Anet, Why is Leaderboard Decay Too SLOW?

#1 - Oct. 8, 2013, 10:52 p.m.

Shouldnt you scale decay by the the current pvp population.
I estimate the current pvp population(for solo arena) right now is around 8.3k.
Why not make decay 1%(just an example) of pvp population everyday.
So For example if player X has not played pvp within 24 hours,
he’d go down leaderboard 83 places. Another 83 places if he
doesnt play again within 24 hours. This way the ones who would
be on top would be the deserving active pvp players.

Look at the leaderboard(solo arena) right now. Look at the top 3, all are afks
preserving their ranks. Whereas other players are more deserving
for that top 3 spot. If they want to preserve their spot they should at least play
1 game everyday. Current pvp leaderboards encourages players
to stop playing instead of playing more. :/ Why would you encourage
your players to stop playing???

Justin ODell

#2 - Oct. 9, 2013, 3:03 p.m.

We’ve actually increased the decay multiple times now, but have been purposely making small adjustments for at least two reasons.

1) So we don’t overshoot. The last thing we want to do is punish our players for not having the time to play every day.

2) The change is retroactive, so the changes are very visible to people tracking their ranking. We don’t want to give the wrong impression to a player when their rating changes for seemingly unknown or confusing reasons.

We’re looking into ways of improving the leaderboards, so please continue offering us your ideas. In the mean-time, I’ll bring up increasing the decay with the team.

Justin ODell

#17 - Oct. 9, 2013, 6:47 p.m.

Krayiss.4926:
Azshene played 1 game since Solo Q release and hes #1 and your telling us you increased decay LOL COME ON

Actually, the last time Azshene played was on the 3rd of October. You can view the last time a field changed on the leaderboard. Just hover over it and a tooltip will pop up.

It frustrates us as well when we see people that don’t play often at the top of the list. We’re definitely agree that needs to change, so now is a really good time to keep those ideas coming.

Justin ODell

#22 - Oct. 9, 2013, 7:40 p.m.

ahuba.6430:
So why isnt the decay permanent? Why, if I play just one game i get right back to the place i was.

For a few reasons, some of which are technical.

From a design perspective, and I’m not a designer so take this with a grain of salt, we want to encourage players to keep playing. If a player has to leave for a while, for whatever reason, we don’t want them to feel punished when they come back.

Making the rating decay permanent would also distort match making because the rating decay would be impossible to keep in sync with the player’s skill.

We’re trying hard to not give this issue a half measure, so we’re opting to do something more than patching this one issue. This is going to take time, but hopefully we’ll be able to give you more details soon.