced at a game and choose to make a new account so they can play lesser skilled players and get a higher rank/reward.

Also, I have made assumptions about the rating system.  I am not math major and I have tried to read the ranking system methodology but it turns to Greek very quickly for me.

Thanks for visiting the forums and give us information.

Keep the good work stef, love this game.

Cave-O-Sapien

Quote from: kumarpr228 on 03 June 2017, 03:38:14 AM
Maybe I am using the term "Twink" incorrectly.

I mean, this is certainly different than any other meaning I've ever heard of. Pro tip: don't google it.

markus

Quote from: kumarpr228 on 03 June 2017, 03:38:14 AM
For me it refers to players that are experienced at a game and choose to make a new account so they can play lesser skilled players and get a higher rank/reward.

That is not a good strategy to rise in the leaderboard: how much you gain depends on the strength of your opponent (and your own strength). The weaker the opponent, the less you gain.

Only if you have a very steep learning curve and/or don't play many games, your preferred new account would come out higher at the end of the month than playing on with your existent.

kumarpr228

I think you might have misunderstood.

When a player starts a new account they are rank 20 correct?

So if someone is ranked 60 and then start a new account they will start at rank 20 and be playing other low ranked players for a while till they get their personal rank back up to 60.

This is a twink player.

I don't know enough of how the ranking system works so I don't know how fast or how many games this person would have to play to get back to their old rank of 60.



jsh

Quote from: kumarpr228 on 03 June 2017, 11:42:10 AM
I think you might have misunderstood.

When a player starts a new account they are rank 20 correct?

So if someone is ranked 60 and then start a new account they will start at rank 20 and be playing other low ranked players for a while till they get their personal rank back up to 60.

This is a twink player.

I don't know enough of how the ranking system works so I don't know how fast or how many games this person would have to play to get back to their old rank of 60.

There is no incentive to do this, and to be honest it isn't even actually a problem. So what if there are smurf accounts? Nobody is earning anything. The only function of rankings at the moment is better matchmaking, so people restarting at Level 20 are just setting themselves up to play with all the slow players at the low levels and wasting their time. Not to mention if they subscribed they are just wasting money. That is on them, not the system.

I checked out the top 50 to see if your fear of smurf accounts is founded. 41 of the people there I recognize either from the MF/Goko days or even as far back as isotropic. It's pretty natural for players who have been playing online that long to be good at the game. 1 is a confirmed smurf account (surprise, it has over 400 games, so your fixation on that number is meaningless) which doesn't even show up on the official leaderboard, so it doesn't seem like an issue. The rest, sure, I don't know them, but I have no reason to believe they are smurf accounts. Not saying I'm the best judge, but considering I recognize 41/50 users and I'm just one guy, it seems like we're okay here at the moment.


Out of the top 50, the only account I'm actually skeptical about besides the known smurf is aaaasn, who only has 4 games, but maybe he's just luser's good friend.