Squidboards Ranking System Proposal

[TheMH]

Not a problem at all, I just made them because I felt like it and had fun doing so. I used to :) I also don't mind handing over my psd file, if you wish. Maybe your designer has a use for it or wants to implement details or shapes in the official banners.

We should definitely aim for a continous layout design for the whole page/league, so don't feel yourself forced to find a place to use my banners^^

 

[UnLucky]

7 players per team does make a lot of sense, but so does having two teams count as one for the same rankings and member swapping.

I would personally cap it at 11, or one less than three teams, so that organizing anything involving 4v4 internally will have subs available.

Just like with the 7 limit, you can switch up varying weapon loadouts to hopefully counterpick other teams or suit the maps and modes for the match, but with 8+ you can have an A team and B team with subs for both.

Maybe have a designated "sub" pool, which could even be part of multiple teams. But if more than 2 of them play on the "main" team, or for two matches in a row, they have to register as a separate team with their own ranking. This would be under the 7 limit, so if a full team needed one more member for practice, they can grab it, or if they totally need that third Charger, they've got it, but under normal circumstances they'd just use the main 4-7 heavy lifters. It'd also allow for two affiliated teams to borrow the same occasional player if they don't want to fully commit to either one, but they cannot become a mainstay of any team.

I'd imagine it'd be more like two separate teams of 4-6 players each that both share 2-3 floaters who can't always play, either time constraints or team composition not being favorable.

This would solve a potentially big problem with large teams being completely unpredictable by swapping out their entire roster before a match, while also allowing for anything a smaller team would wish to organize had they a few more members. Though you'd probably not count any matches played between the two teams for ranking purposes, I'm not sure if the two should share the same rank or be completely separate.


As for ranking tiers, I feel like, at the very least, the highest tier should have transparent Elo values publicly displayed. That's when it's most important, and "gaming" the system is less likely since there's always fierce competition for the absolute top spot. If a team is going to settle for just barely beating one more group, then knowing the exact value or not doesn't change anything. But if you wanted to know just how much "better" you were than everyone in your tier, a simple ordered placement isn't enough.

 

[Aweshucks]

but with 8+ you can have an A team and B team with subs for both

This is exactly why we had the 7 man limit. Each team should be one team. If a team has enough players for an a team and a b team with subs for both, then we want to have them register as two teams. We have no problem changing to 8 man teams, because we can't reasonably expect a team to fracture into 2 and not have any subs for either, but 11 man teams are way too much

 

[Youngster Skaymore]

Looks good, except for the 1 team limit.

I agree. Say i wanted to be on a team with some of my friends who are more casual just for fun, but I also want to be on a more competitive focused team. I feel like people should be able to do that

 

[Kbot]

A couple of things I've recently thought of:

1) I'm not sure if this has been cleared above or not, but for each individual mode (Turf War, Splat Zones, etc.), teams have separate ranks/scores. Some teams may specialize in one mode or the other, and this would make things clearer when judging a team.

2) An organizing system. Teams should be able to be part of a squad. So, a squad can have a portal or something along those lines, with each individual team attached to that squad.

3) Similar to the last one, I think that sub-teams of 7 people can join up with another team, but still be listed as 2 separate sub-teams. Instead of the 8(+) player cap people want, creating and listing 2 sub-teams would be better. The sub-teams would each have to remain active. I'd like to think of it as similar to a varsity/jr varsity thing, where players can switch between the two easily. With this, I'd also implement a 4 week activity period for players, unless the player has a problem that come up, such as a wifi crash or a power outage, that they can report.

Just some thoughts. I don't know if these are clear or not at all, please let me know if I can try to make them clearer.

 

[UnLucky]

This is exactly why we had the 7 man limit. Each team should be one team. If a team has enough players for an a team and a b team with subs for both, then we want to have them register as two teams. We have no problem changing to 8 man teams, because we can't reasonably expect a team to fracture into 2 and not have any subs for either, but 11 man teams are way too much

Yeah, but with exactly 8 you need every single person available to do the bare minimum of what everyone's asking for.

And with two separate teams, you can't swap members due to your 1 team max, so splitting into 2 would be extremely limiting for a group of 8-10. Obviously if we get to like 15-20 people they should split up for a number of reasons, and 5-7 simply cannot split up at all.

 

[Flying_Tortoise]

I hear what you are saying but the goal is not to encourage teams that easily have the capacity to be 2 teams.
The goal is to encourage 1 team because we want teams to challenge a team knowing just about who the players are and encourage a meta where players can come into matches with strategy knowing certain players habits (well that was my vision for Splatoon's future at least, idk about the group's, one of strategy and hypeness). We are allowing 8 because a lot of people have made their voices heard and want the ability to scrimmage themselves which is why a team of 8 will the new team capacity when we update the system and thread (which we will be waiting for the automation of the system to be complete in about 2 weeks).
The point is though, that with a team of 8, people still have 4 extra people and I don't see a proper reason to increase that number.
If a team wants to split into 2 teams then they should be willing to find 2-3 new members for each team, which shouldn't be tough because every two weeks people are able to change teams.

