Hey there! Guys at Anet. and the fellow players!
Having watched the last SoTG I was thinking on the problems of team leaderboards.
Now a lot of the issues raised are valid and I feel a good way to avoid them might be the following.
Creating a team registration system. Ok let me explain on what I mean here:
Team Leaderboards (Or solo too maybe but there might be issues with this due to randomness of pugs) can become a list onto which you have to sign yourself up to. It is a quick and painless procedure, and what happens is, teams that don’t wish to be on the leaderboards who TPvP for fun or skins with friends can avoid the stress of team registration as it isn’t mandatory to be on the leaderboards to tpvp.
Now for those wanting to be represented on the leaderboards, a team registration mechanic can be added, where 5 players become registered onto a solid team with a name of the 5 people’s choosing, which will be like a commitment/membership type deal like joining a guild but only apparent and relevant in Tpvp. Registering with 4 other players to this system puts your teams name on the leaderboards and ranks your team using the chosen team name to respresent the 5 players.
As for switching and subbing out, to make sure it isn’t a light hearted decision and has some impact on team depth, I’m thinking there could be 2 assisting mechanics added.
Team Guesting and Replacement.
Now the first idea is a team is allowed to have a certain number of guests play for them and still be ranked as a team for a week (1-2 seems reasonable) in-case of emergencies where they would need another person to queue with.
The other mechanic would be to be able to literally have team members change. This would mean the team member would have to leave of their own accord or on a vote system, yet to be decided by Anet I’d suppose. (To avoid grief kicking of any sort). Once a team mate has been taken off the team, the team is then allowed to bring a new teammate in for their registered team on the leaderboards and TPvP. This should be a big change in higher play and thus I’am proposing a penalty to the team in order to avoid frequent changes all the time and the leaderboards getting mixed up. A new teammate could cost a certain deduction of the team’s ranking perhaps equivalent to the number of members they lost? For example if 2 members leave, they lose 40% of their earned ranking points but in turn gain 2 new teammates which they wish to have on their team. This seems like a fair compromise to avoid regularity of this happening, and would mean new teams becoming adjusted with lower ranks would have more room to opt in and out members than established teams who are less likely to frequently do such as they have far more to lose.
I also propose this registered team ranking only count for games that the team chooses to count for. This system shouldn’t block teams from tpvping for fun with friends or testing new setups and thus without counting in ranking, tpvp is allowed to be played as it is now with anyone, teammate or not.
I reckon this would be a good solution to the proposed problem though a large thing to add in and probably has many flaws I haven’t thought of… This is where you come in posters!
Any constructive criticism you can offer or agreements are appreciated and asked for to make this a fleshed out idea enough for Anet to take notice. Thank you for reading!