Sorry Cytex, the ranking system has been brought up here to exhaustion and though there have been changes to it, those changes were really early on and didn't do enough to address the issues that make trying to rank up way more of a pain than its worth.

I was 2nd on Xbox a few days ago when I looked so I just haven't played since then. If I queue there's very little chance that I'll play somebody ranked high enough to give me points for a win. But anybody can pick Orgnum and make it a coinflip game so there's always a decent chance to lose.

I never understood for sure how the ranked system works, and I never found any official information about it. But from my experience you normally need to win around 20 matches to recover from one loss, except during the first couple of days after you reach the rank. Seems that you always lose 150 points on a loss, and you'll only get 1 to 10 points randomly on each victory. I already got around 20 to 50 points on a few victories, but it's extremely rare, most of the time it's bellow 10 points. It's indeed a frustrating system, maybe it needs to be adjusted to become more balanced and attract more players.

vuwuv wrote: »

I believe it is based on "Elo rating system". Number of points transferred is calculated using both opponents ratings - if you have high rating losing to an opponent with much lower rating probably will make you lose a lot points.

This is correct. There's also an MMR system at work behind the scenes. It sucks because the spirit of the idea is that a great player curb stomping a newer player is unfun for both, and works to level the playing field a little. However, the community is so small and the MMR is structured in such a way, that there is almost never a large enough ability difference for this to make sense.

Worse still, the skilled and tactical players that this community used to have are few and far between, which has created a selection bias where too many people in this community want RNG farms where the games are "fast games even if unfair," and the devs heard them loud and clear. They keep making nonsense RNG farm decks like Mora and Druid, refuse to nerf the RNG of decks like Pelin and Crow, and too many people in the community LIKE it like that. They would rather lose fast to an RNG farm than dare to need to play a longer game where tactics and skills outweigh RNG.

So, combining those two facts together, you end up with a LB that is tremendously punishing to a good player's losses, barely rewards a win, shifts a tremendous amount of burden onto the higher positioned player to live with outrageous RVR (win against a lower ranked player, get basically nothing. Sometimes actually nothing. Lose, and automatically lose the maximum number of points possible). And with every patch and new deck, skill is less and less a factor. So it's gambling, and the better you do, the worse your odds at winning the gamble.

Further still, the less skilled players who require the RNG spam decks are now looking at this as a win for them, because they don't NEED to be good to win, they just need to be LUCKY. So instead of learning the nuances of the advanced decks and learning to improve themselves, they just pick nonsense like mora, crow, or druid + psijic, pray that the RNG coin toss favors them, and happily collect their 150 points for a win against a superior player due mostly to luck, so that behavior is enabled further. Then the good players get burnt out, because at a certain point, it's simply not worth the risk knowing that any game you play will yield little to no reward if you win, and possible knock you off the LB if you lose, so once they get a top seed, 95% of top players simply stop playing at all, locking themselves into the top of the LB and the people who aren't there need to RNG farm against other RNG farmers to try and get a spot.

Terrible system, but wouldn't feel as terrible if they balanced the decks.