I got an email from someone about the state of the ladder. He was basically saying it was broken because it is just good players tanking their rating to win the ladder. I thought it was a good idea to go ahead and post my response since maybe someone out there will have a good solution:

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Yeah I understand the ladder has issues. I don't want to just give gold to the top ranked players since that is what the mc does essentially. We really like the idea of the ladder since it gets people to play others of a similar rank which is way more fun for everyone.

But we do need to make some changes to it. Probably make it some how less attractive for good players to do this. A combo of making more hoops till you get an account on the ladder and somehow make the ladder prizes less useful for good players.

I think some of the ladder problems will be fixed by having more players online. Since then the better players will have more chances for keep cards and other more lucrative formats than the ladder. We are starting a big promotion next week so hopefully it will get a bunch of people on.

But if you have other suggestions for how to fix the ladder please let me know.

More people for Keep Cards? omgomg!!111!!

I think good thing is to count as a rating battle only 2 battles in one day with one player. (2 constructed + 2 limited)

Limiting the number of battles a day make it more attractive for experience players. Because they have to accounts. So if ladder takes less time it is better for then.

Most of the neebies that play ladder buy some common cards with their gold winings. So I was thinking that maybe you can ad a format that goes before ladder. And give the players opportunity to win random common cards in this format. After a certain number of wins they can go in the ladder.

The point is that for experienced players commons are not really important so it would discourage (if this word exist) then to join. And the new comer will still be happy getting lots of new cards and making the first improvements to their decks with then. Problem is that the existence of phantom cards (which is a very good idea by its own) make this option less attractive.

I have a few ideas. I'm not saying I know better than you guys but this is how I would do it.

1. To prevent highly rated players from making new accounts just for ladder, you could continue to allow multiple accounts, but have players tell the names of all their other accounts and use the highest rating for ladder. This can be implemented in two ways: pay ladder-gold only to the highest rated account a player has or let them use multiple accounts but use their highest rating for all the accounts.

2. To prevent people from purposedly lowering their ratings in the middle of a ladder week without losing points, you could count all constructed games as ladder-games. Of course, the gains from beating a player with a rating 200 lower than you should give only miniscule gains for the winner and very small if any losses of points to the loser. In addition, you could count only the first 20 (or some other number of) games against any one player (including their multiple accounts) each week (this would prevent some abuse cases as well.)

3. To make similar matches more similar, you could add to players' ratings the value of their armies (market last prices) mutliplied by some appropriate number (maybe 1/10?). These modified ratings would not need to be shown anywhere, just be used as the rating when calculating ladder points. Value of any cards that are not owned by the player could be further divider by 2 or something. The values would not need to use the very latest last prices, it would be enough to keep a table of them that gets updated once a week.

4. To make it profitable to play as many games as possible against as many people as possible, winning could give more points - taking any multipliers into account - (the points to be given or taken should be calculated before the match IMHO). For example, if both have 1300, winner could gain 100 and loser lose 80.

I wonder whether just adding some IP address or cookie based restrictions would help. Some possibilities might include:

1) Restricting a single IP address or cookied computer to connect to the server at a time. This would make transferring cards and gold between accounts much harder. You could add a transfer feature that costs gold to use. . .

2) Link ratings to IP addresses or a cookie.

I'm not sure either of those are a good solution though. I've said before that deck strength should be a factor in either similarity or at least in ladder matches. I'd love to see the rating for a player be updated once they went "red" and started a match.

Hey Guys and Gals,

First off I'd like to say is kudos for all the ideas and opinions on improving this game. Secondly, with any system there are players that will attempt to manipulate that system. I agree that the ladder has been the major topic of discussion in many of my chats with other players and something has to change.

I also agree with Jed that increasing the player base will fix alot of the problems. Saying that, after suggesting the game to a few players and my own experience, starting players at 1300 rating with no disclaimer of how their ratings will move, is a bit discouraging to new players.

The guys I suggested the game to said they loved the game, but were quickly put off by the fact that they were getting crushed. Which of course is expected when learning a new game, but now take into account all the sandbagging players that sit in that 100 rating point window to win the ladder. Sure those matches don't count for their ladder points, but they are running over newbies while they are simming around that rating.(Luckily I think I had Loopy explain the rating system when I started, because I to was like 'how the hell is this guy similar to me...lol)

How does this all relate to the ladder you might be asking? If most of the problems would be solved with the addition of new players and the sandbagging players are in essense scaring away new potential players in order to win the ladder, a beginners division where like nayen said where players win common cards could work well. Maybe let them pick their commons, it would have motivated me when I was starting.

