Improvement of Leaderboards

FemtoZetta

Just to add a datapoint, League of Legends (one of the biggest games in the world) which has a league system very similar to ours has a leaderboard that looks like this:

So it pretty much looks the same as ours, it just additionally has a column for the recent rank changes. I think the point is to intentionally give lacking information about the skill of a player, because many people just don't understand it and/or because it leads to players focusing on rating.
LoL also showed rating when it was a new game, but they switched to the league system pretty fast (after like 3 years or so). Players now play to go up divisions/tiers and not rating. The system also rewards (avatars, other "cool" profile UI stuff, in-game skins) players for reaching certain goals, like being at least Gold at the end of a season, and that becomes motivation for people to play.

We don't have any rewards so that part of the motivation is gone. We also don't have rank up games like LoL has (BO3 for division, BO5 for leagues).

There's more to it, like a different system for very high level players and so on, but I think the post is already long.

My main point is:
There's not really anything wrong with our current leaderboards, as it's the same as LoL, the whole thing is more about the philosophy behind the leaderboard. The problem is that we currently have something that doesn't give you good information, but also doesn't have all the intricacies of the LoL system that makes people want to play more and rank up divsions and tiers and feel good about that.
Our system is still unfinished: in-game you still see rating, and as far as I know the cool designs Petric made are still not used anywhere.

Personally I vastly prefer getting meaningful information than the pampering the LoL system does; I think it's also way less effort for our devs to implement.

FtXCommando

League vs Rating is entirely a top-down question. Problem is that the leagues are implemented half-ass because pushing it through entirely and hiding rating made everybody cry so it’s currently useless because no culture exists around league divisions nor is there any reason for one to currently form. So you have the situation of people wanting to revert back to using rating as a leaderboard and essentially making divisions a pointless addition.

Jip

Then we just push through the league system across the board, and say goodbye to showing ratings. If that is the better system for the long term then I'll be happy to implement it in the game, and I'll be happy to take all the flak that emerges from it.

SpikeyNoob

@jip How would that look for global games? Would there be a separate global league or would it show highest mm league?

waffelzNoob

Thread locked for upvote farming.

Femboy

I just re-added the global leaderboards https://www.test.faforever.com/leaderboards

Resistance

good job

metro111

This post is deleted!

Eternal-

I dont have such problems

and fix for Python client. Extract to C:\Program Files (x86)\Forged Alliance Forever
python36.zip

Vindex

Today changes for the leaderboard have been touched upon in the discord suggestions forum.

I’ve decided to use this thread to continue the conversation and gather feedback from the community. No need for another one.

So far has been proposed:

Show win/lose ratio over the current season. Can differ a lot of 1v1s, is valuable information for players.
Show previous league placement. With the removal of visible ratings in favor of leagues, it’s important to show past league placements. Currently, there’s no way to track a player’s league history.
Show position change in the leaderboards. Display whether a player has moved up or down in the rankings.
Show timespamp of when the previous game was played. I.e. - Player A played a 1v1 game 10 days ago.

Please, share your thoughts on the possible changes to the leaderboard. Feel free to suggest other features that could enhance the leaderboard experience now that ratings are no longer displayed.

Crofis

@Vindex

The first thing i ask myself is, what are these additional stats going to do? I believe that more stats might contribute towards tracking each player's own progress (making them feel more satisfied when they see improvements) rather than serving purposes like gauging a player's skill (at least with a non-ill intent in mind). With that said, i see these additions as something that could bring some QoL, but also come with risks. just look at how winrate is treated on LoL, people flaming others with <50% wr, or acting like they're superior with their high 58% winrate or so, even when that 58% is out of 60 or so games, and hence, irrelevant statistically.

The point is, it's up to the community to make good use of these new stats, if we trust the people to not go toxic about it, then sure, why not? Maybe some information about games that have these systems already in place and the effects they have on the community might be evalued first.

Onto the suggestions

About winrate: as previously said, some people might look at the single number without the game count in mind, getting the "wrong" information out of this stat. Also, and i talk from personal experience, in an environment where your WR becomes almost what defines your skill/value as a player, seeing it go down might lead to frustration and poison the environment itself (or lead people to treat you like garbage. This is a risky stat imo, the player base might either make good or bad use of it.
This is nice to track your personal progress, but i would add it to the player's profile rather than the leaderbords page
The position change is graphically easy to implement, some arrows and maybe a number saying how many positions a player shifted, with a set timer for each refresh. I don't see as many drawbacks for this as i do with winrate, although i have to say maybe this might only be meaningful above a certain level (like master+, where positions don't shift as easily as in gold).
~~This is imo unnecessary and doesn't fit well in the leaderboard~~ You know what? I changed my mind, the graphic showing "last game played X days ago" is actually pretty neat. Additionally, how about improving information about the player's previous games regardless of leaderboard? An idea i just had:

Match history feature, showing a record of the players last X games (X totally arbitrary), with the essential info and directly accessible from their profile (this could be an additional feature, or maybe a starting point for a complete rework of the replay section, maybe just a "compact mode" option for replay section itself).
The info would be just some of the ones in the replay section, like players involved, map preview, outcome, game lenght (played not real time), gamemode (custom, ladder, mods). The goal would be to have more and smaller windows so you can skim through them quickly, seeing how the past games went in terms of win/loss, or finding easily the game you wanted to rewatch (i'm not too comfortable with the replay sections, windows are too big and you really need to scroll a lot, plus not having mapgen in the preview sucks but i know we can't do anything about that for now so rip).

Additional suggestion: rework score.
I don't like the score system, first, because in the leaderboard itself i can't find an explanation for it, and second, because even after i think i figured out what it does (i think it tracks your progress in each division, promoting you after it reaches 10+ or demoting on 0-) i can't bring myself to pay too much attention to it. I find myself barely checking the division (paying more attention to my rating), but even when i do score is just the extra of an extra, the only times i recall thinking about score were the times i was trying to figure out why this number was randomly going up or down.

Swatoslav

Good topic,
I can help with some UX/UI design if needed.