How do you like upcoming changes to "Ranked" battles (i.e. "New Concept")?

[Leo_Apollo11]

Hi all,

 

How do you like upcoming changes to "Ranked" battles (i.e. "New Concept")?

 

"Developer Bulletin for Updates 0.9.11–0.9.12"

 

https://worldofwarships.eu/en/news/general-news/bulletin-0911-0912/

 

 

Quote

Updates to the Ranked Battles system

In the old system, Ranked Battles were held throughout the year with significant breaks, and league progression was less transparent. In the new system, Ranked Battles will be available on something close to a regular basis. You'll be able to obtain rewards consistently in battles against players of a level equal to yours. The addition of qualifications will make the progress and distribution throughout the leagues easier to understand.

Main changes

• Ranked Battles seasons will be held with short breaks and be divided into sprints, each lasting about 2 weeks.
• There are three leagues in each season: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. In order to enter the next league, you need to reach Rank 1 in your current league and then qualify.

 

 

 

• During a single sprint, players can only progress through their current league and qualify for the next one.
  • If you don't manage to qualify for the next league, you'll start a new sprint in your current league.
  • If you qualify for the next league, you'll start a new sprint in that next league.
• Rewards will be granted for achieving a certain number of victories in a league, achieving Rank 1, and qualifying.
• The Jolly Roger achievement has been added and will be granted once per season for achieving Rank 1 in each league.

 

 

• We've also added new expendable camouflages—Bronze, Silver, and Gold—which will be granted as rewards in the corresponding leagues.

 

 

 

 

A new Ranked Battles Season is scheduled to start in Update 0.9.11. The Season conditions and rewards will be announced shortly prior to the Update's release.

 

 

Leo "Apollo11"

[wot_2016_gunner]

Idk, they mostly seem okay. My main problem is the stupid "the first guy of the loosing team doesn't loose the star" mechanic, which unfortunately they haven't removed. 

[DFens_666]

It sounds good i think.

Then again we have to see, if you still can no-life/luck your way into higher leagues somehow. As it seems, only the qualifier really matters if you advance or not, and we dont know how that works yet.

[SV_Kompresor]

My problem with it is that it's still based around a very poor star and victory system. But at least it's an improvement. The only thing I don't get is, how do you demote? The only thing that is mentioned is that if you do not qualify, you stay on the same rank.

 

How I would improve this system is:

• Introduce 4 leagues instead of 3 since potatoes can still fail their way to silver very easily.
• Only allow players with at least 1000 battles above tier 5 to enter (possibly randoms only)
• Place players in the corresponding leagues if they're unranked (or rather one league lower...can't exactly allow people to skip all the way to the top league) according to their random battle stats above tier 5 relative to other players. (Or give them some starting points). Or if it turns out that this doesn't work, everyone can just start at the lowest league.

 

This way, a player cannot be a complete sealclubber. And even if they were somehow, they'd demote pretty quickly because their overall stats would suck in higher leagues.

 

Scoring would also have to be points based. Atm it's just a boolean. Do you get a star? Or do you not get a star? It's way too narrow of a stat. It's like trying to look at only wr to determine whether a player is good or not.

So you'd need a points based system. A system where a victory guarantees that you get some points and a loss guarantees that you lose some and it's up to the player to make sure that they get more than they lose. Tanking in less armored ships gives more points than tanking in BBs, same with damage. Spotting damage in bigger ships gives more than in smaller ones. Damage obviously gives some points aswell. This way if you win and do well, you get a lot of points. If you do poorly you get less. If you lose and do well you lose less points. If you lose and do poorly you lose more points.

 

Each of these "damage" stats that a player does would have to be categorised according to the average. That way the game could award (or punish) players that did either low, medium, or high amounts of it in that particular stat. And if it turns out that one of them is being exploited (ie. damage being farmed from behind), that number could then be modified. For example you'd need to do 120k damage with a kremlin for it to be considered a high amount as opposed to 100k (or something along those lines).

[Camperdown]

It sounds as if perhaps WG has been hearing our persistent criticism of the low level of play in randoms and is creating an alternative that is more skill based? At least I hope that in silver and gold you may perhaps find fewer window lickers and glue sniffers. If, at least, progress will not be based on the ability to endure excruciating grinds.

[Bindolaf_Werebane]

Just now, Camperdown said:

It sounds as if perhaps WG has been hearing our persistent criticism of the low level of play in randoms and is creating an alternative that is more skill based? At least I hope that in silver and gold you may perhaps find fewer window lickers and glue sniffers. If, at least, progress will not be based on the ability to endure excruciating grinds.