New players=play other new players=win commons=build own deck=get more involved in games that require owning cards=increase in play=less players discouraged and more players getting hooked on the game=buying gold/booster packs/cards to improve deck=motivation to get better and move up the ladder division.

Just my thoughts, not even coming close to saying that what I'm am stating is not as flawed as what people have come to believe that ladder has become. Again, Jed keep trying things your doing a great job and there will always be bumps in the road and players that manipulate those bumps. I do doubt however someone will keep starting new accounts in order to win a few Woodland Links, everything else will even itself out with a broader player base.

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one thing you could do is gimp the people who just play with phantoms and defaults.

I am sick of getting stormed by someone who isnt spending money while Im using cards I bought.

As it is, there is no reason to spend money, and those that have are not getting clear advantages.

Give people using Phantoms 1/4th the victory points, and if you are using no phantoms and lose, only lose one fourth the points if you are not.

Phantom cards should entice people and show them cool cards, but just using stuff from the default and a few phantoms it is too easy to get far on the ladder.

Why would anyone buy cards ? they can just use the default stuff, have epic veteran, have ivory spire, have lots of creatures, and win plenty of Gold in Ladder. >? There is no incentive to spend money.

People who are serious will not use phantoms, I dont at ll, I might for an AI game, but eve then I find them a waste. Maybe let people get rid of their phantoms and get a gold piece instead. I like the Far Wilds, but with the state of things, Im losing interest quickly to people just playing phantom decks and stalling for ten minutes. (waiting several minutes, taking a turn, then waiting several minutes etc) Great Game, but why would anyone spend real money, when they can spam generic accounts and play with 150 cards for free, to win more money in game ?

Cards go down in value everytime someone purchases a pack unlike in real cards, where a finite number are printed. Over time they go up in value. Why are my vitual cards just as expensive as real cards ? consider making the pricing structure not reflect what real cards cost, for a virtual game it should cost maybe half as much.
Why pay money, when I can use what I get for free, and beat consistently people who have spent money on cards ?

This said, I have spent close to $30 here in the last month, and plan to spend it again, but I have to weigh whether its worth it to just keep getting beat by people who dont spend a dime. Clear, blatant, unfair advantages to people who spent a reasonable amount of money, over those who try to get by for free.

After about 20$ or so, you should be able to earn around 50gold a week easily, and build up cards slowly from there. As it is, people are playing multiple free accounts, and nickel and diming other players out of what they paid for.

Even I play a free account, mostly for AI games, so I dont really want its stat used to define my other accounts rank. Gimping people on multiple accounts is not good, gimping accounts because they are using ANY free cards at all is better. It forces people to pay money, if they want to compete for money.

then again I could be terrible, horribly, pathetically wrong

Giving commons instead of money as ladder prizes would screw the rarity balance of cards of different rarity type (common, unc, rare, odd), and make commons even more worthless than they already are, while the rest would get even harder to get. While this might benefit some casual players who are not willing to spend any money at all on the game, it would be inconvenient (largely because of market tax) for people who buy some gold right away after starting out and spend it for making budget decks out of their own cards or improving their ladder decks, or for people who want to get uncommons or rares too, even though they do not want to buy gold. Most commons can't be profitably sold even now, but the common-payouts would make the bad situation a lot worse.

If players would start in a ladder with common-prizes and switch to the ladder as it is now after a given number of wins (as nayen suggested?), would it really fix anything? It would only slow the good players down a bit if the number of victories required wasn't big, and if it would be a great number, say something over 100 wins, it would frustrate the hell out of real newbies (stuck with getting huge piles of worthless commons for months).

lord_midnight: to say that you are horribly, terribly, pathetically wrong with your post would be exaggerating, but I still don't agree at all.

I do think that people abusing the ladder is a problem, not just because of the diversion of gold, but because of the effect on newer players of getting wrecked by a series of "inexperienced" and "poorly ranked" players can cause people to give up.

As I see it there are two problems with the ladder:

- people tanking their rating on existing accounts to be rewarded for beating easier people than they should be playing

- people using second accounts for the same reason

To fix the first, you could use for ladder purposes some statistic other than the current rating. For example, you could use the highest rating in the past 2 months (throwing out early ones with high uncertainty) or some sort of weighted averaging. While this doesn't prevent tanking entirely, it certainly makes it more difficult to do so.

To fix the second, you could put both a minimum number of wins (25?) and a minimum activity level for the account. The wins requirement should make it somewhat of a hassle to create a new account each week for the ladder. The activity requirement should make it difficult to have 8 or so such accounts and just cycle through them each week to get around whatever changes are made to prevent tanking a single account.

In the end, ladder abuse doesn't need to be impossible, just enough of a pain that it isn't work it for the $2.50 or so you can get as a prize.