Lyte Edge said:
:lol
Just seems to reinforce that high BP doesn't necessarily mean a player is the best with that character...just that they pick him/her a lot.
But the #3 ranked Juri player in the world is talking that kind of shit and refusing to fight you with her?
...
Are people finding ways to cheat to get to the top of the rankings like they did in vanilla SF4?
How much BP does he have, anyway? Please tell me it's a lot more than 4000.
Yeah, if a player mostly sticks with one character in ranked matches, the player points is a much better indicator of skill. However, if that player uses multiple characters instead, it becomes hard to derive his/her skill for a particular character.
Anyways, it seems like there might be a way of boosting battle points (albeit inefficient) without the help of others, purely based on the point mechanisms. Battle points (BP) mainly differ from player points (PP) in the sense that a player gets docked relatively less points for losing, particularly to a lower-ranked player. So, in its very nature, the BP system is inflational, which means your BP will increase over time just by playing a lot, even if your skill level remains constant. In contrast, PP will fluctuate around your "true mean skill". BP are similar to Vanilla's championship points in that regard (although clearly not as bad).
I'm not certain, but it seems that the amount of BP you win or lose not only depends on the difference in BP (between you and your opponent), but also on the difference in PP. Which means that if you're building BP for a character A, you can intentionally lose PP with a character B you don't care about, and thus, not affecting BP for character A. Lowering your PP achieves two things:
1) If the above is true, you would get more BP for beating opponents, and lose less BP for being defeated, based on your lower PP. Thus, your BP increase will be greater.
2) Even if the above is not true, at the very least, you abuse the matchmaking aspect. In ranked play, players are matched based on PP. My guess is that most players have set the search parameter to 'same skill', so you're matched more with players that actually have lower skill than you do. I'm not sure if setting the search parameter skill to 'lesser skill' (is that even possible? haven't checked) will yield the same results (that might invalidate this argument a bit).
So once again, in terms of skill reflection BP suck. In terms of getting people to play more and more, it works great. This is clearly the reason for Capcom to have included BP: they don't want (particularly new) players to become frustrated if their points stagnate over time. Players need to have the feeling they're making progress. It motivates them to continue playing. Don't think of BP as a skill indicator, but think of it as 'experience', much akin to World of Warcraft's experience.