That was my hope too - or is. Unicums will get into the gold league of legendary typhoons, or whatever, potatoes won't be able to advance past the bronze, or tin, or chrome league and I can be happy in the league of mediocrities and never touch randoms again. A dream, no doubt of the pipe variety.

[BlackFish__]

From what WG presented it looks promising to me but, the information is very incomplete. Ee don't know where and how many irrevocable ranks will be placed, how many stars one has to gain in one sprint, will you get one extra star by gaining a rank, will the star saving mechanic still be present, etc.

[FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor]

Well, in contrast to earlier drafts of this rework, the thing where you can't skip leagues no matter what, does at least seem designed to actually keep the riff raff out (= out of the higher leagues).

We'll have to see how that works out in practice though.

And of course there is still nothing resembling a remotely level playing field, and they will still let CVs in. It may be a step closer but still barely approaching a serious competitive mode and still does next to nothing to "prepare players for actual competitive modes", even though that is their stated goal, according to the St. Petersburg CC summit a while back.

[Hirohito]

37 minutes ago, Camperdown said:

It sounds as if perhaps WG has been hearing our persistent criticism of the low level of play in randoms and is creating an alternative that is more skill based? At least I hope that in silver and gold you may perhaps find fewer window lickers and glue sniffers. If, at least, progress will not be based on the ability to endure excruciating grinds.

Most likely the exact opposite of what you want will happen though.
As long as you are reasonably on the same level as the other guys in your league, your win rate will tend downwards towards 50% (compared to whatever it might be in randoms), so the grind will on average be longer.

The complaint that people voice about "bad teams dragging me down" is often ironic, since as long as one is better than the average player, the grind will on average be shorter.
The current system actually favours the really good players and punishes the bad players, while the coming system will make the grind more evenly distributed across skill levels.
This is already obvious through the bracket system under the current system, where most people will find that the first brackets (up till 10) will be easy enough to achieve, then progress into a somewhat more difficult progress between ranks 10-5, and the grindiest part being ranks 5-1.
Personally I'm not on a consistent skill level still, so I tend to progress rather fast to rank 5, and then face a long cycle of roughly equally occuring wins and losses that drag out for a long time.
It's not because of "window lickers and glue sniffers" that I don't rank out (those are mostly distributed below rank 10), but because I myself cannot meaningfully impact the game enough anymore, to consistently beat the average enemy team until rank 1.
 

Moral of the story: Bad players in the game are good for the above-average players who can then rank out faster, not the other way round.
If one blames the team for not ranking out, one is most likely actually a part of the problem.

[Prophecy82]

WoWs is - like all "grinders" (WoT etc.) - founded not on fun but on frustration. 

Thats why you can buy p2gl items like premium time and flags i.e. 

WG knows and exploits this. 

Ask yourself, when was the last time you actually had real fun in this game? For me it was the 3v3 ranked sprint. 

 

I dont wanna give up hope, that this ranked concept is at least better than the old one. But knowing WG it will sure be frustrating af. 

[Hirohito]

1 minute ago, Prophecy82 said:

Ask yourself, when was the last time you actually had real fun in this game? For me it was the 3v3 ranked sprint. 

 

Hitting Storm league three days ago in my off-meta ship (Daring) against meta comps consisting of at least 4 radars (mostly Soviet) and a CV every game.
Great sense of accomplishment, especially since it was my first ever season of CBs. :-)
(Hated facing those meta comps all the time though).

[Hirohito]

3 minutes ago, Prophecy82 said:

I dont wanna give up hope, that this ranked concept is at least better than the old one. But knowing WG it will sure be frustrating af. 

Depends on what triggers your frustration.
If you get frustrated over not ranking out, then the new system will most likely trigger your frustration even more once you find yourself in consisting players equal to your skill level (meaning you will tend downwards in WR towards 50% more than in randoms or the current system).

The new system is more of a catering to less skilled players, since their win rates will now tend upwards toward 50% when they have their Bronze league to work in, where before they would on average cause their teams to lose more than win (and thus not progress too far).

[IanH755]

It's only taken 4 years but they've finally listened and dropped the utterly stupid "............and Win" requirement for collecting snowflakes so hopefully PVP players might be able to avoid stampeding into Co-Op to collect them, although they probably will for the T10 ships just due to the "time required to play to collect" difference between Co-Op and PvP.

[DFens_666]

5 minutes ago, IanH755 said:

It's only taken 4 years but they've finally listened and dropped the utterly stupid "............and Win" requirement for collecting snowflakes so hopefully PVP players might be able to avoid stampeding into Co-Op to collect them, although they probably will for the T10 ships just due to the "time required to play to collect" difference between Co-Op and PvP.

