Erroneous league assignment

[ArtNJ]

Kamikaze,

With respect to the many games at once issue, its actually not a big deal. Correspondence chess has been dealing with that for decades. Basically, if a player delays a loss to gain points, then when they do take the loss they lose a lot more points. Conversely, if they take the loss immediately, then the subsequent wins yield more points. Yes, you can game the system to get over a rating threshhold for an achievement or to try and temporarily and briefly grab a certain spot on the leaderboard, but in the long run its very counterproductive.

As far as the encouraging people to play point, its hard to debate because there is no data so we are speculating about people's feelings. Certainly Blizzard put a lot of thought into it, but clearly there are people that are very turned off by the Blizzard system. Moreover, because its much more complicated than an ELO system, OML did not get it right out of the box, and it may still not be right.

I wont claim I can prove anything with this data, but I offer you the following information for what its worth: in the Hero Academy League (800 registered players, at least half of whom are or were truly active) about 1/3 of the most active players by games completed are outside the top 40 rated players, and some of the most active players are actually poorly rated. ELO, and the ability to tangibly track changes in their ability, motivated them (a lot!) to try and improve. My belief is that if you look at the most active Outwitters players, the percentage of people that are very active, but weak, wont be much different from the Hero Academy League.

Well, I guess that data does prove one thing -- that the Blizzard hypothesis is at least debateable, agree?

Anyway, OML made its decision, its set in stone. All they can do now is try and tweak the formulas so that the best players get top competition before they get bored and quit. Surely we can agree that no one should go 30-0 and be in Gifted.