I appreciate the work that contributors do for the game and efforts they make to lead the balance and cultivate community and new player experience.
That said, it's been very disappointing losing the ability to see rating changes in the replay vault, and in-game.
In-game it has removed the ability to strategise about targeting players based on their rating, at least for the moment where the league placements are only rarely displaying. Which I have to ask, if the new system isn't functional yet, why has it already supplanted the old system ? And then even when it is fully functional in the future, the league placement will give us less granular data than the previous numerical rating did.
In the replay vault it, as others have mentioned it was really nice being able to see the number go up especially if you got a big boost when you got lucky and beat a player with a much higher rating than you. I think most people understand that it's a heuristic and not entirely accurate. It doesn't need to be, it does the job reasonably enough, especially averaged over long periods of time. Also, isn't this inaccuracy shared by the league system?
I personally wasn't discouraged by the negative rating I attained as a noob and enjoyed the grind, it felt like a real accomplishment finally getting into the positives. An accomplishment which now feels like its been taken away And I only got into FAF in the last couple years, I imagine that feeling of loss could be more severe for people who've invested more time.
One other argument I've seen that strikes me as particularly questionable. That the league system will reduce people being flamed by teammates when a higher rating loses to a lower rating.
I mean a) there will still be league differentials. Is this just saying it will obscure, say, a difference of 300 by categorising them in the same league? I guess thats one way of addressing that, but people can still be flamed for being a diamond losing to a gold or whatever so its hardly a comprehensive solution on its own terms. But more importantly b) flamers are going to flame. I don't think this is going to solve that problem to any degree whatsoever. The kind of person who gets in chat to textually scream at their teammates for losing in a video game, like. You can't solve that by obscuring the rank differentials by a moderate degree as this change does. You couldn't solve it by obscuring the differential 100%. They will just find something else to throw slurs about because that's who they are. Trying to design the game so it psychologically engineers such people into not being unhinged is a hopeless endeavour.