Alienshogun said:
I got called host yesterday, shit made me lol.
Oh silly BKs and their necessity to blame away their badness.
I asked on twitter, doubt I'll get an answer though.
Ranked should be skill based, I don't know why more devs are going away from that. It should have a skill denotation next to your name too.
I liked Gears 2's way of just hiding in the back. People get TOO competitive/serious when they can see these values. Not to mention some people get seriously unmotivated by a game if it's a crushing online experience where you can just stare at failure in numeric values.
I'd like to see more games take the starcraft 2 approach. You have leagues, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, masters, and grand masters. You need to win a lot to move up, and before the game moves you up it will start to pit you against players from higher leagues to see how you fair. Maybe you are in Silver and can tackle gold players consistently, but platinum are still too much, so the game knows hey, a few more wins and he's ready for gold. At the same time if you were in Silver and smashing both gold/plat, then the game recognizes it and says well shit throw some diamonds at him. Botch those up and it'll probably toss you into platinum.
The best part of this system, although some hate it, is that you cannot see your win/loss at all until you reach Masters. I think its brilliant because it takes the edge off from having a shit day. Once you reach those Masters/Grand Masters levels you are clearly super tip top and need these stats to help you up your game, but in lower leagues it can be soul crushing.
In console shooters it'd be a system that would need some tweaking of course, such as that the only thing that matters to get you up to that diamond level is wins and not your personal stats. Once you reach that diamond level it not only takes into account wins, but your own personal performance, so that people with fantastic stats that help carry teams, and lead to wins, get bumped to masters to be with the best of the best. I believe grand masters in SC2 in a region is for only the top 200 of that region, so there's a grand master league for north america, korea, europe, etc.
The thing is though, the hardcore player is not the ticket to big bucks for these developers. It's pleasing that lowest common denominator of casual. Look at all of the things Gears has done for them, and the one big thing hardcore players wanted, dedicated servers up all times, was left to the way side. Pretty shitty, but it's the reality.
