Fixed-Point PVP scoring mode

Unknown

Purpose:

• Penalize skipping
• Reduce penalty for defensive losses
• Decrease the need to pay attention to timing within an event
• Reduce incentive to "start late"
• Reduce penalty for losing to players who "start late"
[/*]
• Reduce incentive to shield
• Increase the number of characters a player uses in a given tourney

Scoring System:

• Fights are still based on MMR
• Offensive Wins award 10 points
• Offensive Losses subtract 10 points
• Defensive Victories award 1 point
• Defensive Losses subtract 5 points
• Skipping an opponent subtracts 3 points
• Skipping a retaliation has no effect on your score

Problem Synopsis:
Under the current system, a player who starts the tourney late but has a high MMR can effectively catch up by taking down players who have spent the whole tourney earning their points. When a player starts late, there are more points in the pool and the person who has been slugging it out since the beginning gets penalized heavily for doing so. Another problem with this system is that the scoring system is effectively serving as an MMR for the current tournament. People skip until they can find a fight with a good points earned / difficulty ratio. However, the scoring system should solely serve as a barometer for your wins & losses within the current tourney.

To exemplify this, let's say I have an MMR of 100 and I have a score of 500. If a player with MMR of 100 and a score of 100 attacks me, I'd lose 50 (a net change of 100 points). If that same player had an MMR of 100 and a score of 500, I'd only lose 25 (a net change of 50). In some scenarios, having a player be able to catch up easily is nice, but the "swinginess" of this scoring system makes "gaming the system" far more important than actually just playing to win.

Intent and Theorycraft
Rather than design a PVP "slugfest", I am suggesting a system that makes progression less directly competitive and more like a true marathon (which the long time frames for most tourneys would suggest). It is very much a "whoever plays consistently and wins the most is most likely to win the tourney".

The point system described above is meant to reward people who start early and win consistently. Matches are still determined by MMR so you will always have an opponent of appropriate difficulty (asusming a correctly working match-making system). Additionally, defensive losses aren't so devastating at the high end of the progression pool. Losing 50 points under the current system is the equivalent of 2.5 or 3 fights. Under the current system, losing a defensive fight is equivalent to 1/2 of a fight (to account for the fact that the AI is highly unlikely to be as good as a player with context-sensitive decision making skills). Finally, this system also separates how well I'm doing in the tourney from my MMR. How good I am and how good my team is (essentially my MMR) is the sole factor in determining my opponents, and my score is solely a measure of my personal progression in this current tournament.

Effect on Skipping
The addition of skipping a fight penalizing your score directly relates a player's choices to fight difficult opponents. Because you no longer need to search for a team that gives you a good point ratio (you'll always get 10 points), you now have an incentive to fight almost every opponent that the system deems an appropriate fight. With such a stiff (but manageable) penalty for skipping, players are more likely to actually swap out their teams as able in an attempt to tactically defeat their given opponents.

Effect on shields
Because players aren't getting creamed by the lower and middle portions of the pack, the need to "always shield" should decrease. Because a defensive loss only counts as 1/2 of a win, even getting hit 5 or 6 times means you only need to win 3 fights against any matched opponent (they all give a fixed 10 points) to get back to where you were.

Potential Negatives
Because the number of points in the system is consistently increasing, high end progression rewards may be more readily available. To account for this, the tourney designers simply need to decide something to the effect of "a player should be rewarded the highest tier progression reward after 100 wins (e.g. 1000 points)." Personally, assuming that a player has to win twice as much as they lose, I think anyone with the stamina to win 150 fights in a 2 day period without skipping any fights deserves more than just a single 4* cover, but these numbers are just fictitious examples.