So can we actually fix tiebreakers yet?

Volrak

losdamianos wrote:

Thats why there should be a poll to clearly show D3 what do we want and why they keep DISCRIMINATING people who happen to live on the other side of the world having to wake up in the middle of night to stay competitive...

Lest we forget... before the event schedule discriminated against Americans, it discriminated against Australians, for months, and not just for tiebreaking - it was actually impossible to play every potential game in each node without sacrificing sleep.

I'm not saying the current system has no problems. It does, and I'd like to see them solved. But (A) it could be worse, and (B) the screwage has at least been shared around somewhat.

Ohboy

Nitymp wrote:

Ohboy wrote:

The solution is better tie breaks,

No it isn't. Just no. Perfect scores should be rewarded with the same prize and etc. filtering down, rather than being split just due to speed of completion.

You are literally the only person against this.

You are not reading my posts properly.

I'm agreeing that it shouldn't be awarded based on first past the line. It's literally written a few posts above yours where I clearly stated this.

I'm saying that there should be a better way to break ties, because 20 way ties leaves much to be desired. The problem isn't that 5 out of 20 people with perfect score are getting rewards. The problem is that there are 20 people with perfect scores.

I refuse to believe I'm the only one who wants a better ranking system than the lazy "30 people got perfect score, let's give them all first prize and call it a day".

I would say you are literally the only one spreading this nonsense, but I would sadly be wrong.

Nitymp

Ohboy wrote:

30 people got perfect score, let's give them all first prize .

I fail to see how this is an issue.

Ohboy

Nitymp wrote:

Ohboy wrote:

30 people got perfect score, let's give them all first prize .

I fail to see how this is an issue.

At some point we'll have to stop calling it a prize for first and call it what it is... The final progression reward.

Because today we have 10 tied. Next month we'll have 20 and soon we'll reach silly numbers(did we top out at 60 in terrors and nop?) . They will not be giving out hundreds of mythics every day. It's not a sustainable model if they want to sell cards and packs.

Its not just about what's good for us, the players. A balance must be struck because at some point they'll just pull the plug.

So it's better to campaign for a sustainable competitive environment than one that leads to the thing being scrapped eventually just because we want more mythics now. It's the Golden goose, and you're advocating we dig around in it to see if we can pull out more eggs to share.

I would like to see more competition(and yes, a gentler prize structure to prevent barriers to entry). I read about people here talking about how great nop was for the competitive nature. It hasn't been competitive for a while before they revamped it. We've come to a point where the ai is too weak to make it competitive.

Making perfect score the criteria is playing solitaire. It's not competitive. Competition demands that players eat dirt when they don't measure up, not group hugs when the next player crosses the line. It demands differentiation of scores.

That's the issue. That's why we shouldn't be happy with 30 perfect scores.

I'll even grant you that I agree ties should get the same prize. But not now. Not when there are 10+ way ties. That's why I say that tiebreakers are the solution. When scores are more spread out and ties become rare, everything else becomes trivial to resolve.

buscemi

Ohboy wrote:

I refuse to believe I'm the only one who wants a better ranking system than the lazy "30 people got perfect score, let's give them all first prize and call it a day".

You should start a poll.

wereotter

Volrak wrote:

Nitymp wrote:

Ohboy wrote:

The solution is better tie breaks,

No it isn't. Just no. Perfect scores should be rewarded with the same prize and etc. filtering down, rather than being split just due to speed of completion.

The game awards a certain number of mythics as prizes each week; this is a number that d3go certainly wants to control, for obvious reasons.

Except they don't, else there would never be a mythic rare card in the millions of packs that get opened each week. Since there are mythics in packs they have much less control over how many come into being.

Ohboy wrote:

Nitymp wrote:

Ohboy wrote:

30 people got perfect score, let's give them all first prize .

I fail to see how this is an issue.

At some point we'll have to stop calling it a prize for first and call it what it is... The final progression reward.

Sounds good to me... I wouldn't care if ranking were eliminated entirely and there were better progression rewards. Perhaps the old first place prize added for high/perfect scores. I know that's not what you intended with your comment, but it is a solution that would both remove a lot of the animosity regarding ranking as is and benefit the largest number of players.

Steeme

Sounds like we need "seasons".

Individual events can have multi-way ties for first, no problem, but the top prize is not the exclusive mythic. Perhaps just a couple more tiers in the progression reward (including one for a perfect score).

Players accumulate points during the season based on their performance in each event.

At the end of the season they have an exclusive "invitational" event with only the top scoring players.

Those players duke it out in a special event, with special prizes, perhaps special rules as well (ie. decks are locked once you select a planewalker for a node, and you only play against each others' locked decks).

Since the invitational has a limited player base, they are free to award the top prizes to all players in the event of a tie.

Reasonable?

Ohboy

Steeme wrote:

Sounds like we need "seasons".

Individual events can have multi-way ties for first, no problem, but the top prize is not the exclusive mythic. Perhaps just a couple more tiers in the progression reward (including one for a perfect score).

