New lobby

[Doomweaver]

A handicap is more widely used as a disadvantage. Don't quote me on this, but I think the only reason it can be used as an advantage is because over the years it's gotten mixed up.

[Betalord]

Let the player manually set his rank to a higher value if he wants to ?

I think ranking system will loose its purpose, if anyone can change his rank. Some people just aren't realistic about their skills. When I host I usually ask players that I have never seen before about their skills (to make fair teams), and they are only seldom realistic. People who played TA before and never played a single game of spring, usually think they are "avarage". Now I consider myself an avarage player, still I have played nearly 100 games of spring.
The point of currently implemented ranking system is not to tell how good certain player is, but how experienced he is (which is usually close enough). And experiences are proportional to the time player spent playing spring.

Perhaps a better solution is to manually adjust ranks of old players. I can give limited admin access to some old players for a week or so and they can manually increase ranks of other players which they know from before.

[Betalord]

I forgot to mention: you will be able to limit battle to players with certain rank, so that players with lower rank won't be able to join.

[FoeOfTheBee]

I like to build dragon's teeth around them to lock them, in, then builld much artillery set to "hold fire". Then destroy all their base at once.

[SJ]

I forgot to mention: you will be able to limit battle to players with certain rank, so that players with lower rank won't be able to join.

Im not sure if this such a good idea it will really breed elitism among the players. If you want such a game just write "veteran only" or something in game name and leave it at that.

[Slamoid]

*cough*Additional/mod races*cough*

[SJ]

Well spring.exe already support it I think Slamoid so take it up with Betalord.

[Ace07]

I forgot to mention: you will be able to limit battle to players with certain rank, so that players with lower rank won't be able to join.

Im not sure if this such a good idea it will really breed elitism among the players. If you want such a game just write "veteran only" or something in game name and leave it at that.

Yes, elitism is not something I am particularly fond of. We could develop really complex ranking systems, but that would take a very long time. It would be much easier to just follow the tried and true way of keeping a tally on how many wins/losses you have.

We could impliment a Warcraft3-like ladder system which goes beyond just wins/losses and looks at who you win against and places you accordingly. The problem is: To get it to work right, it can take a long time to tweak. I am in favor of a simple system until someone wants to spend long hours on working out a more complex system that can place players more intelligently.

[Betalord]

Well spring.exe already support it I think Slamoid so take it up with Betalord.

Since I use unitsync.dll to get mod info, you should take it up with Fnordia :)

[PauloMorfeo]

... It would be much easier to just follow the tried and true way of keeping a tally on how many wins/losses you have.

We could impliment a Warcraft3-like ladder system which goes beyond just wins/losses and looks at who you win against and places you accordingly. ...

What about crashes? Happens so often...
What about players who are wining and quit before so they're rank does not increase?
What about «dirty tactics» to win as to get good ranking?
What about...?
I can see so many problems with it...

I think, for now, that keeping record of played time, as Betalord said it was planing on making, is probably the best.

[colorblind]

Thanks Betalord!

About the ranking system; I was thinking more on the lines of the Yahoo online games rankings. I only play chess there, but I really like the ratings.
You begin with 1200, if you beat someone you take points from him and vice versa. The number of points depend on the difference in ranking (the bigger the difference, the more points the 'lesser' player gets when he bets the stronger, and the less points the stronger player gets when he beats the lesser one).
And of course there's a possibility to play unrated games.

This kind of a system would require Spring to report to the server when someone's won or lost a game.

Although I can't vouch for the result such a system would have on the online-community; perhaps a lot of bitterness will be the result ....

[colorblind]

I figured I might have been a bit vague in the last post, so I did a little research. The rating scheme I mentioned is the so-called ELO rating system. You can find info on it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating and here http://gobase.org/studying/articles/elo/ .

This is an 1v1 rating system, which is of course not satisfactory if you play 3 of more people games. I don't know if ELO can be extended in a straightforward fashion to include more player games. It might be a good idea to look into the ratingsystems of other RTS'es (if they have one).

