An Idea for Two Years Out

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Hello,

I just had an idea of hope from the last Tower Hour. SunsetLion brought up the timeframe of two years out. A lot of the discussion was about building out the playerbase. Games are a series of interesting decisions as the famous saying goes. Many decisions have tradeoffs. One of the tradeoffs in having ranking is smurphing. I say let’s look forward to it.

I thought of an idea that the lower the rank you are the better loot you get from chests and npcs. On the first floor at bottom rank all chests could be legendary and all npcs drop full health and shield. Where if you’re the highest ranked player in match you get less powerful loot until higher floors. At the end everyone would have loot parity but it would allow lower rank players to cheese the first fights.

A smurph getting full eternal gear on floor one could go on a rampage. However if the progression systems that have been teased kick in, they could be encouraged to earn the highest status by being the most nerfed.

A prestige system where if you’re rank “Platinum II” you start out with a debuff could lower the ceiling that a new player first comes across while allowing the most skilled players to show off how good they are. It could prevent the population becoming too stretched where everyone is struggling to find a fight and only fighting the same people. Good and bad players could play together more.

I don’t think that is something that will happen soon but its just a daydream of what ascension could like in two years

Cheers

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Hey Wildcaught, thanks for playing and for taking the time to write this up. Fair warning, I’m going to push back on a few of the assumptions underneath it.

What you’re describing has a name in game design: a comeback mechanic. Power or loot scales in reverse of your current rank, so weaker players close the gap automatically as the match goes on. It’s a legitimate category of system. It’s just not built for what you’re hoping it solves.

Start with smurfing, since that’s the tradeoff you named. Smurfing is when an experienced player makes a new account specifically so the system reads them as a beginner, then dominates real beginners with it. It’s not just “a lower ranked player has an edge,” it’s a skilled player hiding as an unskilled one to stomp people who are actually new. Hand full Eternal gear to whoever shows up as low rank on floor one, and a smurf gets handed exactly that gear, since the whole account exists to present as low rank. A comeback mechanic built on rank doesn’t detect smurfing, it rewards it.

Set smurfing aside entirely and the mechanic still runs into competitive integrity. Mario Kart is the classic example of this category done well: fall to last place and you can pick up a Bullet Bill and blast past someone who’s been driving clean and skillfully the whole race. It works there because it’s friends who all opted into the chaos together. Put strangers on the internet into that same system, people who showed up specifically to prove how good they are, and getting overtaken by someone else’s item pickup doesn’t read as rubber banding. It reads as getting robbed.

You’re right about the actual problem though, it’s population. Closed Beta starting is the real fix we’re hoping for there, a bigger pool of players to draw from, and that pool is exactly what skill based matchmaking needs to do its job. Valorant, Apex, Overwatch, the highly competitive shooters people compare us to, all solve the fairness problem the same way: build the match itself out of similarly skilled players rather than adjusting power once it starts. It’s not free, a small population at the high end of rank can mean long queues while the system waits for players at that level, which is the tradeoff we’re watching closely as we grow.

The one thing I will tease is a ranking system idea that’s actually close to what you’re circling, just built differently. Rather than adjusting your gear or power, it rewards you with more points when you win as the underdog. Not a comeback mechanic, since nothing about the match itself changes. Just recognition that beating the odds should count for more than beating someone you were already favored against. We’re looking forward to testing that out later this year.

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Wow, thanks for reading it. I just wanted to clarify that I know what smurfing is lol. It’s one of my favorite things to do. In games with MMR its always fun playing at a friends house on their account and just feeling uber powerful.

I like the reward for going against the odds. That’s a problem with some modern sports being all about odds making and statistics. When you succeed from les than a 50% chance is interesting. Going against the odds is where the magic happens so that’s really cool.