HoD Prize Rankings Need a Re-Think

Skiglass6

bken1234 said:

DumasAG said:

bken1234 said:

I finished just outside of the top 50 in the second bracket with 4 freezes and one dropped objective -- that is -29. I would have probably not even made top 250 in the first bracket. 

Why should someone who puts in as much effort and gets the same score get lower rewards because of the time they enter the event?

We don't ever talk about brackets here -- and I think we should, because a lot of big groups track these to give their players an advantage. 

Personally, I would like to see personal rewards as they are abolished. 

Personal progression stays, but individual rewards are determined by win %. A perfect score would get top rewards. 95% and above next and so on. 

This way you are rewarded for your time and you're rewarded the same way everyone else in your tier is rewarded for the same effort, no matter what time you join. 

I'm not sure I full understand what you're advocating. You're suggesting we drop the current individual ranking system (not progression) in favor of a win-percentage ranking system? I thought the current tie-break system already avoided the problems with "first to the finish line". Are you suggesting that win-percentage over x amount of wins would be your rank? So essentially every node you play is a new bracket you reach, and your rank within that tier is based on win percentage? Are you suggesting that we get rid of support objectives and based solely on win-percentage (which I'm a fan of, actually, because it encourages experimentation and innovation in my mind if I don't have to run streamlined decks over and over for support objectives)?

Perhaps a workable ranking model would be:

• Every node played moves the player into a new reward bracket, with incrementally increasing rewards
• Final ranking within every bracket is based off of win-percentage as opposed to point total, every 3-5% could be the cutoff for a new tier
• Points for support objectives are added together as a multiplier. Every 10 points multiplies final rewards by x amount more. This could be a relatively small amount, and thus your individual rewards grow for your commitment to objectives, but your ability to win the base rewards doesn't change depending on support objectives

Progression is fine -- like @span_argoman said -- it rewards people for the effort they put into an event -- it's equitable and it doesn't depend on your tier. 

BUT -- the current tier system makes individual rewards over progression unfair. 

Last NOP a bracket opened up 35 minutes before the event ended. I entered the event, played 5 nodes with the fastest, untuned decks I could come up with and finished first -- someone else spent 2 days building decks and winning every charge for the same rewards. How is that fair?

With HoD and RtO, it's the same -- the first tier is widely-known to be tougher. I could score 240 there and not even finish top 250, or I could wait until the second bracket opens, get the same score, and get higher individual rewards. 

The only way to make it equitable is to give out individual rewards by score, and not by rank. This way, a player in Europe who is probably heading to bed when the first bracket opens, thus doesn't start until the morning when the second bracket is opening gets the same rewards for their effort as someone did if they entered when the event started. 

OR a player who purposely waits until the last minute can't get 300 pinkies (this happened recently when a third bracket opened a couple hours before one of these events ended) for putting in almost no effort, when other players have been grinding for 4 days and have higher scores and get lower rewards. 

Forum rules state you can not discuss cheats and exploits.  What a stupid tinykitty rule. But rules are rules, unless you are above the rules. 

Bil

  Well, i don't think we are properly talking about promoting exploits in this thread. Overall it is just someone reporting how things work around here.
   If something has to be made responsible for promoting exploits it is the bracket design itself, not the player who reports it.

bk1234

Skiglass6 said:

bken1234 said:

DumasAG said:

bken1234 said:

I finished just outside of the top 50 in the second bracket with 4 freezes and one dropped objective -- that is -29. I would have probably not even made top 250 in the first bracket. 

Why should someone who puts in as much effort and gets the same score get lower rewards because of the time they enter the event?

We don't ever talk about brackets here -- and I think we should, because a lot of big groups track these to give their players an advantage. 

Personally, I would like to see personal rewards as they are abolished. 

Personal progression stays, but individual rewards are determined by win %. A perfect score would get top rewards. 95% and above next and so on. 

This way you are rewarded for your time and you're rewarded the same way everyone else in your tier is rewarded for the same effort, no matter what time you join. 

I'm not sure I full understand what you're advocating. You're suggesting we drop the current individual ranking system (not progression) in favor of a win-percentage ranking system? I thought the current tie-break system already avoided the problems with "first to the finish line". Are you suggesting that win-percentage over x amount of wins would be your rank? So essentially every node you play is a new bracket you reach, and your rank within that tier is based on win percentage? Are you suggesting that we get rid of support objectives and based solely on win-percentage (which I'm a fan of, actually, because it encourages experimentation and innovation in my mind if I don't have to run streamlined decks over and over for support objectives)?

