Global Ranking (for example like ELO)

How about introducing a global ranking system for players.
This system could work something like the ELO ranking system used in chess.
(The ELO system would have to be tweaked though, as it is designed for the 2P game that is chess)

You are awarded some points for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, and you loose points for the other places.
The amount of points you win or loose depend on how high your ranking is relative to the other players: If you are a veteran player winning a game full of newbies, you get only view additional points to your ranking… if you loose that game though, you will also loose quite some points.

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There is too much chance of abuse, as you can create your own games, and select who enters them. That potential is already present, but there is no global ranking to manipulate, just your own stats, which only hold what value others place on them when making diplomatic choices in games.

Seems easy to avoid that problem by only registering global ranks in open-to-all games… Not sure ELO is the way to think about it, but doesn’t seem like such a bad idea…

Such a ranking is obviously susceptible to one user having multiple accounts.
Just a few ideas to mitigate this:

  • Only premium games get ranking points
  • A game is only relevant for ranking, if all players have not played in the same game for a few months (this might be too difficult, depending of the size of the user base…)
  • As Alias​What​Alias said: Only open games count.
  • Games with same network warning are not eligible for ranking.

But let’s face it, this is the interwebs, so if somebody truly wants to cheat, he will likely find some way to gain some kind of advantage in ranking up in such a system. I would say: If that makes he/she/it happy, so be it.

ELO was just an example, there are surely other ranking systems out there…

I do want to have some tournaments, so yes, it would be great to have this kind of point system with that.

I think ELO would be perfect. It can be abused, but only to a limited extent. To achieve very high rankings only by cheating, one player would have to create many different accounts, separate them in groups, each group building one account to moderately-high levels, and then using those accounts to build only one of them. It could be an enormous effort.

If the accounts had some public history, showing all the games that was played, who else was on that games and how many ticks (and real time spent, for turn-based games) it would be somewhat easy to spot cheaters.

A good way to adapt ELO for multiplayer is to count the points separately against each opponent and summing at the end. You could consider a win if one player finished “above” another, so the Winner won against all other players, the 2nd won against the 3rd and lower but lost to the Winner, and so on. It would problably be fair to give a bonus to the winner, like multiplying the points of all pair-calculations that (s)he is involved by X%.

This would also change the dynamics of the games, for good and for worse. For example, people could think twice before quitting; The 2nd placed, seeing there will be little chance for win, could offer his/her services to the 1st place in order to maintain his/her position; The 3rd placed could also offer his services to the 1st place so (s)he can pass the 2nd placed; And all players would be interested in placing the highest ranking player below them, so they would gain more points.

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