EDIT: My suggestion is bad. It wouldn't work because some people would tank their Elo to get easier league matches. Sigh. Original post follows. I'm sure this has come up before but not in the last 5 pages of suggestions, so away we gooooo With the massive influx of new players into the game recently, league matches frequently make me feel like a damn bully. I've had a handful of games against people who said they've never played this league before, and many others against silent players who acted like they've never PvPd in any way in CH. While I can't claim I don't somewhat enjoy the near-guaranteed epic chest that league now offers for veteran players, I think most of us can agree that it's not very cool to beat up on players who really do not stand a chance. The biggest negative factor driving this suggestion is that getting horribly thwacked 4 times by experienced veterans' superior knowledge of mechanics, cards and strategies for each league will just turn them off entirely, lowering the playerbase in the long term. If league newbies were matched against other league newbies they could have fun matches and earn their wins against comparable opponents. Matching me against a 300 elo guy at this point tempts me to concede just so I don't feel like an arse. There are several good counterarguments which are valid, but which I will attempt to preemptively address. QD/Fixed deck leagues put all players on an even level. No they don't. You know they don't. We know what cards could come up, we can predict what might be in others' hands and play accordingly, we're better at spotting predictive plays, we know what combos to try for, we know how we've won and lost in the past. There's no AI opponent in leagues so using Elo matchmaking could result in overly long queue times. This is a problem; I've seen games die to the dreaded queue. I propose that leagues use a broader band of ranks for matchmaking. If it's not too much work, the disparity between potential matches should increase by 200 per minute of elapsed queue time. So, you hit queue, the game tries to find someone within 200 elo for a minute, fails, then tries for 400 elo for a minute, and so on. Something along these lines, anyway. Using matchmaking would deny new players the awesome experience of besting someone vastly higher ranked than themselves. This one I have no real counterargument to. It's simply a question of whether this is more important than the number of people who get frustrated as newbies because they keep getting matched against people against whom they have no realistic chance of beating, to the point that they're turned off trying altogether. Naturally I don't have stats on this but my gut feeling is that a lot of people are dissuaded from even trying in leagues because of bad early experiences against nasty bullies like me. So, what say ye?
It wasn't a formal suggestion, but this has come up recently: http://forums.cardhunter.com/threads/why-am-i-playing-against-1700-ranked-players-in-leagues.7806/
As Xayrn pointed out, this has been discussed earlier. I think something should be done about it. My suggestion is to hide the ELO rank in league matches and try to match players based on the total games played (or won) on that certain league. That would mean additional tracking of matches to the database. The actual matchmaking should still be quite flexible so that queue times don't grow longer.
Xayrn's linked thread has a lot of discussion of this topic, including my explanation of why using ranked elo for league matchmaking is a pretty bad idea. Still, the 'problems' behind this suggestion could be addressed in other ways in time.
The matter discussed in the linked thread is something I failed to consider and completely invalidates my suggestion. Things seem so simple when you're not trying to break things All the solutions to the problem that come to mind are downright wacky, so I guess I'll just have to hope you guys come up with something clever to at least take some of the pain out of leagues for the poor newbies at some point.
On the other hand, the more one segregates newer players so that they tend to be playing against each other, the less opportunity they likely have to observe and learn from interesting plays or to realize when they've made a mistake because their opponent missed a chance to capitalize on it. As a less-experienced player (cardhuntermeta shows me as having a grand total of 51 ranked games, heh)... *shrug* it's not like I lose ELO or inventory for losing league matches, and I'll probably learn more from playing versus somebody with more experience than with less.
The frustration of losing repeatedly and frequently, vs learning more from losing to experienced players? Honestly, It's a tough one. Why not simply have a mixture, of 2 of your 4 league games vs players of guaranteed similar skill, and the other two games vs random skill levels? Yun-yang etc.
