Multiplayer 1v1 ladder? What would it look like?

from Offworld Forums

So the multiplayer for this game is fantastic. It is fun as hell. amazing.

But it does feel like it is missing some sort of official way to rank players. In particular, one of the biggest issues of FFA's is that there is only one winner.

The problem is the game is obviously best played in a FFA, or perhaps even team setting. certainly the FFAs are amazing with a group of friends.

I notice a lot of cool, often unused options in the multiplayer lobbies... I am wondering if they are intended for an eventual 1v1 ladder? 

 

I am very curious to what that might look like. In particular, would that 1v1 ladder include AI's? I almost feel like it might have to. masqurade? AI buy out? tight debt?  All very interesting possibilities.   

Just curious if there are any plans on this, or if anyone has any thoughts on what settings would be optimal for "competitive" play.

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Reply #1 from Offworld Forums Top

The way I see it teamers are the real "problem" for ranked play. 

1v1 is ofcourse not a problem. Only one buyout.
2v2 3v3 etc  would cause some problems as it is not easy to judge how one player plays if ranking is only based on how the team does. If one goes for buyout rank ourder that would cause problems by players doing it on purpose in a order to reduce other good players rank to avoid playing them in future and could be abused. If one also just have a single team gain or loss in rank then simply by plaing many games you will have better rank even if you are not a good player but the rest of your team saves you. Basically it will skew the ranking result so this is not an ideal situation. 

Ranking gain loss by how well you played during the game (for example money gained) would still cause problems if buyout is used since the good players will be taken out in many games before the bad if possible, thus skewing the ranking compared with actual skill levels. 

All players as a single company that can be bought out per team would allow some interesting strategies where some of the team go debt while others do not. However if debt is shared this is perhaps a good solution. It would however skew the result in the scence that one player terrible at defending his share price still does well if the rest of the team keeps him afloat and thus he can do some crazy stuff. Perhaps influence the ranking gain loss by how much you contributed to a gain / loss of share price of your single company would help this.

In theory we could remove buyout from team games and have another victory condition like say building a special project requiring huge amounts of resources. This is a massive scale sort of victory as volumes would matter instead of costs. This would then give some value even to resources with 1 in cost. Ranking gain / loss inside a team would depend on your contribution to the project.

 

 

 

 

Reply #2 from Offworld Forums Top

Many team and single player games use ELO and there's no reason an ELO coulnd't be adapted to this game's ladders as well. I hope ELO or some other form of ranking comes some day but this game is so early in it'd be a shame to make it competitive until all the bugs are shaken loose.

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Reply #3 from Offworld Forums Top

Glicko2 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system ) is better than elo but any of these rating systems is sufficient. It does not solve the problem of ranking in a teamer as noted above in this game due to the buyout mechanism. But I guess its fine to have everyone on a team loose or gain ranking as 1 even if that means a bad player could be carried by his team if that makes it a simple solution, but I prefer better solutions if possible.