A couple of things I've recently thought of:

1) I'm not sure if this has been cleared above or not, but for each individual mode (Turf War, Splat Zones, etc.), teams have separate ranks/scores. Some teams may specialize in one mode or the other, and this would make things clearer when judging a team.

The community is going to have to decide which game mode is going to be the competitive one and stick with it. We don't want to split the player base, a lot of us have seen a lot of communities die off quickly because they split off into different game modes when they weren't huge yet (maybe in a year with LAN and Spectator mode).

2) An organizing system. Teams should be able to be part of a squad. So, a squad can have a portal or something along those lines, with each individual team attached to that squad.

I think I understand. So basically when the teams are being ranked, also show the squad they are a part of. We were planning on doing this, depends on if the ability is there.

3) Similar to the last one, I think that sub-teams of 7 people can join up with another team, but still be listed as 2 separate sub-teams. Instead of the 8(+) player cap people want, creating and listing 2 sub-teams would be better. The sub-teams would each have to remain active. I'd like to think of it as similar to a varsity/jr varsity thing, where players can switch between the two easily. With this, I'd also implement a 4 week activity period for players, unless the player has a problem that come up, such as a wifi crash or a power outage, that they can report.

the teams will be connected through the squads. Most likely the squads will name their teams "Squad Name" A and "Squad Name" B and with the ability to move players every 2 weeks I think this should be fine. If we had 2 teams switching players whenever we want we wouldn't have a way to keep track of the players atm.

 

[Aweshucks]

As for the restriction of one team per player, one of the main reasons we did that is so that things would be simpler on our end. Launching something like this is hard enough without the logistical issues that come with stuff like that. Once the system is up and running for a little while, we will start to consider changing things like that, but for now we don't want to bite off more than we can chew. Please understand

 

[Aweshucks]

Yeah, I know of some people who are looking into it. It would be very difficult without LAN support though.

And also, that's not really what this post is about.

 

[iVortex]

Great idea!

 

[Valkyria]

Where do we post to register a team? Also, it seems that http://squidboards.com/threads/splatoon-online-squads.221/ has a separate ranking ladder for squads. Once the August update comes, will there be 2 ladders - one for teams and another for squads?

 

[Aweshucks]

We will have a way for you to sign up once we launch the system.

As for that thread, the OP is actually a member of our team, and that thread was just a very early version of what we are doing

 

[Valkyria]

Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying.

 

[KingCowman]

I think a separate PUG(Pick Up Game) ranking system would be valuable, as many members of the community don't have the ability to be reliably part of a team. I know I would more likely use a matchmaking service for PUGS.

Additionally a PUG system ranks individuals instead of teams, very similar to the in game ranked system, but would allow for all the control of the private matchmaking system.

 

[Aweshucks]

Hey everybody, sorry it's been so long without any updates. We've been hard at work getting everything prepared, and now we're ready to give you guys an update:

The system will be called the Splatoon Community League, or SCL for short, and will be launching on Thursday, August 6th, the day after the update.



We have also come up with a ruleset, which we will like your feedback on. This ruleset is flexible and may be changed over time. Of course, once the community comes up with a standardized ruleset, we will adopt that.


Each set is played as a best of 3.

Game one:
Mode is chosen through striking. Team 1 strikes one mode, team 2 strikes another, the third is what is played. The mode list for this is SZ, TC, and TW, but TW will be replaced by RM once that is released.
Map is chosen through 1-2-1 striking. The team who struck the mode second strikes first for maps (team 2 strikes one, team 1 strikes two, team 2 strikes one, the one that is left is chosen). The maps available for this are WW, UU, SR, BS, AM.
The teams play on the chosen Mode and Map.

Game two:
Loser of Game one chooses the mode. There are no bans. All game modes are able to be chosen.
Winner of Game one bans two maps, and Loser of Game one chooses from the rest of the maps. All maps are able to be chosen.
The teams play on the chosen Mode and Map

Game three (If necessary):
Loser of Game two chooses the mode. There are no bans. All game modes are able to be chosen.
Winner of Game two bans two maps, and Loser of Game two chooses from the rest of the maps. All maps are able to be chosen.
The teams play on the chosen Mode and Map

 

[Aweshucks]

I think a separate PUG(Pick Up Game) ranking system would be valuable, as many members of the community don't have the ability to be reliably part of a team. I know I would more likely use a matchmaking service for PUGS.

