- Rules and docs have been improved. There is less redundancy, and outdated images have been updated or removed.
- Some changes to the ranked competition points formula based on results from the first week
- Competitions with no prize do not display prize: invalid competition on the details page
Is the ranked competition points formula publicly available?
It’s still being adjusted a little bit, but since we have a fairly unique community of mostly programmers I like discussing these sorts of inner-working things and often get good feedback doing that.
The system is heavily modeled after popular tiered ranked systems like those in League of Legends or Overwatch. The objective is to give players a goal to work towards of reaching higher tiers over time.
Approximate algorithm
Currently, the top 60% and bottom 40% of players in a competition will receive / lose points scaling linearly from near-zero to around 40. This creates pressure in the tiers, and will eventually reach equilibrium with ~33% of players in each tier. We can adjust these percentages per-tier to create more or less pressure in a tier if we wanted to adjust the distributions in a tier.
Quality of life adjustments:
- Players will always stop at 0 points before being demoted, if they had over zero points at the start of the competition.
- When a player promotes or demotes, their extra points are divided by two and carried over. For example, a player with 90 points bronze gains 20 points, going to 110. They have 10 extra points, so they go to silver with 5 points. Like wise, a silver player who’s points go to -10 will demote to bronze 95
- The first place player in a competition automatically gains 100 points regardless of other factors.
- Points range from Bronze 0 to Gold 100
Things we might change
- With linear point gains for better performance, rewards don’t feel linear. Gaining 25 points vs 40 points feels about the same, as they both mean you will promote in two competitions, but the 40 point reward is much harder to achieve. Meanwhile, the difference between 5 and 15 points is very significant. We are considering a more logarithmic distribution, such that number of competitions required to promote at this performance level scales linearly with performance, while points would not.
- We also presume that given a very long period of time players performing consistently in the highest tier will all tie one another at Gold 100. We are considering adjusting the points formula at the highest tier to avoid this in the long run.
Edit: Made some corrections and updates at around 1pm ET