MM ladder activity bonus #3022
Description
For years there has been the persistent view that the MM ladder discourages MM activity. In its purest form, this view comes from the idea that ladder position is all that matters. The vagaries of WHR sometimes cause periods where the actual rating of the top players is below their artificial "ladder rating", so the function that tries to pull ladder rating close to WHR tends to pull people down rather than up. There is also the issue of predominantly playing people of lower rank, so gaining little for wins, and losing a lot for the occasional loss. This all feeds into the idea that you should just play once every few weeks, to retain ladder visibility, and the related idea that people who only have time to play infrequently are "camping" the top spots.
Modifying WHR itself seems like a non-starter at this point. Even modifying the way ladder rating interacts with WHR seems unfruitful, since WHR fundamentally resists feeling good to interact with (since it goes against some human biases that lead to false expectations). So instead, threxxy suggested bonuses for activity. This would be a transparently arbitrary system, but ladder rating is already arbitrary, and the audience of this change seems to care much more about the officialness of the number and ranking than whether it was calculated in any given sensible way.
Here is the system:
- The ladder rating values have a bonus applied based on recent activity. This applies to the order on the ladder and wherever players are shown a numerical rating.
- Note that the ladder rating itself is unchanged. WHR is unaffected. The star colour system should probably not be touched either. The bonus is only seen wherever you see a numerical rating, and for ordering people on the ladder.
- To calculate the bonus, query the number of matchmaker games played in the last 21 days. The bonus is min(300, games*10), which is around 1.4 games per day.
- The bonus should be updated after each battle, and should be included immediately in whatever it is that players use to see how much rating they gained for their last game. This will probably make people feel good because their wins will tend to be worth more than their losses.
- The bonus also has to be updated for inactive players, every day or so, to ensure that they slip down the ladder.
The main appeal of this system is that it touches nothing about existing systems. It just adds an extra number to UI elements and rank sorting that query ladder rating. The social/MM benefit is that people who play more do not feel disadvantaged compared to people who don't have as much time to play.