Jedi, this is a great starting point for discussing any potential compromise regarding leagues.
For me, the ideal ranked solution would have these benefits:
- Engage players across all investment levels in better gamified competition for increased enjoyment
- increase the benefits of staking larger amounts of SPS even for lower league players
- address the risks of underqualified accounts
1: Choose your League based on where you think you can compete
In the past, the inability to compete in a league befitting your cards was a problem, and we don't want to return to that type of situation.
Choosing your league (bronze-diamond) for the season is the perfect solution to avoid players being stuck facing lower-league specialists gunning for leaderboard positions.
If you pick the wrong league (either by accident or misjudging, you can start over in a different league).
2: Avoid underqualified accounts from climbing or swarming
The way I see it, gating leagues based on Collection Power (CP) or average card levels could be ineffective, unduly punitive, or even manipulated (depending on whether players rent before playing, when snapshots are taken, how delegations are handled, duplicates and reward card stockpiles, etc).
I'd propose that, instead of enforcing a barrier based on CP or specific deck-based rules, we could consider the fact that the reward formula is directly related to Ratings^3, and near-zero ratings have near-zero earnings.
3: Rework the Ratings - Each league starts from zero
- Ratings for each league range from zero up to as high as you climb, to make it a true leaderboard.
- The starting rating for each player is reset to zero each season in their chosen league.
- Even if you assume a bunch of underlevelled accounts swarm the league and all start with 0 rating, they would provide easy wins for the other accounts in the league and stay near zero.
- If someone makes a mistake and chooses the wrong league, they can move, but they start in the new league with a zero rating. (only available if they haven't purchased any energy, or if they give up all their energy, to prevent exploits)
4. Change the winstreak rating bonus
The current winstreak bonus is simple - 20 points each time you string together 3 wins in a row.
Let's assume the average player has a 50% winrate - that means 12.5% chance of getting a winstreak going. If a typical season is ~350 matches, that means around 40-45 winstreaks on average for everyone - this is around 800-900 points of rating inflation.
We don't want the underlevelled decks to be getting 800 points of rating, but we want to reward the strong players that can string together long winning streaks.
If we drop the winstreak rating bonus to start at +5, but increase by another +5 each consecutive win, up to max of +40 winstreak bonus, that further limits the ability for underlevelled decks to inflate themselves just by sheer random statistics.
5. Liquidity Bots can be more effective
Right now, the modern liquidity bots are designed to lose. They have ratings decay, so they can arbitrarily push up players to be in the "target rating" - and the Support team need to keep resetting the rating back higher and higher to push players to "where they should be".
Instead, assuming these bots were assigned to their target league, they could be tuned more precisely to knock down under-levelled decks towards the lower rating limit, capping their earnings and effectiveness, while giving liquidity exactly where it's needed.
6. Increase the appetite for SPS at lower leagues with a higher max multiplier
Right now, bronze and silver decks get most of their glint and earnings from the first few thousand SPS staked.
I'd like to give these players a reason to stake more than that!
I'd even suggest it may be worthwhile to consider increasing max multiplier from 13.3X to 20X to reduce the diminishing returns on higher stakers.
Champion players sometimes rent hundreds of thousands of SPS to increase their multipliers... I suspect we could increase staking demand in the lower leagues if we allow higher ratings and higher multipliers, and more of the pool will go to players near the top of the leaderboard or with larger stakes (both of which I think are desirable outcomes)
7. Separate, targeted rewards per league (again)
We know the team has added achievements to league climbing with chests at each Tier - these could easily be adapted to Rating levels or mini-Tiers. That should be fairly straighforward.
And, we used to have SPS pools split by League, and that system worked fairly well to incentivize each league. If we had liquidity bots in each league that didn't need resetting, they could knock down underlevelled accounts, and support good competitive decks, it would seem a much healthier ladder. If needed, we could tweak rewards in each league up or down with glint minimums or multipliers for each league too if seemed warranted.
Maybe we can get some data
Long ago the team had provided some data on league participation. I wonder what it looks like now - this was back in 2022.
Good data can help make better decisions.