Perhaps we should start a seperate topic on this, before I steal this thread completely :)

[Min3mat]

a 1v1 system would be awesome and a 2v2 but beyond that games just get boring (and laggy!). the thing i want most is a option to play a 'quick match' where u face some random and the win/loss is recorded in the ranking system, alsongisde the way u can do a 'custom match' atm (for fun, trying out new strats playing ppl u know etc)

[Ace07]

... It would be much easier to just follow the tried and true way of keeping a tally on how many wins/losses you have.

We could impliment a Warcraft3-like ladder system which goes beyond just wins/losses and looks at who you win against and places you accordingly. ...

What about crashes? Happens so often...
What about players who are wining and quit before so they're rank does not increase?
What about «dirty tactics» to win as to get good ranking?
What about...?
I can see so many problems with it...

I think, for now, that keeping record of played time, as Betalord said it was planing on making, is probably the best.

Crashes do happen, but there isn't anything you can do anyways. The game needs to draw the line somewhere. Regardless of whether or not your computer died or not, there is no way for the server to tell whether or not you did this on purpose (to avoid a loss).

This system is not based on ratios. Someone with 300 wins and 20 losses is worse than someone with 350 wins and 40 losses.

Dirty tactics need to be fixed by the game balance system. The ladder can't objectively determine dirty tactics from normal tactics.

This ladder system is a fairly useful way to do it. As long as the ladder resets every so often (4 times a year wouldn't be a bad way to do it), there is nothing inherantly wrong with this system that doesn't justify the effort put into it. With little to no effort you can have a tried and true ladder that ranks people effectively.

[jcnossen]

This system is not based on ratios. Someone with 300 wins and 20 losses is worse than someone with 350 wins and 40 losses.

But does it need to be based on ratios? Right now it should only prevent experienced people from playing against the newbies, because that's frustrating for both sides.
Ratios might make people only play against worse players, and increases frustration of those who have a low ratio.
IMHO, people who like the competition of a ranking system should have another system they can register on, but it should not be enabled by default.

[Ace07]

This system is not based on ratios. Someone with 300 wins and 20 losses is worse than someone with 350 wins and 40 losses.

But does it need to be based on ratios? Right now it should only prevent experienced people from playing against the newbies, because that's frustrating for both sides.
Ratios might make people only play against worse players, and increases frustration of those who have a low ratio.
IMHO, people who like the competition of a ranking system should have another system they can register on, but it should not be enabled by default.

As far as I am concerned, ladders should never be based on ratios entirely. In most cases, you should never base ladders on ratios at all.

[Dragon45]

What about a weightage for each win/loss based upon the current ranked value for a player you won ro lost against, then the ratio of all the win/losses (with weightage)? So lets say you had an experieced player at level 40 playing against a newbie at level 7, and the epxerienced player wins. So then the experienced player might only get .175 "win" points and the losing newbie would only get .175 "lose" points.

As for "dirty tactics losing", i think trying to take that into account in the main scale is irrelevant because it would become statistically irrelevant over time. And dirty tactics playing does get you a lot of negative publicity, so the problem is solved socially, not techonlogically.

[Betalord]

I think some heavy ranking system should not be integrated in the client, since it's causing "disturbance" amongst the players already as it is. I think if people want to use it, a new page should be opened on ESL site. They are hosting pages for other open-sourced games, they are using ELO rating system as far as I know. It works pretty well too, they set the time for official match to happen, players are notified before the match takes place, and all the participants must enter results in a web form and upload demos. There are different ladders as well.

Check out http://www.esl-europe.net/

[Doomweaver]

Please, no ranking, I lose too much

[zwzsg]

I forgot to mention: you will be able to limit battle to players with certain rank, so that players with lower rank won't be able to join.

I'm against that. It will mean that there will be a couple of vet playing together, and that any newcomer won't find any game for him, and so leave to never come back, and so it will kill Spring. Make is as easy as possible for new people to play a game.

When you'll have thousands of Spring games going on simultaneously, then you can start thinking about sorting them by skill. But not before.