charred cobalt
There’s an upcoming Dev questions and answers voice chat, focussing on the upcoming update, and the ranking system. If your timezone/schedule makes it hard for you to attend that call, you can post your questions here
#Your Questions for Dev Q&A
haughty junco
With the update coming (or sometime soon) will we only be allowed to play players our rank or at least as close as possible if it was an issue to fill up higher rank player lobbies?
If not, then I think the leaderboard split will make absolutely no difference for 1v1 players. And the FFA leaderboard will just be dominated by noob farmers as well, dedicated players will just play on settings in which it's the easiest to farm noobs while players who prefer to play on some other settings (so for example fixed cards which are the most popular in the app) won't have a decent chance to compete with them.
Noob farming aren't 1v1's or some other settings, noob farming is high ranked players being allowed to play low ranked ones, and while in ranked games ranks are hidden, statiscally who you will get the most often are beginner rank players.
pearl reef
I think players resort to “noob farming” primarily because of the severe loss penalty. They know that if they lose, even to a high rated player, their rank will drop significantly. It is less risky to seek out inexperienced players that they have a high chance of beating. It also explains why so many of the top ranked players play so few games on their primary account. Once a player reaches their desired rank, they create alternate accounts to avoid rank loss. If this penalty were eliminated or less severe, I think high skill players would be more likely to seek out other high skill players and would be more likely play with their primary account. The rank decay feature may help with the second issue. It will be interesting to see the details on this feature.
haughty junco
Is anything in plans to reduce the amount of deliberate suiciding for a better place?
A lot of higher rank players will suicide for the 2nd place because why to risk for 1st and potentially get 3rd while you could just take 2nd and get the ranking points.
The suicides are a part of the game and I understand that you won't run away from them, however I think that it's really unfair that they're being rewarded, I think the current system encourages toxic behavior when it comes to that mentioned aspect and not necessarily rewards skill in the best way possible... If you open for ideas, my suggestion would be to only reward the 1st place, while make all losing places be equally worth for you.