 

If id have to play >130 or so random games, every ship once, id get sick

Maybe we see a lot (spells: more) of yolo suiciding in randoms now, which actually would be worse imo...

[Bindolaf_Werebane]

35 minutes ago, Hirohito said:

Most likely the exact opposite of what you want will happen though.
As long as you are reasonably on the same level as the other guys in your league, your win rate will tend downwards towards 50% (compared to whatever it might be in randoms), so the grind will on average be longer.

The complaint that people voice about "bad teams dragging me down" is often ironic, since as long as one is better than the average player, the grind will on average be shorter.
The current system actually favours the really good players and punishes the bad players, while the coming system will make the grind more evenly distributed across skill levels.
This is already obvious through the bracket system under the current system, where most people will find that the first brackets (up till 10) will be easy enough to achieve, then progress into a somewhat more difficult progress between ranks 10-5, and the grindiest part being ranks 5-1.
Personally I'm not on a consistent skill level still, so I tend to progress rather fast to rank 5, and then face a long cycle of roughly equally occuring wins and losses that drag out for a long time.
It's not because of "window lickers and glue sniffers" that I don't rank out (those are mostly distributed below rank 10), but because I myself cannot meaningfully impact the game enough anymore, to consistently beat the average enemy team until rank 1.
 

Moral of the story: Bad players in the game are good for the above-average players who can then rank out faster, not the other way round.
If one blames the team for not ranking out, one is most likely actually a part of the problem.

But imagine playing all your games in bracket 10 to 5. I'd love that and I have no problem with 50-50 wins, if the games are fun. Close. Exciting. I don't care about the rewards, but if this ends up being a "kind-of-ELO mode", I'm 100% in. Knowing full well I won't advance beyond silver for sure. Don't care. I might even get premium time if it's an equal, fair, fun system.

 

Now what are the chances of that, I ask you.

[Karasu_Browarszky]

10 minutes ago, Bindolaf_Werebane said:

But imagine playing all your games in bracket 10 to 5. I'd love that and I have no problem with 50-50 wins, if the games are fun. Close. Exciting. I don't care about the rewards, but if this ends up being a "kind-of-ELO mode", I'm 100% in. Knowing full well I won't advance beyond silver for sure. Don't care. I might even get premium time if it's an equal, fair, fun system.

 

Now what are the chances of that, I ask you.

 

I fully expect never to reach rank 1 in the Bronze league..

[Prophecy82]

Any1 knows which Tier the new season will be?

[Verblonde]

8 minutes ago, Prophecy82 said:

Any1 knows which Tier the new season will be?

I don't believe I've seen it definitively stated anywhere, but I'm assuming it'll be T10 in the first instance.

 

2 hours ago, Leo_Apollo11 said:

How do you like upcoming changes to "Ranked" battles (i.e. "New Concept")?

Cautiously optimistic (despite the inevitability of CVs and small maps making it a lot worse than it needs to be), in that I tend to quite like Sprints much more than the existing regular Ranked set-up; that said, it's too soon to tell, as there is a lot of detail still to see...

[asalonen]

Overall I like it. It's potentially better than what we had before, and I don’t see anything making it worse. 

 

One question though: when are you demoted? Or do you stay in the same league to kingdom come, without having to re-earn your rights to stay there? 

 

Asking because I can imagine relative plebs getting their play together just enough to earn a promotion. Then with the incentive gone, can they then fool around forever with no fear of relegation? 

[Yedwy]

Honestly its kinda hard to tell, I ll have to try it out to see, in theory it should result in less stress during ranked after a while (ie 5-6 seasons) when people distribute through the leagues but we shall see how it pans out IRL...

[DisorderZ55]

15 minutes ago, Verblonde said:

I don't believe I've seen it definitively stated anywhere, but I'm assuming it'll be T10 in the first instance.

 

Cautiously optimistic (despite the inevitability of CVs and small maps making it a lot worse than it needs to be), in that I tend to quite like Sprints much more than the existing regular Ranked set-up; that said, it's too soon to tell, as there is a lot of detail still to see...

The original article on the Development blog (78)

In different Leagues, battles can take place on ships of different Tiers, and not necessarily only on one. For example, in the Bronze League, battles can take place at Tier VIII, and at Tiers VIII - IX in the Silver League. The format may change from Season to Season.

Which hints that it can vary from league to league.

[Gvozdika]

Am I the only one who has had to read through the 'new and improved' Ranked mechanics about 10 times to actually work out what they are?

 

No? Just me? 

 

I'll just click on Battle and see what happens then - what's the worst that can happen? 

