Announcing: Card Hunter PvP Spring Season

The season is over. Final standings can be found in this post.

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Hi guys! I'm here to announce something very exciting.

To bolster the Card Hunter PvP scene, I am starting the first ever Card Hunter PvP season. This is the Spring Season, and it runs from April 1st to June 30th. To participate, all you have to do is continue playing ranked as you always have. There are no special rules or constraints, and you don't need to sign up. Play ranked games, and eventually, if you're really good, you'll win a prize!


Why?

Previously, there was little incentive to maintain a high rating. A lot of players participated in the forbidden activity of artificially lowering their ratings in order to get quick, profitable matches against players with less experience or worse gear. There was also no real incentive for players who cared about rank to keep playing once they had attained a high rank—35 of the top 55 players are inactive. These both seem like bummers to me, and the goal of what I'm organizing is to provide a constant, fun incentive to play well, win games, and remain active.


Details

Start Date: April 1
End Date: July 1

I'll be keeping track of player statistics on a weekly basis. At the end of the season, I will join all my leaderboards and produce an overall seasons standings table.

There will be prizes in two categories.

Most Wins: Each week, the top 20 winning players who qualify* will be sorted by "points," which is their weekly win score multiplied by their overall win rate and the log of their standing. (Points = Wins * Win% * log[Standing])

Highest Rated: Each week, the top 20 rated players who qualify* will be sorted by rating.

*In order to qualify, you need to maintain positive standing and play 10 games or more in the week in question. If you don't qualify for one week's standings, don't worry! If you do really well most weeks, you may still end up winning prize at the end of the season.

Here is a sample data set, reflecting weekly standings at the beginning of the season.



Every week, I will publish a little table like this one so people can see where they stand and who the current season leaders are. Stats will be posted to the forum and I will link them from the Loot Fairy Tracker's announcements section.

Feel free to discuss the system here. You can ask me questions; you can strategize on how to dominate the season. My hope is that these weekly leaderboards and the promise of prize make their way into lobby chat and motivate a lot of players to keep doing their best. Also note that guilds are represented in these stats, so be sure to fly your colors and make your guildmates proud!


Prizes

Everyone who makes the final season standings table will win a prize.

The prize breakdown is as follows:


Winners receive unique slime figurines—a dwarf priest, an elf wizard, and a human warrior! These slimes have never been released before, and are only available as prizes for this competition.

• 1st place gets all 3 slime figurines, 10 epic chests, 5 magnificent chests, and a special trophy to display on the forums!
• 2-3rd place get 2 slime figurines of their choosing, 5 epic chests, 5 magnificent chests, and a special trophy to display on the forums!
• 4-5th place each get 1 slime figurine, 3 epic chests, and 7 magnificent chests.
• 6-10th place each get 1 slime figurine, 2 epic chests, and 3 magnificent chests.
• 11-20th place get 1 epic chest and 4 magnificent chests.

If a player ranks in both categories, that player will receive appropriate prize in each category. Sorcererers who rank will not split their prize among all Sorcererer participants in the content, for reasons that should be obvious.


Questions?

Ask them in this thread!


Standings

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 6
• Week 7
• Week 8
• Week 9
• Week 10
• Week 11
• Week 12
• Week 13
All standings can be found on the Sorcererers Guild website: http://sorcererers.dotq.org/season.php


Final Season Rankings
(as of week 13)

 

Most wins? Or highest win percentage? It looks like your table shows the second.

EDIT: Scratch that, I can't figure out how your first table is ordered. Help?

 

It's wins weighted by win rate. The table is sorted by "points" which is basically just wins times win rate.
The purpose of this weighting is to reward high volume play without rewarding tanking.

 

April Fool's

 

LOL, but not really.

 

This is cool, but if the incentive is only offered to the top 3, I doubt the mindset of the people in the 1200-1600 range will change dramatically. There are some people at the very top that have very good gear (multiple lochabers/ VP, strongarms) who are not really beatable on average for someone running more common items. Top 20 is readily achievable with relatively common gear - i have been using a melee team with only 1 lochaber, and mostly double-edged swords and am at 11 on the rated list. In this current context if there are even 3-5 such strong players and they don't quit, the odds of anyone else achieving a top-3 ranking are slim to none.

 

Good point. I might stretch out the prize structure. We'll see what Blue Manchu is willing to part with and then I'll update my post.

 

Great idea Flax! I agree on expanding the prize structure; I think that most active players should get something at the end of a season, with much better prizes for the top 50 players or so.

 

Yeah, thanks for the enthusiasm, I'll announce a finalized prize structure within a day or so
EDIT: P.S. I don't think I'll be doing top 50 stats, because that would increase the amount of work I'd have to do by several fold. But between the two categories, we should see a lot of people getting prizes.