Perhaps a workable ranking model would be:

• Every node played moves the player into a new reward bracket, with incrementally increasing rewards
• Final ranking within every bracket is based off of win-percentage as opposed to point total, every 3-5% could be the cutoff for a new tier
• Points for support objectives are added together as a multiplier. Every 10 points multiplies final rewards by x amount more. This could be a relatively small amount, and thus your individual rewards grow for your commitment to objectives, but your ability to win the base rewards doesn't change depending on support objectives

Progression is fine -- like @span_argoman said -- it rewards people for the effort they put into an event -- it's equitable and it doesn't depend on your tier. 

BUT -- the current tier system makes individual rewards over progression unfair. 

Last NOP a bracket opened up 35 minutes before the event ended. I entered the event, played 5 nodes with the fastest, untuned decks I could come up with and finished first -- someone else spent 2 days building decks and winning every charge for the same rewards. How is that fair?

With HoD and RtO, it's the same -- the first tier is widely-known to be tougher. I could score 240 there and not even finish top 250, or I could wait until the second bracket opens, get the same score, and get higher individual rewards. 

The only way to make it equitable is to give out individual rewards by score, and not by rank. This way, a player in Europe who is probably heading to bed when the first bracket opens, thus doesn't start until the morning when the second bracket is opening gets the same rewards for their effort as someone did if they entered when the event started. 

OR a player who purposely waits until the last minute can't get 300 pinkies (this happened recently when a third bracket opened a couple hours before one of these events ended) for putting in almost no effort, when other players have been grinding for 4 days and have higher scores and get lower rewards. 

Forum rules state you can not discuss cheats and exploits.  What a stupid tinykitty rule. But rules are rules, unless you are above the rules. 

It’s not an unintended exploit. It’s a feature of the game which is exploitable through regular game play (no apps, special steps, cheating the system, etc). It is within forum rules to discuss. 

FindingHeart8

I love knowing that after hundreds to thousands of hours and cash we've all invested in this game...that there was a cheat to get all the good stuff without actually having to work for it.

I can't do it on these threads, but just imagine me saying all the swear words you can think of, over and over again.

James13

To focus a little bit, the fairest solution to the bracket/entry time issue specifically was already touched upon by boopers upthread.  But It bears repeating, I think:

1. For any given bracket/ranked event, a number of brackets should be pre-made that is at minimum 1 more than required.
2. Upon entry, a player would be randomly assigned to one of these brackets.
3. As a result, entry time is unimportant.  Random chance will dictate that you will have a mix of effort levels and bracket sizes roughly even across all potential brackets.  This neatly bypasses the bracket sniping issue created by the single filled bracket entry model.

The only potential complication here is it does require a rough estimate of the number of active players and attention to a given event bracket size.  N+1 for bracket numbers is kind of a minimum, and simple to estimate for 3k bracket events.  But for those legacy 250 size events you'd probably want to dial it up further.

Ranking rewards themselves is a separate issue that I'm not commenting on here.  But a concrete path for addressing bracket flips as an issue is doable.

Mburn7

James13 said:

To focus a little bit, the fairest solution to the bracket/entry time issue specifically was already touched upon by boopers upthread.  But It bears repeating, I think:

1. For any given bracket/ranked event, a number of brackets should be pre-made that is at minimum 1 more than required.
2. Upon entry, a player would be randomly assigned to one of these brackets.
3. As a result, entry time is unimportant.  Random chance will dictate that you will have a mix of effort levels and bracket sizes roughly even across all potential brackets.  This neatly bypasses the bracket sniping issue created by the single filled bracket entry model.

The only potential complication here is it does require a rough estimate of the number of active players and attention to a given event bracket size.  N+1 for bracket numbers is kind of a minimum, and simple to estimate for 3k bracket events.  But for those legacy 250 size events you'd probably want to dial it up further.

Ranking rewards themselves is a separate issue that I'm not commenting on here.  But a concrete path for addressing bracket flips as an issue is doable.

@Brigby please pass this along to the Devs.  It is a simple change that would dramatically increase the fairness of events, and increase the quality of play for a lot of people.

Gabrosin

Is there even a reason to have brackets?

