Well, people have been complaining about ladder. They say it benefits people with lower ratings. Today I heard some one accusing another of making a second account so he can have a lower rating account, battle against neebes and get a lot of gold from ladder.

I think it is good that ladder benefits the ones with lower ratings, witch are most of the times people new to the game that don’t have any other ways to get gold because they have no chance at MC.

But I think the game needs a way to encourage players to get high ratings. I think a good way to do that may be a tournament that gives prices (gold) to the higher ratings once a moth in the same way that ladder do. I mean higher rating in the game will be getting 120gl, second 110… and you know.

What do you think?????

(Sorry for any mistakes, I am not use to write in English, I speak Spanish )

I agree Nayen, this is a problem. From my own experience, it's rare to see more than one player who is "similar" to me on at any given time (Jed and Altren excluded). So as a player with a higher rating, it's harder to get ladder games.

Even if we had special tournaments for certain rating levels, people could still have a "main" account where the focused on their rating, and side accounts for taking advantage of ladder gold.

Jed and I have chatted at some length about possible solutions/mitigations to this issue, but no 'great' solutions have come up. One idea that I proposed was to make new user accounts go through mandatory (and extensive) tutorials so that lazy people are discouraged from creating new accounts.

And how about reduce the ladder prizes AND gives to high rating players some gold?

Actually im a newbie on this game, and im shooting on my own foot right now but, if u have the same encourage method to both (high rating players and low rating players) the "cheaters" will still making this strategies.

Even with a large tutorial, if the boring start worths the cost, these guys ill not give up.

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I don’t think the boring and long tutorial is a good method because many new placer could hate it. In fact I hate tutorials. If I will have to play a long tutorial at the beginning maybe I would be playing another game now.

I've mentioned this before, but I do think that some of this could be addressed by raising the minimum uncertainty. This would mean having a low rated account that racks up ladder wins would rather quickly rise in the ranks and it'd become less of an issue.

A harder fix to implement would be to measure deck strength when calculating similar matches. You could even go with larger difference in ratings if the decks chosen were similar. The simplest measure would just be the ratio of common:uncommon:rare:odd cards. A better measure would be a total of deck values based on market prices.

Also, in conversations with Jed, it sounds as if it's perfectly okay by him if people create multiple accounts so long as they're not playing against themselves. It can't be "cheating" if it's not against the rules.

I don't see the problem. I mean, it's free gold. If free gold goes to noob accounts with crappy cards, no harm is done. You still need actual skill to win, so it balances out. Also, I've noticed that even if I don't have a similar player, I can play anyone and get some ladder points nonetheless.

Honestly, I can't think of another way to give free gold without making the veterans unbeatable in the long run.