[Suggestion/Wish] Card Hunter tiers and change the way how PvP is matched & ranked

This is a response to What's your vision for Card Hunter
Card Hunter tiers & PvP matching
1. The whole population of active gamers should be evenly divided into 10 tiers, (called Card Hunter tiers)
by the % completeness of unique Epic+Legendary (maybe Rare) cards collected (against the total # of Epic/Legendary put in by BlueMachu)
2. During PvP player matching, gamers are only matched with gamers within 1 tier of Card Hunter tiers.
3. People who resign has a low but increasing % chance of permanently losing a random Epic+Legendary, say initially is only 5%. Reset once per week.
It will be neat/fun to know, where am I in terms of loot collected, compared to the population.
Current ranking system, wihle good, does not truely reflects skill level of players. Newbies are slaughtered by people who has much better gear as people do auto-resign.
This generantee that the card quality of all PvP are similar, and make more build type avail as powerful cards aren't avail in lower tier.
Deck building skills/tactical skill is fairly reflected in their skill ranking.
(Optional) While above is all and good, I am not sure the effort involved in following worthwhile for the increase fun factors:
4. Players can decide at particular session of the game, they play at a lower Card Hunter tier (e.g. A tier 10 gamer wants to play at tier 4). When they decided to do so, random Epic/Leg items will be hiddened from them. The eventual number of Leg/Epic item they can use will be the same as the median of tier 4 players.
5. Thereby, for each Card Hunter tier they attain, players will have a differnt skill ranking for a specific tier.
When this is implemented, the best of the best player will be having skill rank of 1600+, in all 10 card hunters tier.
6. The set of items being hiddened from player is reset once per month. This give ample time for players to advance in specific/all tiers.
7. The UI (or Profile), will show what is the personal best skill ranking
If above 4 and 7 is implemented, the UI needs to vastly changed (while the backend change should not be difficult), as now there are different parties coming from a max of 10 tiers per player...
The point being there will really be a truer reflection of how you play the game, and there is more of something to brag of/fight for.

 

I think you might be conflating "skill" and "amount of grinding a player has done," but the idea is definitely interesting. Matching people based on their collections could be sweet. I'm not a fan of ever making players lose items (unless an optional 'play for ante' setting is introduced, that would just be funnn).

 

I don't think the current system is perfect, but my tier idea simply limited which rarities were allowed at each tier.

 

Do you think that within a year this game will already be able to support a playerbase that's split ten ways? I get that you want it evenly split somehow, but how is it going to be able to stay that way after a year has gone by and everyone's got enough loot to all qualify to be in the top bracket? Would you really want to be thrust into a higher bracket full of people who can kick your butt because you looted a Hand-held Ram and the game arbitrarily decided that with that in your posession you must finally be ready for the big leagues? Conversely, do you really want genuinely good players complaining they can never get into the top matches because the loot system hasn't given them enough stuff to ever be considered contenders?
I think I'd be really uncomfortable with a system that rated me on my wealth and not my skill. Isn't this the sort of thing that's usually solved with a draft system, if you want everyone to be even-steven for power levels? Also, I don't think you'll win many points with a system that permanently removes your legendaries starting at 5% probability just for resigning a match.

 

First of all, in the current system Epic / Legendary items are not strictly better than Commons and any other. For certain strategies, a certain epic or legendary items may be required, but that's quite arbitrary. See this developer blog post on card rarity.

Really, what you do here is assume that obsessive item collectors are also the most competitive players with the best strategy and decks. There may be some overlap it's not automatic.

Even worse, you create an incentive for top players to sell off all epics and legendaries that are low-level or don't match their current strategy to lower their tier. There are 200 legendary items in the game, but a top player won't need to hold more than maybe 10 of these. He can get rid of the rest.

I agree that there should be a PVP area that creates a more even playing field for players who don't have a lot of items (yet). But that's quite easy to achieve: Just create a separate PVP arena at a lower level. For example, a lvl 9 arena would only have 3 blue orbs available for items. This makes deck building quite challenging as most of your gear will be restricted to lvl 6 or lower.

This does not work in a world of unresponsive servers and spotty Internet connections. I don't know why but the only time I ever have server problems is when I am in some sort of PVP ranked match. Bad karma?

Opponents just resigning is not a fair tactic, but there is no perfect way to adjucate this as there are still legitimate reasons to resign.