porkenbeans wrote:WTF are you talking about, lol. The players at the top would be the best players, period. Not only would they have to achieve the rank, they would also have to keep their opponent average the highest. What on earth is keeping you from seeing the logic.
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First, win percentage says much more about the type of games a person plays, not so much about skill. Only if you look at the whole picture ... the types of games they play, the score and the win percentage can you get anything close to a "clear" picture of a player's skill (and even then its pretty murky).
But the real point is about the score change you suggest.
Right now, the score adjusts. You play a lower ranked player, you get fewer points, but lose more. You play a higher ranked player and gain more, lose fewer. This causes people to move up and down a lot, at least up until you get so high in rank that the points you could gain even from winning all but the absolute impossible to win because of luck games. (if you lose 30 points, but gain only 1 point, you have to win 30 games to equal 1 loss, but you often lose more than 1 in 30 games due to pure random dice factors -- and the real stretch is actually much higher).
This is
one reason those at the top play mostly each other (farmers are generally from the slightly lower ranks). But, though they play a lot, they get very few points for each game. So, after a certain point, they move up only very slowly. The Conquerer shifts regularly, but it is more or less the same group of people who stay up there and compete for the title. The thing is ALL of them are slowly moving up. I cannot remember the exact figures (and its not important to this discussion anyway), but say a year ago the top scorer might have been around 5000. Now maybe they are at 6000 (again, not sure of exact figures, but it IS going up). Eventually, it will be higher.
As new person, what is the likelihood that you will get that high? Even if you are very good, it takes much longer to reach 6000 than 5000. This is particularly true because the higher you go up, the fewer points you CAN earn per game. BUT, in the current system there is the "leveler". The lower point person (lower ranked person) has an inherent advantage because they can earn
more points for the same game than the higher ranked person. You move up quickly at first, then slow down. Even though the points involved in high rank games is fewer than in other games, this principal still applies. It keeps the score from going up even higher, faster.
You would do away with that. Suddenly, those who have been here a long time will be raking in points, points, points. The lower down, newer folks simply won't be able to catch up, with the
possible exception of someone who plays a phenomenal number of games quickly.
Also, since you allow lower ranked players to join the higher ranked games (but not the reverse), they could open a lot of games and simply wait for newbies to join or advertise for them to join. Since they are much better, they will win most of the time. They accrue points quickly. They keep accruing points. Eventually those folks have so many points that it becomes very, very difficult for any new player to catch up. Even if the new player plays a lot and wins a lot, the older players will always have played and won more and therefore will have more points.
This would not solve farming. It would change it. It would create or add to point inflation.