A Modest Proposal to fix PvP ranking and avoid a skip tax

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I've been lurking around the forums for a while, but I feel like a I have some great ideas to improve the PvP that I think benefit both devs and players. This will be long, so I describe my proposal first, then explain why I think these changes help.

The proposal:

When a player is attacked by someone else, they do not lose points (or if you feel they must, cap this at a very small loss like say 5 pts). You'll of course have to adjust the scale of progression rewards, but it could be similar to PvE. I'm sure you have data for how many matches people play, how long they last, etc., so you should be able to project how high the top people can go.

Instead of an ISO skip tax, if I skip a match then I lose points. This could be either the full points I would have gained, half that many points, or a fixed total like 5 or 10.

If someone fights me and loses, I get points as before.

If someone skips me, I get points for that. Again, could be a variable amount based on ranking (say half what I would get if they had fought and lost) or a fixed amount (say 5 or 10).

Now, the devs will object that this makes shields worthless, so they lose money. Here's a replacement to fix that: sell DEFENSIVE boosts. Much like the shields, you pay some amount of HP and get +3 AP or increased damage, etc. for some amount of time whenever you are attacked.

Some observations to support this proposal:

1. Shields are a premium advantage that people can buy to get an edge, but it perversely requires them to NOT PLAY. If you instead had people pay for defensive boosts, they could buy them while they are playing and/or before they put the game down. Furthermore, it gives people who attack them harder matches, which means those people might be more likely to buy and use offensive boosts. They might take more damage in these matches and need to buy health packs. Therefore, I think switching from shields to defensive boosts could have a bunch of positive knock on effects for the developers and be a big moneymaker.

2. People skip for two reasons, and an ISO skip tax is going to annoy both groups:
a) Low level players skip because they cannot beat certain teams. If they have to pay ISO, they feel they are being robbed and can't progress to the point where they could beat these teams.
b) High level players skip because they realize that a 10 point opponent will very likely retaliate for 40 points, and so attacking is a net loss of about 30 points. Why should they have to pay to avoid all those negative value matches the matchmaking throws at them? Every high level player has a minimum, maybe 10 or 15 or 20 or 25, below which they really do not want to attack, unless they absolutely cannot find a good match.

3. In this game, essentially the only way to defend yourself is to be intimidating enough so that people skip you. People are good enough, and the AI bad enough, that I think most players (with 3* or high level 2* characters) can defeat anyone, it's just a cost/benefit analysis of whether the time/damage they will take is worth the points. Increasing the ranking of people who get skipped over and over better reflects this reality and seems fair.

4. Losing a ton of points from something beyond your control is incredibly frustrating. Everyone has made a final push in a tournament, played a match and found they were attacked many times during that match and lost far more than they gained. This is hugely frustrating, and there's no need to enrage people like this.

5. It seems random how often I get attacked. Some tournaments I'm just constantly getting attacked faster than I can play matches. A few times, I'm lucky enough that I get attacked rarely in the final push. It seems like every tournament there's some lucky soul in a bracket that just does not get attacked much. It seems like random chance to me (maybe there's something in your MMR system, but it seems very capricious). Very often I think the winner of a bracket is determined just by the random chance of who gets put in the queue for other people to attack the most during the last hour. There's definitely a better way to choose a winner.

6. My system would have people place according to how they performed over the whole tournament, not just how rabidly they can push in the final hour or two. This could better engage people in unlucky time zones and seems fairer overall.

7. I would like to see you do a better job of grouping people with similar scores (whether or not you adopt any other parts of my proposal). For example, you could only draw from players within N spots of you (for example, 500 spots above or below you). If you want to get one of those final spots, you should have to duke it out exclusively with all those other 3** teams vying for the top. Seems fairer and more exciting to me.

8. It might seem like one could exploit the points for being skipped. For example, I might set up a 2nd dummy account and try to find myself and skip myself repeatedly. However, this should be easily preventable. For example, if player A skips player B, then he might not get player B in his queue again for a certain time. Or you could just keep an eye out for accounts that almost always skip. Or if you use point 7 above, it would solve itself as that rank 0 skipping account could only see the bottom of the ladder before long.

9. If I want a top reward, I need a bunch of other people dedicated to push that high. If I'm willing to go all out to get that last 4* progression reward, I can't get there on my own. If everyone else is below 800, I'll get nothing to 0 pt matches and it's literally impossible. My system would fix that. If I want a reward bad enough, I just have to grind hard enough, I don't need help from anyone else.

10. Kudos on the recent efforts to better communicate your decisions. I think you could go farther engaging this forum, though. For people respectfully putting forth suggestions, why not discuss more, and tell us what your concerns are? For example, if you like some of the above suggestions, but have a problem with some part, or think it's vulnerable to some exploit, etc., why not respond and let us know? I or someone else may offer some brilliant counter suggestion. Same with respecs, any of the suggestions seem almost but not quite right? Then jump in and maybe we can find a good system together. I think there are a lot of good ideas here and engaging more might be a valuable resource for you. That being said, I know there are only so many hrs in the day, so keep working on this great game!

If anyone actually made it this far, thanks for reading and let me know what you think!

Pwuz_

I'm all for anything that avoids the proposed skip tax. It just sounds like a way to penalize players. I am too low to have realized that as you rank higher, the lower people are not worth fighting.

It really sounds like there needs to be a better system in place to determine who shows up in your queue. I know I personally won't even try to fight a team with one or two characters that are 20+ levels above my highest characters. Don't get me wrong, I've tried, but I get crushed. Yet time and time again I keep finding all my possible opponents with maxed 2* or better characters. I'm still transitioning off of my 1*characters and can't even get covers to push my 2* characters beyond them. (OK, my Wolverine is finally worth using, but that's it.)