Not long ago when Frogboy announced that accurate stat tracking is at the top of his to do list I balked, and when he said that custom games should no longer be ranked I was delighted. I was wrong on both counts.
Proper stat tracking seems pointless when you look at the top 100 and see that the majority have well over 90% win rates, when you see the rank 8 player joining "no premade" games with a premade, and in a way it really is. The current system offers no insight into whether the rank 1, 10, or 20 players would win if some life or death emergency actually forced them to play each other.
However the stats are actually excellent at guaging skill level disparity at lower ranks. In my experience a team full of rank 1,000 players will consistently beat one of rank 10,000 or lower players. Rank 200 players do genuinely seem to win more consistently than rank 500 players.
The proof of that reliability is, in my mind, my own rank. Now bear in mind my skill didn't improve very much if at all from when I was rank 400 or 500'ish, what actually changed is that I started looking up everyone's stats before hitting the ready button, to the chagrin of many a lobby. I found that the majority of the time the stats genuinely reflected players' relative skill level. My improved rank reflects how well I can gauge the outcome of matches from the much-disparaged ranking system. Again that's not to say it's especially precise in that players within 100-200 ranks of each other won't always have distinguishable skill level differences, but nonetheless the stats are actually incredibly helpful for a pugger who's trying to find good games.
Now I can see the argument against custom game stats. The idea is that players on the top end of the ladder have figured out the most effective way to rank up is to win by sheer volume against crappy teams. The rank 1 player has 327 wins and 7 losses, which makes the ladder look awful. But let's not put the blame on the wrong party, the purpose of a ladder system is to rank up and try to reach the top. The real issue is something else I learned:
Game quality matters, but not enough. I've seen a lot of people with win ratios similar to mine who have much, much worse ranking after a comparable number of games. I believe this is because the majority of my losses are against fairly high ranked players and I lose virtaully no points for them, and a handful of my wins are also against high ranked players, and I receive more points for them than from usual games, in other words the ladder works better than we tend to give it credit for. So that leads me to conclude that the issue with pub stomping premades is not actually that their games are ranked, that the ladder exists, or any of those things, the issue is that they get any points whatsoever for it.
There must currently be a minimum amount of ranking gained for winning, and that minimum needs to be removed completely. If the average rank of your opposing team isn't within 500 ranks of your own team, you should gain zero points for winning, which leads me back to Frogboy's point about accurate score tracking. I was initially nonplussed about FB's emphasis on tracking, but now I agree it's actually a pretty critical improvement, so long as the ranking requirements are tightened enough to actually take advantage of it.
Let's be honest, when ladder ranks are determined by who had 300 pub stomps vs. 305 accurate tracking isn't especially compelling, because the ranks it correlates to are meaningless. However if ranking is dependent on a few critical matches between high ranked players then accurate stat tracking is quite important.
The process of ranking up has been very enjoyable for me, and not because the number by my name on the pantheon website is important to me. It's been fun because the current ranking system works well enough for me to match myself into fun games, and I really think that it could work for other players too if only they could see the stats in game. When I play this game on my brother's computer which is ridiculously better than mine when I tab to check stats I have to worry about crashes and I'm sure most people do too. On my own computer the game is inexplicably rock solid and I can afford to check every player every game even if I'm too dumb to remember their names and have to tab out half a dozen times to get them right.
So, the synopsis if this is TLDR:
Frogboy was right about stat tracking accuracy and he was wrong about removing custom ranks completely. Instead the rankings need to be tightened up in conjunction with stat tracking improvements, and every player needs a reliable way to check stats.
As a long-term goal removing custom game rankings make sense, but only when team auto-matching is impelmented.
