The benefits of ranking
A lot has changed in online gaming since the first lines of Armagetron's were written. It goes without saying that eSports is a huge industry and professional gamers make more money in a couple than most of us ever will in our lifetimes. Just like traditional sports, gamers have to worry about their stats, and those stats vary wildly depending on the game. Kill/Death ratio is a common one, as are Win/Loss (or ELO) and various time-based metrics. It's assumed every modern game released with a massive online multiplayer component will collect some kind of in-game stats and use them for match-making. Obviously, these systems exist because players demand games that are fair and challenging.
Tronners also demand fair and challenging games. #pickup culture exists to have fair and challenging games. Ladle went through years of small and large changes on the road to improvement. However, most of those changes were at the team level and did not affect individual players. Today there are few teams. Clans have mostly gone extinct (for better or worse) and players are largely independent. And yet, we still have room for improvement. Ladle matches are more lopsided than ever and even #pickup games are becoming hard to balance with our limited pool of players. If there were ever a time to experiment with player rankings, this is it.
Player rankings could be used to make fair teams, not just in Ladle, but in all Armagetron tournaments. I am not suggesting that matchmaking is done completely by algorithm, but having ranks could inform team-making decisions. One possible scenario is to break players into tiers, then have team captains pick equally from every tier. Another scenario could use a point system where each team gets a budget to spend. Do you want to have three top level players on your Ladle team? Sure! But you either play with fewer players on your team, or you're forced to spend the rest of your budget on low level players to make a team of six. Of course, there could be any combination of manual picking, automated picking, and randomness. We decide -- but we can't do any of it without rankings.
How to rank players?
Armagetron doesn't collect stats in a meaningful way. Anything we currently use gets parsed from log files. Arma is also notorious for giving points away to other players, so even if we did track K/D it probably wouldn't be useful. The problem with in-game stats is that they don't create an accurate picture of a player's skill. This is more true of Armagetron than other games like shooters and racing. The ability to read your environment and make smart/skillful moves cannot be understood by the game engine. What I'm getting at is, player value is subjective.
We can recognize good and bad players. We can recognize ourselves in relation to other players. We all have an internal raking system of the players we encounter in Armagetron. So, let's come up with a way to pool our internal ranking systems into a tangible one we can use as a game-wide reference!
My suggestion is to create a website that allows us to rank our peers. In my mind I imagine a domain that requires a login and could also be used for authentication. After logging in, users are presented with a choice to make between two players:
Is player 1 worse|equal|better than player 2?
The system continually generates random match-ups and records the scores. If enough people sign up and rank their peers, over time we would have a pretty good picture of who the best and worst players are in the community. Notice that I said "best" and not "skillful." Since these rankings are subjective, it leaves room for evaluation on our own personal criteria. I might recognize someone as having incredible skill, but maybe their situational awareness isn't so great and maybe they are kind of unpleasant to play with. I might want to give a high rank to a player with exceptional wisdom who doesn't have the best reaction time. Accuracy isn't the goal, but rather we should focus on creating a useful tool that has a nice distribution of player scores.
Some considerations
Ideally, the system should stay intentionally vague. What I don't want is players reduced to baseball card stats. Ideally, the actual ranking score should remain a mystery, even to the database owner (if possible, I haven't spent much time thinking about how to do this programmatically). I think ranks should be displayed in low resolution, just a few tiers. I think players would be happy to confirm they share a tier with a dozen other players since they probably know this intuitively. There are enough egos in this game that we don't need someone parading around a badge with a number.
I have not thought deeply about how the math would work in a system like this. Math isn't my strong point. I also have not thought much about how to prevent abuse, though with a community this small I don't think abuse would be too much of a problem. Tournaments and #pickups have been pretty much free of drama for a while -- isn't that nice!?
Thanks for reading and I welcome your thoughts.