Additionally a PUG system ranks individuals instead of teams, very similar to the in game ranked system, but would allow for all the control of the private matchmaking system.

This system was built from the ground up to be a team-based system, and that is not something we are going to change (and it's much too late to do so anyway). I'm sure there will be other services that offer a PUG style. I know that @GameGalaxy64 was working on one, so I'd suggest reaching out to him.

 

[KingCowman]

I think that we need to move away from Smash Rulesets and into actual team based shooter rulesets, like CounterStrike's.
In smash, stage striking and banning exists to prevent people from taking advantage of a characters flaws for a free win, since some characters are undoubtedly better on certain stages than others. In splatoon, you don't really have that. You have 3 classes of weapons, but a team doesn't consist of only 1 weapon. And everyone on a team's choice of map is more or less personal preference, or levels of practice. You can't say, "KingCowman is playing as a Blaster this round so if we take him to Camp Triggerfish he will be countered and we can win." Because I can change weapons (or at least I haven't been lead to believe I couldn't). And splatoon isn't like smash bros in that a really good player is proficient with a lot of weapons, so that doesn't hinder the player ti switch to a weapon that can stand a chance on that map. If we cant change weapons between games, then all maps should be decided before the first game starts, so people can strategize their weapons better, this is a benefit of the CounterStrike system.


CounterStrike map selection goes like this:
Take a maplist of arbitrary size.
Let Team A strike first, continue striking until you have 3 maps left.
Team A selects the first map from those 3.
Team B selects the second map from the remaining 2.
The last map is used in the 3rd game (if necessary)

As for modes? I think it should be explored if setting certain maps to be associated to a certain mode is a reasonable outlook. Certain maps just don't work very well with Tower Control, others don't work very well with Splat Zones. I guarantee you some won't work well with Rain Maker. The only one that seems to be consistent is Turf Wars but you seem to have ruled that out as a viable mode for some reason.

Finally I think that you need to elaborate on what a "Game" is in a 3 Game set. Is a "Game" a Bo3 victory on the designated map for that "Game"? Or is it one regulation Ranked Battle? I personally would prefer if each "Game" would be a Bo3 like we saw at the Nintendo World Championships, otherwise these Matches will be really short. (<15min)

 

[Aweshucks]

Thanks for the response. We did play around with rulesets inspired by competitive shooters like CS or TF2, but we ultimately decided that a smash-like ruleset would be for the best. Like it or not, a large part of our community comes from the smash community, so a ruleset similar to that one means that most players are familiar with it. Additionally, we felt that with this ruleset adequately allows for balanced play and does not leave out anything important, while keeping it relatively simple.

We did look into assigning modes to maps, but we did not feel that we should dictate which maps go with each mode, and if we did not do that, there would be way too many maps to reasonably deal with.

The only one that seems to be consistent is Turf Wars but you seem to have ruled that out as a viable mode for some reason.

We didn't leave that out. It is able to be chosen in games two and three (and game one until Rainmaker comes out). There are a few reasons we did this. First and foremost, for striking to work there needs to be an odd number of options. Additionally, there has been a lot of debate over whether Turf Wars should be played competitively or not. The general argument against it is that it is much more volatile than other gamemodes and that the victory conditions are predicated on the last seconds of the match, and the rest of the match doesn't really matter. To appease both sides of the isle we are including it, but not as a "neutral" mode and it is not required to play it.

Finally I think that you need to elaborate on what a "Game" is in a 3 Game set. Is a "Game" a Bo3 victory on the designated map for that "Game"? Or is it one regulation Ranked Battle? I personally would prefer if each "Game" would be a Bo3 like we saw at the Nintendo World Championships, otherwise these Matches will be really short. (<15min)

A game is literally just a single game. We considered having each one be a Bo3, but we felt that was unnecessary and overly complicated. That does make each set relatively short, but nothing is stopping teams from playing multiple sets.

 

[KingCowman]

Thank you for the quick and well thought out reply. I am sorry I misread the Inclusion of TW.

While I understand that many people here came from smash, I feel its insulting to smashers intelligence (myself included) for people to assume that we can't understand and use other rulesets. This is something that won't change, but at the end of the day, its your system and I'll keep my protests tasteful and infrequent.

Also I would like some clarity as to when we can switch weapons/substitutes, as that slows down the match significantly. Maybe give people 2 minutes between games to ready up? Else forfeit?

 

[Aweshucks]

Hey, thanks for being respectful, man.

We're not trying to insult smashers' intelligence or insinuate that they can't understand other rule sets, just that a smooth transition and familiarity are helpful for everyone involved.

As for switching weapons and players, you can switch weapons between each game after the mode and map are chosen. We haven't come to a decision on whether subs will be allowed during a set or not, and we'd love your input there. We trust that people won't spend too long between games, but we can implement a time limit if necessary.