 

Ahh, I see it now. I like the idea, and applaud you for helping build more motivation. Therefore the following is meant to be merely feedback for thoughts on any future things, not a complaint. I don't see myself trying to participate, I've been playing since January and love the game, but don't have enough top end gear to compete for the ranking board (which I suppose might change during the "season"), and can't compete for game numbers against those who can play 100+ games a week. Ultimately though, I don't see myself attempting to go for either because there's a good chance that for at least one week over that period I will be away from my computer for the whole week and would be unable to make the minimum weekly quota.

 

I should have clarified, the minimum weekly quota is only per week—so you are disqualified on a weekly basis for inactivity, but not for the whole season.
Missing a week will hurt your chances at the the seasonal rankings, but by how much I don't know—depends on how dynamic the weekly stats are.
I definitely encourage you to just play as much as you can, and have fun doing it.

 

I think I got how you are going to calculate the 1st table but how about the second table?
Could I just quit today and play 10 games on 30.06, go past PaladinGP with those 10 and top the 2nd table?

Edit: And it's not a good idea to multiply the score by Standing! Game lost with 0 vps is not better nor worse than a game lost with 5 vps (unless you resigned despite being still able to win but you don't know that). If you want to include Standing more than just throwing out those with negative Standing, maybe multiply the score by (Standing + 3) / 10 for those whose Standing is lower than 7 or sth like that.
Edit2: or at least by (Standing + 2) / 10 for those whose Standing is lower than 8

 

I'm not sure if now I'm more clear, or more confused. So the prizes will be given to the leaders from each week, but not until the end of the season? Actually based on this statement:

I don't think that's right either. The problem is I don't know what "synthesize" means. Names will be drawn from a hat? Something else?

Regardless, I will definitely continue to play and have fun. However, if your goal is to get people to play more, at least in my case, to be inspired to play more I want to know exactly how a winner will be determined so that I have a specific goal to try to optimize my approach towards. An ambiguous competition gives me the feeling of "play more, maybe you'll win," and doesn't actually inspire much change in what I do. (Put it this way, the Loot Fairy was a fun idea, but most people had absolutely no way to play every level every day to track her down, so it was a novelty and great if you found her, but not something really worth chasing as there wasn't a real comprehensible way of catching her daily. Then some real smart guy came along and said if we pool our resources and make a tracker we can all catch the Loot Fairy daily. All of a sudden, there was a real reason to chase the Loot Fairy because it had gone from ambiguous to attainable. I'm just looking for all the information so I feel like there's a real reason to chase your "Season 1 Loot Fairy" if that makes sense.)

 

I love this Flax!
Didn't realize there are so few active player at the top, I always thought it's due to different time zones that I haven't chances to meet many of them...
And there are only 2 names that appear in both tables. Guess it's pretty hard to win a lot when you're at the top lol.

He multiples it with win rate, not standing.

 

Guess it's pretty hard to win a lot when you're at the top lol.
Wrong.
Losing more and winning less raiting per game doesn't make winning any harder (nor easier).

He multiples it with win rate, not standing.
Wrong, look again.
He also multiplies by Standing/10 at the moment.

Edit3: If you want to punish those resigning too early a lot (in above table those with Standings 5 and 6) you can multiply score by ((Standing + 3) / 10)^2 for those whose Standing is lower than 7.

 

So what is the important factor in the first table then, the amount of wins or the the 'points'?

I ask based on the observation that I don't have enough wins to crack the top 20 on that list, but if you take my number of wins for the week and multiply by my win rate (which I'm getting from my guild page), I'd be at 19 on your list.

Just curious what one should be aiming for.

 

Points = 0.1*wins*win_ratio*standing there.
Only those with 10+ games during the last week and with positive standing are included.

 

Even with that calculation I should be in the top 20 on that list, as I had (as of last night at 23:00 EDT): 43 wins, standing of 10, and win rate of 48%. That should equate to 20.64 points.

Or perhaps I'm looking at this wrong, as I've only played on game this morning with a win, but the leaderboards show me at 11 wins. So perhaps my view is skewed by time.
In any case, no worries. It's just a game. I was just trying to point out a possible issue if possible.

Thanks for your response and the information.

 

Or maybe it's hard to stay on top for long if you play a lot. Well that is my experience anyway.

 

If some things aren't decided yet, I think you should delay the season. So people know what they are counting with and decide if its worth playing or not. As I can see alot of the people don't understand what are that rankings and I'm sure that alot of other people didn't see this post yet.

Are the people out of that first board (on topic) going to be penalized?

Isn't it better to start the season at the launch of the new patch? I think there are some people waiting for the next patch to start playing, since playing at the moment don't accomplish much for them (when you already have almost all rare/epics itens means that you can play during one month and get 0 useful itens for you) and giving time for people to see the post and to the season ratings and penalizations to be clarified would be nice.