I just want to share some of my thoughts about some aspects of what information we got about the new ranking system. I really like the approach with exponential point distribution. I already love that in TM² where I get just a couple dozen or maybe 100 points when I play a map for the first time and when I put a lot of effort into a map, eventually improving my time by maybe 0.2 seconds, it means getting another 1,000 or even 10,000 points. That within itself feels very rewarding and motivating. I think it is a very good thing that we still have this concept.
In the newest interview Hylis said that he would like to have the community decide about the distribution of points as soon as possible. Having slept over that information, I wonder how that would look like (It would have to be inside the game, right?) and whether that's a good idea in the first place. Because I see some issues with it.
1. Different interests
Players love different things about the game. There are different map styles already like Tech, Dirt, ZrT, Fullspeed, RPG, Kacky, and with the new game I have already seen new styles (like Golf) and can easily think of more (like wingsuit). Understandably a Dirt-only player would like to get as high in the ranking system as a Tech-only player and both may argue that Kacky is not a skill-related map style and therefore it should be rewarded less. This could lead to players advocating in an opportunistic way about how trophies should be distributed instead of seeing the big picture of the game, which can then lead to useless fights between community members, toxicity, and frustration.
2. Complexity
When distributing the trophies there are several aspects you could take into account: How well was the event organized? How regular is the event organized? What kind of players attend(ed) to the event? How many players watched the event live on twitch and/or youtube? How many players participated in a single event? How difficult were the maps being played? How much price money was there?
Most of this can be seen as valuable metrics, but different events could get the same amount of trophies because of different metrics. There might even be some events that want to be large and popular but stay at the like trophy5-level to not attract too many pro players, but the amateur players instead. On the other hand there might be smaller tournaments (like Solary Cup) that are about high-level competition. Apart from the money, this kind of event needs trophy7 or trophy8 rewards to attract high-level players.
So far I don't see a good way to just give a vault of trophies equal to 3 Trophy9 to the community and let us figure out the rest, even though I see that as kind of a utopian solution. I think it would be better to have event organizers "request" a certain amount of trophies for either a single event or an event series. Trophy1-3 can probably always be accepted. Trophy 4-6 would require some kind of effort from the organizers like an event logo, ingame advertising for the event, and could be limited to 1 Trophy6 per week or so. Trophy 7-9 would require some close interaction with someone from Nadeo and those events should always be live-streamed by the organizers (accessible internationally, this means at least 1 English stream). This way the prestige of an event is also reflected by the effort the organizers put into it.
See y'all on the track.
(partly)