If I were designing the individual rewards system from scratch, I might start with something like this: everyone who enters an event (in a given tier) gets put in the same group.  There's a big pot of rewards for that tier, which dynamically adjusts based on the number of participants in the event... I dunno, let's say 10 crystals and 5 jewels per player, and one booster pack per 10 players, plus a bunch of runes.  Tune it to whatever numbers make sense.  The rewards screen shows the number of players and the size of the pot, and it gets divvied up based on how well you score.  Perfect scores get the largest percentage of the pot, with each subsequently lower score getting a slightly smaller percentage.

Perhaps it would need to be based on something like total number of matches played, to prevent players from creating a bunch of non-playing dummy accounts to artificially inflate the bracket size.  Or maybe the devs want to let that happen because it makes their engagement metrics better for advertisers, I dunno.  The important thing is that it would be easy to remove the incentive for gaming the system by jumping in late.

GrizzoMtGPQ

Mburn7 said:

DumasAG said:

bken1234 said:

DumasAG said:

2) Assuming three brackets total:  assign the first to join to to the 1st bracket, second player to join to the 2nd, third to the 3rd, then 4th to to the first bracket.

There is no reason to cap the brackets, except to perpetuate the auto-generation of the new brackets.  With this method, the brackets are evenly populated, and the potential rewards are largely locked down.

I thought this is what already happened. I had no idea that you could join an event late, be placed in a new bracket of other people that joined late, and get final rewards with minimal effort. Man, do I feel like a chump now... 

Current system is one fills up, another opens. This is why big groups and even individual coalitions often report the size of the brackets when they enter. Getting in a later bracket offers huge advantages. 

Got it. That is a terrible system - I'm a little irritated actually.

Yeah, its always been like that.  Used to be the same thing back in Quick Battle, if you timed it right you could get a free mythic after just 1 or 2 matches.

Its a terrible system and I personally hate bracket snipers, but hey, I can't blame them.  Just the game that lets them do it.

Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

babar3355

Before you all run home to grab your pitchforks, can you please explain to me how this is exploitable or even unfair?

Let me give you the most extreme example I am aware of.  A player joined on the third day of the event for Rishkar's Expertise.  There were only about 60 people in the third bracket, and 50 of them got the strongest gem converter in the game.  Infuriating isn't it?

Except a few things... 

1. He had NO idea there was going to be a third bracket!  He easily could have ended up being player 2995 in the 2nd bracket and received a handful of runes instead.
2.  He missed tons of nodes and could not contribute to a remotely competitive coalition.

Ok, but what about the people who consistently attempt to enter the second bracket of HoD?  

1. The only way I know of to check for when the new bracket has started is to join the event.  So, unless they have a platinum level alt, or someone in their coalition does, and can verify that the new bracket is opened... its just relying on timing relative to past events.
2. It's not that much of an advantage.  You still fight against the same opponents, there are thousands of people in the 2nd bracket, and recently the 2nd bracket had more perfect finishers than the 1st bracket.  

But, even if you think this is unfair, why don't you just do it yourself?  There is no one preventing anyone here from doing this...Then it becomes a game theory problem where everyone is trying to outgame the others on when to join the event to "sneak" into the 2nd bracket.  In other words, make it part of your strategy if you think its that important.

And for you guys that are complaining that you didn't know this is occurring... Are you serious?  You have never joined NoP, EC, etc and realized you were immediately in the top 25-50 or a 250 person bracket?  Do you just immediately join the events as soon as they are available? I am frankly mind-blown that anyone could be unaware that brackets were filling up... Honestly, I can't comprehend.

*** I don't join late for HoD or other big events... I just try to get perfect, and let the rest take care of itself. Sometimes I join NoP or another event 1 hour before it ends to see if I can luck into getting 20 jewels... since the events aren't worth playing for the rewards. But it's just random luck, and I never seem to get it anyway.

Mburn7

babar3355 said:

But, even if you think this is unfair, why don't you just do it yourself?  There is no one preventing anyone here from doing this...Then it becomes a game theory problem where everyone is trying to outgame the others on when to join the event to "sneak" into the 2nd bracket.  In other words, make it part of your strategy if you think its that important.

And for you guys that are complaining that you didn't know this is occurring... Are you serious?  You have never joined NoP, EC, etc and realized you were immediately in the top 25-50 or a 250 person bracket?  Do you just immediately join the events as soon as they are available? I am frankly mind-blown that anyone could be unaware that brackets were filling up... Honestly, I can't comprehend.

