I’ve been looking around the forums recently at the feedback everyone’s been giving on the the new leaderboard system and it certainly has some problems. I thought I’d take a look at the problems and try to make a system based on the player feedback and here’s what I came up with, not perfect but it covers what people seem to want.
Let’s start with the player requests, no farming points, no camping, more emphasis on higher MMR, and incentive to play as many matches as possible. The current leaderboard system is based almost entirely on games played as long as you aren’t throwing matches and disproportionately rewards lower MMR players. We can’t just use an MMR leaderboard though as that would defeat the point of a tournament season so we need some sort of point based leaderboard that fulfills the criteria.
In order to prevent farming points there must be a limited number of games that contribute to the leaderboard or an average. Since we also want to prevent players from stopping early in the season to preserve their score an average won’t work as well. So we’ll go with a leaderboard that uses the top X number of games to calculate a player’s score, many sports tournaments use this system and it seems to work quite well.
The points each game awards is a lot more tricky though. We’ll make it so that each game can award a maximum number of points that is almost impossible to reach so only the most impressive games provide max points. When awarding points we want to take several factors into account: the opposing team’s MMR, the difference in MMRs, the odds of victory, the score of a match, and your team’s MMR. The higher your opponent’s MMR, the more points the game is worth since you are playing a theoretically more skilled team, especially if your team is rated lower. The odds of victory should play a factor to allow solo queue players to compete, an upset with a bunch of solo queue players against a good premade would constitute a more impressive game and contribute more to their score. The match score is simply how well the match went and is obviously a factor. Your team’s MMR is important because the system I have outlined so far makes it very hard for a premade high MMR team to achieve the max points for a match. If your team is on the high end of MMR you will never have less than a 50% odds of victory and cannot get points for defeating higher MMR teams than you. So if we factor in your teams MMR with a complicated bit of mathematics a high MMR team should be able to achieve max points in an impressive match with another high MMR team.
Hopefully this system will reward people for playing as many games as possible in order to try to get high point games and will punish losses through MMR reduction without directly affecting their leaderboard standing. Theoretically with a lower MMR, players who lose often or throw games will not be matched with high MMR players and their games will not be worth as much and have less impact on the leaderboard.
Let me know what you think of this, did I miss any problems that might crop up, are there any issues with my premises? This is just a rough draft off the top of my head for leaderboards and assumes the MMR system works, though there’s really no reason it shouldn’t.
tl;dr: The current leaderboard is grindy and rewards low MMR. New leaderboard should be top X games with games rewarding points based on MMR and impressive victories. (Read for more clarity.)