[:1]Rather than mucking up that sticky, thought I'd make a seperate post.
The post suggests that an update is coming our way. Balance and exploits are adequately handled in other topics, so I'd like to talk about Ranked here.
I heard Ranked is pretty dead these days.
Why is that? What can be done in an update to try to revive it?|||Get an Ahwassa and level everyone's ratings to give people a fresh start.
But mainly, educate players on counters to the common cheese tactics. Having perceived imbalances can kill ranked communities faster than actual imbalances can.|||I dont think education is the answer. Theres a notion that ranked is for the hardcore, but given that, in most games, pressing "find ranked match" is the fastest and easiest way to get an opponent, its also for the "casual competitive" crowd. (whereas the more hardcore will instead play people they know, or join tournaments, etc.)
Casual competitive crowd probably arent interested in "studying" the game, they just want to play. And depending on their learning ability and ruthlessness, they'll either blindly keep doing what they want to do or blindly ape whatever cheese they're aware of.
If low level cheese is hurting ranked, its possible that some balancing needs to be done for lower skill levels (as long as it doesnt impact higher level balance.)|||None of that should matter if you have a working ranking system that actually matches players with similar experience levels. If it's routinely matching up newbies with people who have 30+ wins on their record, of course the new player is probably going to get crushed, and most people won't have any interest in using a ranked feature if that happens several times in a row.|||I guess thats also a problem, and maybe an unsolvable one. Even if it had a perfect matching system, is SCom2 ranked active enough for there to be a reasonable number of players of different skill levels to match you with?
I suppose this is a difficulty with "reviving" ranked. After launch, theres a sudden influx of players, so theres enough of an ecosystem for all players to have fun.
But when ranked is less active there might only be one or two people searching for a game at any given time, so every person trying it out might have a poor experience and give up. Thus making it hard to slowly "grow" a ranked community, even if the game was perfect.
One solution might be:
- Have fixed intervals where you can start ranked games. (ie. Ranked games can only be searched for at the quarter hours, PST. eg. 3:00, 3:15, 3:30, 3:45, 4:00 etc.)
- Show statistics displaying which hours of which days are most active, so players can have a better idea of when the best time to play is.
This will tend to concentrate the remaining ranked community, increase the number of players searching for matches simultaneously and thus give the matching system a greater range of players to work with.
From this starting point (provided gameplay and other problems are fixed), people will enjoy themselves more, stick around, and the community can gradually grow from there.|||AdmiralZeech|||Whilst the first may not be trivial to implement, I dont know if I would call it difficult. (probably beyond the scope of the resources SE/GPG are willing to spend on multi right now, though.) You can see things like this in games like Guild Wars, where they have regular timed automatic tournaments.
As for the second, an ingame graph that is displayed whilst you are waiting for a ranked match to connect (and when you are in the ranked match menu), that purely focuses on ranked stats, would go much further than some community website few have heard of.
But again, possibly beyond the scope of available resources.|||I wasn't implying that the community website was the solution, rather that it's common knowledge that your region's primetime is always going to be the easiest time to find lag-free ranked matches, and US primetime will be the easiest overall for games that are more popular in the US (assuming SC2 does international ranked matchmaking).|||A very basic thing would be to make ranked more prominent. Having an automatch button in the lobby as well as in the main menu and the ability to invite players to play arranged team automatch games would probably go someway towards boosting its popularity. It would also be a good idea to automate the expansion of the search ranges for a ranked match like other games do so that if there are just two players waiting for a game they will be able to play each other even if there is a big gap between their skill levels.|||+1 to 2v2 ranked. No one wants to get their butt kicked alone, but if you have a buddy with you; well it's always your teammate's fault, right?
Also add incentives to ranked. Things like achievements and having the leader-board prominently displayed in the main menu would help.|||AngryMacrophage|||I disagree about the ACU rushers.
There's a solid counter for it; if you're unaware of the counter, or unable to effect it then you're the noob.|||If new players are avoiding ranked because of ACU rushing, then this is again a problem with the ranking system matching up disparate players. Which again brings up the problem of there probably not being enough people playing ranked, so it has to. Which then makes those newbies quit playing ranked. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.|||I disagree with that too, Mithy. It's not about skill rating; it's about the tactic. If they keep getting beat by the same tactic because they don't know how to counter it - they'll leave.
You don't have to be a high rating player to use the ACU rush; it's incredibly easy an intuitive to do.
You don't have to be a high rating player to counter one; it's not obvious or intuitive strategy to use, so people need to be taught it.
The other option is nerfing the ACU so that it can't be used to rush - I'd like that, but it puts the ACU back to what it was like in FA. I remember that GPG made a point that they made Sup2 ACUs this way just to avoid being like FA.|||There are plenty of ways for a semi-experienced player to beat a completely green player, and I don't think the counters to the ACU rush are any less intuitive than the counters to other strong strategies (e.g. proper build order and early unit advantage). There is no way to educate starting players against every possible way they could lose.
However, if the ACU rushing is so prevalent that players with 5-10 games under their belt are using it against 0-game newbies, then yeah, it could probably stand to be toned down or delayed in some way, even if is risky already.
If the problem is that players with 30 games played are going up against players with 0, then the latter are still likely to get stomped with little indication of what they did wrong, even if ACU rushing is removed/delayed/nerfed. This is where having a larger, ever-shifting pool of ranked players is very useful, so that players with more closely similar numbers of games played can be matched with each other instead of having to go wide and pair up newbies with people who have learned some of the quick-and-dirty ways to stomp newbies.
Edit: The ranking system also needs to take into account win/loss ratio. If a player with few games has a ratio stilted very heavily toward wins (say 10:1), it's fairly apparent that they're better than the average player in their experience bracket, and should or could be paired up with higher-ranked players.|||Sooo.. basically the league system in starcraft 2?|||BulletMagnet|||IIRC, there are thread in here on how to handle an ACU rush on several maps. On the other hand, there're some few replays available at GameReplays.org which show you on how to do that as well.|||Whats the opinion on making the ACU tree uselessly expensive?
Just something to dump your points into in large games when everything else is purchased.
Sure, you'd lose a lot of gameplay, but does it solve the problems?|||Back when ACU rushing was prominent I liked the idea of not being able to spend RP in the ACU tech tree until X amount of time.|||Nah its easy to counter an acu rush. All u need is hunker which isnt very rp expensive tbh.|||Mithy|||I still suck at countering and doing ACU rushes. My problem with countering them is that I usually spend my RP at the start of the game on eco upgrades (either structure build time/cost as cybran or unit build time/cost as aeon) and so only have 3 odd RPs to spend when the upgraded ACU shows up.|||Actually, how did game mods of popular games (like DoTA, Natural Selection, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, etc) grow their competitive communities?
Since they never had the "big bang" of a well-defined launch, and instead grew from obscurity to fame.
I guess they never had automatic ranked, though. They were played via private matches and tournaments.|||UnitedStrafes
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