I tracked 117 ranked games over the past couple of days.

Out of 117 games, I had 13 losses.

4 losses happened going first.

9 losses happened going second.

So yes, the possibility to lose a game does seem to go up alot if one is going second.

It also seemed to be the case that I went first 65 times and second 52 times. The game does still seem prone to having long go first/go second streaks. I counted 2 times that I got 8 "go first." I also counted a time that I got 5 "go second" in a row. I'm not really a statistics person, but the go first / go second chances could have possibly been improved since the last time I was counting the odds of going first or second. This weekend, the go first / go second system didn't seem obviously flawed.

@ZOS_Kevin , another thing that I noticed, since I cared about ranking this month, is that different players don't earn score at the same rate. That seems like an incredibly large flaw. On my smurf, I played at a 90% win rate. The smurf nestled into maximum point gains of around 30 points.

On my main account, which had just gotten done with a large losing streak, I played at around a 80% win rate and I noticed that the score change became closer to 60 points per win.

I kept close track of another player and the amount of score that they gained for their games seemed to bottom out at 30 point, but was much more consistently 50 points or higher. This player had around a 70% win rate.

On my smurf, I played up to about 2000 points before losing a few games. so 30 points average per win times 50 games, which was my winstreak when I maxed out on the smurf, means I played to that point from around 500. If I had been getting 50 points per win, then I would have soard past everyone else on the leader board to 3000 score, instead of 2000, and I would have stopped playing.

At this point I will indicate that the point system rewards people who lose. My first loss was in rubedite league after 16 games. Even as a brand new player in Rubedite, I was already gaining score like 10 points for wins. I even had a number of 0 point wins.

Why is a brand new rubedite player punished so badly? Well, I think that I can say why.

Until I got to a certain score, it seemed like I was being matched against the same few unfamiliar faces over and over. Then eventually, it seemed like the game changed my matchmaking and started to match me against the people that I'm more familiar with. So it seems that the ranked ladder is segregated based on some criteria. It seemed like when one is at the bottom, they only play against others at the bottom. And it seemed like those at the top, they only play those at the top.

It's all well and good to have that type of system if it's real, but it was a bad experience for someone such as myself who wanted to rank up, but was destined to only play against players giving 0 to 30 points. And I felt the shift into the top of the league. There were a couple of games that I got 150 points when I theorize that this "shift" happened, and then I went back down to 30 point wins quite abruptly.

@ZOS_Kevin I'm tagging you again for emphasis on this next idea since I don't want it to get lost in the above talk. Players are rewarded in a type of way for losing. As previously stated. My main account and this other player were both getting around double the score per win as my smurf. It seemed to be the case that both my main account and this other player became entitled by the matchmaking system to earn more points for our wins after we had huge losing streaks.

In that way the system is able to be exploited in the sense that those with a lesser win rate can relatively gain a large amount of score and then stop playing once they get on a good win streak. As stated, my smurf would have been at 3000 if it had been entitled to the same score gains by the system as the other accounts. But it wasn't entitled to those score gains because it wasn't losing...

That is sort of disappointing that players can play themselves into bad matchmaking positions merely by doing well. It's also not really a system that indicates higher levels of skill when a good player can win streak into a top leaderboard spot and stop playing while someone with a 20% higher win rate needs many more games and chances of loss to achieve the same position.

That is all. Thank you for reading.