Gods Unchained has gone though a lot of changes since I have started playing some years ago. New sets, revamped rules, client updates, all sorts of mods and revisions. One of the most important changes I think the devs made was changing the requirements for weekend ranked from 25 games to 18, bringing it down from a somewhat absurd devotion of time to the screen during your weekend to a much more manageable one that can mostly be accomplished while you watch SNL or something. This also came in tandem with a rethinking of the prize structure and how players earned.
Now that we have had several months with the revamped system, I am here to propose a revision to the current one that I think will not only be better for players overall but easier to understand and to scale. One that does away with some of what I see as the short comings of the current system and replaces them with a system that encourages more play.
My proposal, a points based system that does not care about where you started, cares more about where you finish, and rewards winning players in a more accurate manner.
The shortcomings of the current system
While I do not think the current system is terrible by any means, I do think there are some notable faults with it. My first issue is how we bracket players for prizes. As of right now, the system locks you into a prize tier based on where you start, and rewards you (disproportionately) for your win record simply by virtue of having started in that bracket (An explanation and the different rewards tables are located ). This is presumably a method to discourage people from deranking, but I find that it is also a deterrent to continued play during the weekday.
The prizes a player receives in $Gods for wins in daily play and earn are generally ok, but if a player holds themselves in decently high regard as to how they will do in weekend ranked play, the value of the packs are often much more than the value of the gods earned for 2 or so days of play. Basically if you think you can get to 10 it is not worth playing anymore. Entrenched players like myself often find themselves deciding on Wednesday or Thursday to just stop playing until weekend ranked starts for fear of deranking to a lower tier and then either having to grind the hell out of the game to get back up in time or just taking lower rewards. A look at the player statistics shows that play peaks during the weekends and then declines day over day ever other day of the week until Friday hits again, which in this authors opinion is not actually healthy for the game long term. Part of this also stems from how obtuse the rank/standings display is in client and how it is very difficulty to tell if a loss will derank you or not out of Mythic, but that is a separate UI issue all together.
Furthermore, it is almost impossible at any lower rank to do well enough to get a legendary pack or equivalent higher ranked award and not advance to the next rank. To get a single expansion legendary pack at Diamond, you need 13/18 wins as opposed to 10/18 that you would in mythic. It is very hard to intersperse those loses between 13 wins and not jump to mythic in the process. Likewise, to get a single legendary pack at Solar gold you need a perfect 18/18 run. Depending where your rank starts on the weekend, it is impossible not to end in Diamond and it may even be impossible not to end in Mythic. A player who can do a perfect run that consists in large part of higher ranked players should probably be rewarded better than someone who did just better than 50%,
The corollary to this is Mythic players can often lose their first 2 matches, get knocked back to Diamond, and then face presumably easier competition on the way back up while having all their matches count the same as if they were playing other mythic players. If 2 players went 16/18, but one did 7 or 8 of those matches in Diamond, should they really count the same?
Part of the goal of this system is that the rewards are based on the level of challenge you are receiving from other players with the assumption that player rank is a good barometer for skill, but in order to prove myself a good player at rank 10 or 11 I almost certainly will have to face off against rank 12 players at some point in the journey.
How do we fix the current system
I think the fix is actually rather simple and elegant, and it still factors in rank as a measure of challenge which will keep players from deranking in the first place. Simply put, for every win in the 18 matches a player plays on the weekend, they accumulate points equal to the rank they were in when they won. A player who wins a game in Mythic gets 12 points, a player in diamond earns 11, etc. At the end of the 18 games, your total point score represents how well you did, whoever has the most points is the top player of weekend ranked. Prizes would be doled out against a single revamped prize table, as opposed to the 12 individual tables we currently have. A perfect run in mythic would be 18 games X 12 points = 216 points. Tiebreakers for top positions can still be determined by ELO score, but alternately we can also use other metrics including number of wins @12 points, etc to accurately reward the players who won the harder matches.
What does this accomplish? Well first and foremost I think it more accurately rewards players for how well they performed. I would make the argument that a player who started in Diamond who had a perfect run had a much better and much harder time doing it than a player in mythic who went 15/18, yet the current prize structure rewards that mythic player much higher. We have had players who had perfect runs starting in diamond in he past that could not even qualify for top placement prizes when the top Mythic player only had like 15 wins. In my opinion that seems wrong and not an accurate assessment.
Furthermore, it takes away the stigma of playing weekday matches for fear of deranking, since the blow is far less severe. There is still a difference in the points you receive, so it pays to maintain rank, but it will not absolutely ruin someone's day anymore when they have a bad streak and just wanted to play some games, earn some $Gods.
I do not know what the prize table would have to look like, since I do not fully understand the breakpoints between the tiers to know how many matches you can lose to drop a tier, gain a tier, etc, but I do not think it would be too complex to rebuild the system from the ground up. Not every single point from 0 to 216 needs its own row, as you can have prizes within point ranges, and we do know that in this current point system that 17 wins at mythic (12*17=204) is still better than 18 wins in diamond (11*18=198, but this is impossible to get) and is equal to a player who wins 6 matches in Mythic and 12 in Diamond with an undefeated record ((12*6)+(11*12)=204). I am sure someone at the GU team can do the economics around all this and I am confident there would not be some sort of points configuration that would prove too out of wack with the old system.
So, in summary, thank you for coming to my TED Talk
I think by making this change to the current system you help future proof the rewards program, make it infinitely more grokable for newer players, very likely make it easier to display standings and rewards within client (BTW it is insane to me that this does not exist and that I have to go to a 3rd party website to see results) and make the entire system more fair and equitable to the playerbase, encouraging more play on the slower days and getting the overall games played numbers up, which can only be good for the health of the game long term.
If you agree with me, please feel free to share this idea with other players or nag the GU team about it, and give me a like or a comment on the bottom of this article if you could. I enjoy writing about all things GU and wish I had the time to write more, so hopefully we can all have more discussion in the future.