Players accumulate points during the season based on their performance in each event.

At the end of the season they have an exclusive "invitational" event with only the top scoring players.

Those players duke it out in a special event, with special prizes, perhaps special rules as well (ie. decks are locked once you select a planewalker for a node, and you only play against each others' locked decks).

Since the invitational has a limited player base, they are free to award the top prizes to all players in the event of a tie.

Reasonable?

Great idea, in lieu of a badly needed real pvp system.

wereotter

Ohboy wrote:

Steeme wrote:

Sounds like we need "seasons".

Individual events can have multi-way ties for first, no problem, but the top prize is not the exclusive mythic. Perhaps just a couple more tiers in the progression reward (including one for a perfect score).

Players accumulate points during the season based on their performance in each event.

At the end of the season they have an exclusive "invitational" event with only the top scoring players.

Those players duke it out in a special event, with special prizes, perhaps special rules as well (ie. decks are locked once you select a planewalker for a node, and you only play against each others' locked decks).

Since the invitational has a limited player base, they are free to award the top prizes to all players in the event of a tie.

Reasonable?

Great idea, in lieu of a badly needed real pvp system.

A real PvP is too easily trolled is the problem. I feel like it was in the game at launch and eliminated. Someone could, theoretically, enter a match, and then just spend 20 minutes fiddling around with the cards in hand, and intentionally trying to make matches that won't actually match gems until you get frustrated and concede the match. I'd rather play against an AI opponent that I can both walk away from if something comes up and I need to put my phone down, and who won't troll me if I'm trying to play.

Ohboy

Thankfully numerous other games have already solved this problem by implementing a timer.

Volrak

wereotter wrote:

Volrak wrote:

The game awards a certain number of mythics as prizes each week; this is a number that d3go certainly wants to control, for obvious reasons.

Except they don't, else there would never be a mythic rare card in the millions of packs that get opened each week. Since there are mythics in packs they have much less control over how many come into being.

Some percentage of cards from packs drop as mythics; they control the percentage. If they doubled the percentage, a number very close to double the number of mythics would be given out in packs. As an average over a large population, this is a very high degree of control.

The total number of packs opened is also controlled (except for one avenue): Packs and crystals from QB rewards, event rewards, and daily rewards, are all released at a fully controlled rate limit over the player-base as a whole. The one uncontrolled avenue is of course money purchases, but not only do they have no reason to want to control that, but keeping that avenue attractive is kind of the key reason why they control everything else.

Giving a mythic reward for 100% progression would not only relinquish control (since there's no control, direct or statistical, over the number of players achieving 100%), but would also cause a huge increase in the flow of mythic cards released for events with large n-way ties.

A separate observation for this thread that nobody has made yet is that events which do have a 100% or 99% progression reward (some PVE events) tend to attract a lot of complaints from those who feel excluded, even when that reward is just a 5-card pack. Imagine the feel-bad and the deluge of complaints if that reward was a mythic.

gruntface

Implement 2 or 3 windows per leaderboard event and let people pick their start-end time. Each bracket would be self contained and at least people get a fairer chance than the broken system we have currently.

Selfishly, for an average player like myself, it would enable me to wake up at a more reasonable time around work commitments to complete my final round of nodes.

I'm not competing for the top prizes but have empathy for those that do and lose out to inadequate tie breakers especially given there is absolutely no supply issue in extending the top prize tier. It would barely impact the card pool and if anything incentive players to spend more to have a crack at temporarily exclusive cards.

And yes, I would 100% vote for ai enhancements but suspect this is a pipe dream given much simpler (albeit less effective) solutions are not implemented.

Muche

Currently, a player who finishes first ranks higher (among players with the same number of points). This favors players in certain time zones and faster decks.
This could be mitigated by more methods in the tie-breaking system.

At first I thought about using the length of the match, since the start of a match and the end of it are both communicated to the server, AFAIK.
All a player needs to be ranked first is to have the perfect score and play their games quickly.
This would fix the time zone issue, but still favors fast decks.

Thus time per turn could be used. This would mean that one could play a slow control deck, win in 30 turns, and still rank higher than an aggro deck that won in 5 turns,
but its player took long time to decide which gems to match.

Another option, (applicable to PvP events only) is to incorporate tie-breaking system from e.g. chess. The basis of which is that the player with harder competition ranks higher.
The simplest method would be to sum the final score of all opponents.
This would indeed be more resource-intensive, as each won match affects the ranking of all players that played against the winner.

In conclusion, each player would have four scores - actual points (more is better), sum of points of their opponents (more is better), time and turns spent (taken from all matches, displayed together as time divided by turns; less is better).
The chance of all three of them being equal is significantly lower (especially the time spent).
Ranking would be no longer time-zone dependent, but more skill dependent.

I don't think there are PvE events with individual ranking, so the above applies for PvP events only.
It could be partially applied to Quick Battle as well - the time spent tie-breaking method only. The simple opponents score method doesn't work in an unlimited-number-of-games environment.