First of all, the "if everyone else is doing it why don't you" argument doesn't address the problem at hand, which is that it is at all possible in the first place.  What time you click the "join" button should not effect the level of competition you face.

Second of all, players who don't know about the exploit (myself included up until fairly recently) usually join the event immediately when it becomes available, since there is no conceivable reason why you shouldn't do that.  

bk1234

babar3355 said:

[snip]

And for you guys that are complaining that you didn't know this is occurring... Are you serious?  You have never joined NoP, EC, etc and realized you were immediately in the top 25-50 or a 250 person bracket?  Do you just immediately join the events as soon as they are available? I am frankly mind-blown that anyone could be unaware that brackets were filling up... Honestly, I can't comprehend.

[snip]

I think you take for granted that you have been part of a community that has tracked this longer than pretty much every other community or group of teams that I know of -- since the QB days when everyone in Slack would do a channel call the last day when the bracket flipped.

First, yes, a lot of people join events as soon as the buy in happens. They don't know they are put into a bracket when they click "join". We've never even had this discussion here, and even if we did, there are 6000 players in Platinum -- how many of them participate in this community?

This is, until now, one of the most unintentionally best kept secrets in the game. It is the thing that I explain to players and teams all over the place struggling when they tier up. It's a good rule of thumb for helping you when you aren't quite ready to be in the bracket you have put yourself in. 

There is a clear benefit to joining a later bracekt, whether you're sniping at the end like what occurred in QB or more recently individual, small bracket events, or joining the second bracket in Platinum. 

As one of the few players who has 2 active Platinum accounts, both of which regularly play at a competitive level -- I can attest, over and over that my main always finishes higher than my alt with the same or lower score. My alt generally enters the first day of an event so I can clear it down a bit and be able to handle both accounts, my main joins on the second day. 

I think the biggest factor is the fact that the more competitive players, the ones who want to go for the big prize tend to enter earlier -- while the less competitive players, the ones who have other commitments or aren't as focused on getting all prizes enter later. That waters down rankings in the second bracket. 

However, most people don't look at their rank until they have a few matches. Even being part of a group that tracks this, I forget to do it more often than I remember when I enter an event. Sure if they enter on the last day and finish top 25, that's something they would notice -- but since the consensus is that people thought we were being evenly divided into brackets, most people don't bother to enter on the last day, for fear they won't catch up. 

babar3355

@bken1234

My problem was that your comment led people to think stuff like:

DumasAG said:

2) Assuming three brackets total:  assign the first to join to to the 1st bracket, second player to join to the 2nd, third to the 3rd, then 4th to to the first bracket.

There is no reason to cap the brackets, except to perpetuate the auto-generation of the new brackets.  With this method, the brackets are evenly populated, and the potential rewards are largely locked down.

I thought this is what already happened. I had no idea that you could join an event late, be placed in a new bracket of other people that joined late, and get final rewards with minimal effort. Man, do I feel like a chump now... 

and...

FindingHeart8 said:

I love knowing that after hundreds to thousands of hours and cash we've all invested in this game...that there was a cheat to get all the good stuff without actually having to work for it.

I can't do it on these threads, but just imagine me saying all the swear words you can think of, over and over again.

which are both completely untrue...  You can't just get [top] final rewards with minimal effort repeatably and reliably.

There isn't a "cheat to get all the good stuff without actually having to work for it"...

How is it helpful to pretend this is what is going on?

For the record, I agree with @James13 that they should fix the way brackets are filled.  But we don't need to raise a false firestorm of rage that veteran players have been exploiting a trick to get masses of free prizes for years.  Occasionally some people do... but it is mostly luck based.  

As an aside, it sounds like you have been knowingly using this "unfair" advantage by refraining from joining the event until the next day, knowing you will likely get in the second bracket. Otherwise you would just join it on Friday and not start your games until Saturday, right?

FindingHeart8

babar3355 said:

@bken1234

My problem was that your comment led people to think stuff like:

DumasAG said:

2) Assuming three brackets total:  assign the first to join to to the 1st bracket, second player to join to the 2nd, third to the 3rd, then 4th to to the first bracket.

There is no reason to cap the brackets, except to perpetuate the auto-generation of the new brackets.  With this method, the brackets are evenly populated, and the potential rewards are largely locked down.

