How to Fix the Ranking System

What is the purpose of the ranking system?

To give players a way to relate their level of skill in the game of Risk with each other.

To motivate players to continue to play the game, improve their skill and become valuable members of the community.

Does it achieve this objective?

Currently the ranking system is flawed and not viewed with appropriate credibility.

How do we fix it?

So far I have seen 5 main threads that I would like to incorporate into a proposal.

1. Separate the 1v1 and FFA leaderboard.

2. Balance the sp gain/loss per game to be a more fair reflection of the skill of the player.

3. Strongly incentivize playing to win.

4. Some kind of rank decay

5. The end of noob grinding.

I do not claim any of these ideas as my own and I am happy to give full credit to those who came up with them originally. Also I am not a numbers guy or a developer. My strengths are systems design and messaging.

1. Separating the 1v1 and FFA leaderboard is a crucial step in restoring credibility to the ranking system. The game of Risk has evolved from its origin as an FFA multi-player game to currently having 1v1s as the most efficient way to rank up. When I first became connected with the community on Discord I was surprised to discover that I was one of very few FFA players, notably Ares and a handful of others with their main ranked accounts in the top 100. Frankly I don't care if a 1v1 ladder exists at all. But I'm not here to gatekeep or tell others how to have fun in the game. Decoupling 1v1 games from FFA games is essential if we are going to design a fair ranking system. It is way harder to defeat two or more opponents than it is to defeat a single one and that difficulty scales with more opponents. Separate leaderboards also solves the problem of trying to use numbers and math to account for that relative difference in difficulty.

2. Balance the sp gain or loss in any given game to be a more fair reflection of the skill of the player. Currently the risk is too great in the top 100 and the reward is too little to really incentivize top players to play ranked with their main. In a system that would be a more fair reflection of skill I would suggest that sp acquisition and loss be slowed down. I would suggest that it take longer to become a grandmaster and once there have it take longer to lose that status from losses. We want our ranking system to incentivize players to play. If our top players do not aspire to play because the risk for them is too great to do so, this points to an obvious flaw. 3. Strongly incentivize playing to win. The winner of an FFA game must take the majority of the points. Making FFA games be winner-take-all points wise has been Obi-Wans hill to die on so I don't need to rehash too much of what has already been said. Rewarding playing to win is a good incentive. Suiciding for second is a feel bad. If rank and skill progression are a key ingredient of fun in the game we get to decide what we incentivize. Players will do what the game tells them to, even if that thing is unfun.

4. Some kind of rank decay. Sterling has proposed a solution that I would like to support and echo here. The idea is that players would need to play a ranked game at minimum once a week to maintain their position on the leaderboard. After a week's time that player would drop off the leaderboard and their account would show a 'ghost rank' where that player would be if they were to play a game. This is a positive incentive to reward players for playing. Rank decay could also be done with a negative incentive, something like a slow sp bleed. I feel like Sterling’s solution is superior here.

5. The end of noob grinding. A grandmaster who beats up on novices and beginners has a dubious title at best. The irony of this statement is not lost on me. Because I noob grind I make myself a hypocrite unless on some level I don't believe in the legitimacy of my own title. I am a top 10 player because I noob grind. And what a grind it is. At 7 million sp I stand to gain less than 3k per win but lose nearly 160k per loss. That's something like 54 wins per loss to stay at parity. The only way that is possible is by intentionally playing the worst possible opponents such that we can leverage every skill gap possible to effectively never lose. As a solution I suggest a camouflage mode. As with any FFA multiplayer game, Risk has targeting inherent in the structure. If we were able to implement a system where no information of our opponents is given, every player in every game would be on equal footing. This is how I would approach it for ranked games. You see Player 1, 2, 3 etc. in the lobby and that’s it. No stats, no name, no country, no colour. Level the playing field completely. We could toggle this off in PWF games but for ranked it doesn’t seem that we as a whole benefit from this extra information. It enables me to rank grind and whereas I’m happy to be able to claim I’m a top 10 player, I would much prefer for my true rank, whatever that may be, to be known and something I can actually improve upon. Frankly I don’t think I’m all that good. A camouflage mode would also allow top players to play each other ranked because they would not know until after the game is over that they played each other.

Two Final Points: XP: Olive had suggested that xp can be tied to gems which I think is a brilliant positive incentive that will get players playing.

Collaboration: There must be a way to automate collaboration detection that does not involve the cumbersome player reporting process. Also, if collaboration detection was successfully automated, then all of the complaining about perceived collabing that remains can be shown for the confirmation bias that it is.

Thank you all for listening and I’m very happy to keep iterating these ideas. I want to see this game be the biggest and best it can be.