Could we use a league format?

Unknown

The PvP ranking system sucks. Normally I shy away from such declarative statements but it really, really does. The relentless butt f*ckery of the MMR system, the ludicrous nature and implementation of retaliations and how they effect your score and the now all too apparent disparity between the almost necessary use of shields and having their price doubled and a host of other problems feel like they are coming to the fore and for want of a better word...irritating people.

Straight up, I'm a money player. I've spent a not huge/not small amount on the game and I'll buy again when D3 can finally offer me some value (hint, 15 quid for 5 levels worth of ISO is not value), but I also want to have a challenging and worthwhile experience. At the minute I don't feel like the system can support that as tournaments feel a lot more like a lottery than competation.

So what about a league format? I haven't fully thought this through but could it work? Let's say your bracket of 1000 players was your vs pool and some arbitrary value was used to group these players (average roster level, effective roster level consisting of a points system weighting 3* higher than 2*, whatever). Now you know who you are facing and who is facing you.

Rather than random points loss/won, have a set amount of points for a win and 0 points for a loss. This is how must competitive leagues in the world operate and for good reason. The leaderboard will display either the W/L or W/L ratio and crucially, you will never wake up to find that you have been battered for 300 points and have to do all of that work again.

'But abuelo you fool! The game will simply be a grind! Everyone will be on the same points! IT'S MADNESS YOU MADMAN!'.

Fear not increasingly apathetic reader, for there is more to the tale.

Alongside the standard points = wins, there could be different aspects based on PERFORMANCE that offer different modifiers to your points total. It could be literally anything, for example Total Damage = 10000 = +0.5 points, Surviving AP = 12 = +0.9 points, 1 dead character -2 points. Whatever, the values and metrics could be absolutely anything. The point is that this a) rewards players performance b) could actually make team selection interesting if you build around these modifiers and c) would ostensibly be a lot fairer. A not inconsiderable advantage is that these weightings could be changed from tournament to tournament as an effective balancing mechanic.

There is loads of other stuff that should be considered, for example matchmaking would have to favour opponents you haven't faced against those you have and there would still be an element of 'he who grinds wins (but I don't think you can realistically fix that outside of a knockout feature). I don't know maybe I'm insane and there is probably lots I haven't considered but it seems promising to me.