I thought this is what already happened. I had no idea that you could join an event late, be placed in a new bracket of other people that joined late, and get final rewards with minimal effort. Man, do I feel like a chump now... 

and...

FindingHeart8 said:

I love knowing that after hundreds to thousands of hours and cash we've all invested in this game...that there was a cheat to get all the good stuff without actually having to work for it.

I can't do it on these threads, but just imagine me saying all the swear words you can think of, over and over again.

which are both completely untrue...  You can't just get [top] final rewards with minimal effort repeatably and reliably.

There isn't a "cheat to get all the good stuff without actually having to work for it"...

How is it helpful to pretend this is what is going on?

For the record, I agree with @James13 that they should fix the way brackets are filled.  But we don't need to raise a false firestorm of rage that veteran players have been exploiting a trick to get masses of free prizes for years.  Occasionally some people do... but it is mostly luck based.  

As an aside, it sounds like you have been knowingly using this "unfair" advantage by refraining from joining the event until the next day, knowing you will likely get in the second bracket. Otherwise you would just join it on Friday and not start your games until Saturday, right?

I didn't know about the bracket system and the imbalances that it could cause until now.

I dunno...I hadn't put much thought into this before and yeah, when I joined a bracket and there were only 50 people and I got a rare for being in the top 25 for playing 1 round of Nodes, I just thought nobody wanted to play legacy...not that I had gotten lucky and jumped into an empty bracket.

It's not as bad as I'd originally thought now that I've had some time to think about it, but it's still an imbalance that adds an additional layer of luck to this game that I'm not fond of (too much of ranking already is dependant on luck: who you're put up against planewalker-wise, what's in your opponent's deck, what you draw and what they draw).

Laeuftbeidir

So, why do we have brackets at all? Probably because competition is intense. We already feel how much harder it is to compete in the 3k brackets compared to the 1k brackets regulary.

The solution would be opening x brackets by the start of the event and assign players randomly. But.

This is a minor detail, compared to other issues, plus - Currently, there is no way to tell when brackets will flip. And that's good.

Kinesia

If prizes are changed to points based instead of rank (Effectively having progression rewards all the way to perfect) then there is no need for brackets at all.

It _would_ lead to a burst of complaints about "I can't get all the rewards now!" because people wouldn't understand the switch.

stikxs

I really like the idea James13 mentioned.

What about a scoring that would take into account your deck rarity on each match as well? It could probably just use the numbers that cards provide for color mastery. That way the system could compare veteran decks with many mythics to newbie decks capping out at rares. With a point adjustment based on the deck power that could possibly lead to pauper decks being a contender for rewards as well.

bk1234

stikxs said:

I really like the idea James13 mentioned.

What about a scoring that would take into account your deck rarity on each match as well? It could probably just use the numbers that cards provide for color mastery. That way the system could compare veteran decks with many mythics to newbie decks capping out at rares. With a point adjustment based on the deck power that could possibly lead to pauper decks being a contender for rewards as well.

A lot of veteran players are just as successful in pauper as they are using shiny decks, so I don’t think it should be a consideration in scoring.

If you can't compete in the tier you are in, you tiered up too fast --I did this and went through months of very low placements compared to where I was in gold. Eventually I made do with what I had and collected more cards and caught up. 

bk1234

Dusty said:

Laeuftbeidir said:

Currently, there is no way to tell when brackets will flip. And that's good. 

Well, not *no* way. People use alt accounts to do it. It's hardly pinpoint accuracy, but it's better than nothing.

Or coalitions or groups of coalitions report their rank on entry -- there are always many who don't care which bracket they enter. It's actually pretty accurate and after a large amount of time doing it -- very predictable. 

babar3355

bken1234 said: lol

stikxs said:

I really like the idea James13 mentioned.

What about a scoring that would take into account your deck rarity on each match as well? It could probably just use the numbers that cards provide for color mastery. That way the system could compare veteran decks with many mythics to newbie decks capping out at rares. With a point adjustment based on the deck power that could possibly lead to pauper decks being a contender for rewards as well.

A lot of veteran players are just as successful in pauper as they are using shiny decks, so I don’t think it should be a consideration in scoring.

If you can't compete in the tier you are in, you tiered up too fast --I did this and went through months of very low placements compared to where I was in gold. Eventually I made do with what I had and collected more cards and caught up. 

Totally agree with this.  Incentivizing players to use pauper decks rather than their coolest, most interesting, and complex cards gets a huge NO from me.