There is an issue, where I think about for some time now. Not sure, if I just didn’t find anything similar or if no one had this idea yet. But I think it’s a big issue, when it comes to a tournament, like soon again. So there is the need of some kind of handicap.
Situation:
Matches are generated by a rating. This rating is mostly influenced by the number of people playing. So basically it’s the more people playing, the higher the server rating. This shouldn’t be anything new. However when servers are matched, the winner is determined only by the highest achieved points in that match, regardless whether the servers are close to each other or not, measured in the current rating system.
Problems:
- In most matches, the highest rated server will have an advantage.
- If the difference in rating is too high, the lower rated server has nearly any chance to win the match.
- Server Transfers will favour higher rated servers.
- When it comes to a tournament and servers are split into different groups, it might be worth to lose some rating to become the highest rated server in the next group, instead of the lowest rated server of the previous group.
Now let’s assume, we had a handicap to give lower rated servers a better chance to win against higher rated servers.
Idea:
Determinate the winning server of a match based on the change of the rating. If a server did well, the rating is increased, if a server didn’t, the rating is decreased. So let the winning server be the one, which got the most increase in rating. And 3rd should obviously be the one with the highest decrease in rating.
Example:
Server, Rating, End Score, Rating Change
- A, 1640, 255000, -22
- B, 1560, 230000, +6
- C, 1430, 158000, +18
You can perfectly see, that A has the highest rating and the highest score at the end of the week, while C has the lowest rating and the lowest score at the end of the week. However, if you look at the rating changes, C has the highest increase and A the highest decrease. Applying the suggested detection would result in:
C 1st, B 2nd, A 3rd
You might get an idea, that this easy change would make the odd matched easier for lower rated servers. However, there are some consequences you should respect.
Consequences:
- For nearly identically rated servers this handicap has hardly any impact.
- Higher rated servers have to fight, to obtain the best reward, instead of idle for a week.
- If servers with too high gap in rating are matched, the higher server can hardly win the match, unless they own almost everything most of the time. Also this is almost impossible, this could make it even more difficult for the lower rated server to get a starting position on an empty map.
- Server transfers are more difficult to plan, especially when the rewards are given weekly. Once a server gets an increase in rating it will become more and more difficult to obtain the first place and the highest reward.
- If server are split into different groups, if will be better to fight for the higher rated, since the handicap will favour you there most of the time.
I think you get the idea now. It’s obviously not the best idea, but it’s easy to implement and already has a huge impact on matches and therefore transfers.