[Hades_warrior]

Few days ago I have played PT and Ranked. TBH I didnt notice any difference compare to current Ranked exept that maybe we will be able to get better rewards.

I ended Bronze league in Round 2 of PT so I was unable to continue into Silver league because its 1 league per PT round.

 

Oh yeah, in Bronze league I played with BB tier 8 against tier 9, so that was I guess part of new system, to play with -/+1 tier in Ranked MM.

[Wulf_Ace]

This is same botox crap like League of legends, from which I have escaped long ago. Since this is team play game and you depend on others to actually progress, the whole ranked system is one big GRINDFEST to reach higher rank. How is it possible that in sprint 10 took me 88 games to reach rank 5 and in sprint 11 took me 288 games to reach rank 5?? 

 

I hate this system, it will never will show the true  progress of how good or bad are you. Especially the frustration when you need to league up and you are in league up matches, but your teammates dont give a [edited]about that and just die. And start all over again.

[Dutchy_2019]

2 hours ago, domen3 said:

My problem with it is that it's still based around a very poor star and victory system. But at least it's an improvement. The only thing I don't get is, how do you demote? The only thing that is mentioned is that if you do not qualify, you stay on the same rank.

 

How I would improve this system is:

• Introduce 4 leagues instead of 3 since potatoes can still fail their way to silver very easily.
• Only allow players with at least 1000 battles above tier 5 to enter (possibly randoms only)
• Place players in the corresponding leagues if they're unranked (or rather one league lower...can't exactly allow people to skip all the way to the top league) according to their random battle stats above tier 5 relative to other players. (Or give them some starting points). Or if it turns out that this doesn't work, everyone can just start at the lowest league.

 

This way, a player cannot be a complete sealclubber. And even if they were somehow, they'd demote pretty quickly because their overall stats would suck in higher leagues.

 

Scoring would also have to be points based. Atm it's just a boolean. Do you get a star? Or do you not get a star? It's way too narrow of a stat. It's like trying to look at only wr to determine whether a player is good or not.

So you'd need a points based system. A system where a victory guarantees that you get some points and a loss guarantees that you lose some and it's up to the player to make sure that they get more than they lose. Tanking in less armored ships gives more points than tanking in BBs, same with damage. Spotting damage in bigger ships gives more than in smaller ones. Damage obviously gives some points aswell. This way if you win and do well, you get a lot of points. If you do poorly you get less. If you lose and do well you lose less points. If you lose and do poorly you lose more points.

 

Each of these "damage" stats that a player does would have to be categorised according to the average. That way the game could award (or punish) players that did either low, medium, or high amounts of it in that particular stat. And if it turns out that one of them is being exploited (ie. damage being farmed from behind), that number could then be modified. For example you'd need to do 120k damage with a kremlin for it to be considered a high amount as opposed to 100k (or something along those lines).

 

I can see where you are coming from, and let it be clear that I not necessarily disagree with the underlying sentiment.

 

Introduce 4 leagues instead of 3 since potatoes can still fail their way to silver very easily: IMHO not necessarily a problem, but to some extent it means that league 4 is more or less a qualifier.

 

Only allow players with at least 1000 battles above tier 5 to enter (possibly randoms only): I have a few issues with this; (1) if I were a player who tries to progress the 'take it slow and learn' way, I would get very frustrated by the fact that I am NOT being rewarded for taking it slowly. For many players who do not have multiple hours a day to spend on the game, it would come down of at least 1, if not 2 years of playing the game to even be allowed in to the ranked tournament. Realize that it is quite a few of those players who actually are at the core of keeping this game afloat in the first place. (2) if I were getting frustrated by (1), I would simply potato (or worse) my way in T6 ships to meet the conditions to be able to enter the ranked battles in the first place. Which leads to me as a player not learning anything, and an even more frustrating experience of players in T6+ who whill be flooded by players who just want to potato their way there to reach the 1000 game threshold. (3) The assumption is that players with that amount of experience (1000+ games in T6+) are automatically way better (team)players than players who do not meet that threshold. IMHO that is an absolutely erroneous assumption, based on what I have seen in games myself, observed on twitch streams, and based on comments on these forums itself.

 

Place players in the corresponding leagues if they're unranked (or rather one league lower...can't exactly allow people to skip all the way to the top league) according to their random battle stats above tier 5 relative to other players. (Or give them some starting points). Or if it turns out that this doesn't work, everyone can just start at the lowest league. Isn't that pretty much what this three tiered ranked tournament with qualifiers tries to achieve?

 

I think your idea of promotion / demotion is worth consideration.

 

I think your idea of a new way to determine progress is also worthy of consideration.