How do leagues work?

[CommandConquerer]

I'm sure this has been brought up before but...
How exactly does a player go up a league? As far as I can tell, it is completely unrelated to points, which begs the attention of two questions:

1. How ARE leagues calculated?
2. Why do we HAVE a points system when it is completely irrelevant to your actual skill level, not to mention which opponents you are matched against? (correct me if I'm wrong)

Please enlighten me on this matter, as I feel that a clarification of the system will help everyone play more competitively

[Lutherj]

1. It's a hidden rating system so we don't know exactly how it works. We do know that winning is obviously key, but also that who you win against is also significant.

2. Yeah its frustrating huh? It's basically a placebo designed to make you wanna play more. Somehow though it still works....I really wanna see my name at the top of my random 100 players list.

[CommandConquerer]

Hmm. Well, that sucks. I agree with you that there's a great motivation involved with climbing through the division ranks, and I get quite carried away with winning/losing points, but leagues are the big guns.

Kk. Let's hack the system. Question to all players with a recent league change: Approximately how big was your streak before you were promoted/demoted?



P.S Adam and Alex, you know that you're gonna have to tell us someday, it might as well be in this thread... Right? I know you're listening...

[onealexleft]

(08-25-2012 11:24 AM)CommandConquerer Wrote:  P.S Adam and Alex, you know that you're gonna have to tell us someday, it might as well be in this thread... Right? I know you're listening...

[onealexleft]

But in all seriousness, I've been working on the league system since release. Admittedly, the less visible portions. But I've deployed tons of fixes involving matchmaking to help improve that as much as possible, but we don't post about every tiny fix. The more visible stuff will usually have to come in a client update, but I've definitely got the ladder points on my list of things to improve on in an upcoming update.

[CommandConquerer]

Matchmaking has been quite improved since launch. Before, I was pitted against players light years in front of me quite often. Now all my matches are against people very close in rankings to myself. I also like the way that most patches are rolled out server side to reduce impact on players , so congrats.

Oh, and btw, I just realized, are you sidestepping the issue? Oh well, I suppose as sole programmer of the game, you are entitled to secrecy regarding the internal workings of the game. Could you at least confirm then that promotion/demotions ARE purely streak based? Or do points have some relationship as well? Please please please?

[wonderpug]

Is this a good place to lobby for some kind of mass demotion of inactive players? Half of the folks in my ST division have points low enought to likely mean they snuck in during those wild and carefree early days of promotion, and every time I peek at an opponent's ST division it looks like a similar story.

Maybe have holding pen divisions for people inactive for X days? Whatever the new Fun Points formula ends up being, it's not as fun to compare points with 20-30 people who aren't playing anymore.

[awpertunity]

(08-25-2012 12:10 PM)CommandConquerer Wrote:  Could you at least confirm then that promotion/demotions ARE purely streak based? Or do points have some relationship as well? Please please please?

I can quite confidently say that promotions/demotions have nothing to do with pure streaks. i.e, if you go 4-1 over and over and over and over and over, you WILL get promoted. It doesn't matter that you can only reach a streak of 4 wins at a time.

The visible points have nothing to do with it. The biggest indicator of how close you are to promotion I'd say is the number of points you get for a win against the people you play and how good they are. Of course their skill rating is hidden to so you cannot know for sure, but in general if you keep winning, you will notice you will be playing against players in a league higher than you. If you are winning against players a league higher than you and earning ~16 points or less, your promotion is probably very close.

[pookywb]

Yeah, doesn't seem to be streak based. I've won probably the past 15 games. No sign of a promotion. :/

[CommandConquerer]

Complicated system, I see. I suppose that we'll never know for sure how leagues are calculated. Good to know that as long as you're winning most of the time, you will get promoted though. I was losing hope.