Drrrrrr wrote:The game is already about competition since certain people use the strongest strats all day just to win.
fortunately thats not true for everyone. i for one play for fun, not for competition.
Drrrrrr wrote:We are far away from games where people chose a nice strategy over a winner strategy.
we arent as far as you imply, i do this all the time. currently the community has some people who play to win, and others who play for fun and do the sorts of things you describe. we're half way there.
Drrrrrr wrote:And elitism is not that much of a problem as well.
i have a completely opposite opinion to your's on that. i think elitism is bad for communities, especially small communities, where new people can easily be intimidated away. thats why i think the current approach has it pretty good. normal play has no ladders or leagues or results, but we have tournaments that people can enter when they are good and ready to do so. so the competitive players can enjoy themselves in the tourneys, and everyone else can just play for fun.
Drrrrrr wrote:The idea to store data is just to make them available for other purposes. If someone builds a tool to get a ranking out of it, fine. And an open balancing approach is much better than this "we test things silently without the community" approach.
if the info was stripped of anything personally identifying then i wouldnt oppose it. so raw stats of which race is played most, which strat played most, which strat wins most over which race etc, that would be ok with me, as it would purely be focussed on balancing the game.
and things arent tested "silently without the community", thats why there's a game balance forum, if enough people notice a balancing issue and post about it, then everyone will know about the issue.
Drrrrrr wrote:and what is the problem with "top 30 only"?
i think you ask that because you and he have different positions on elitism. when i see things such as "no noobs" or "top 30 only" etc i think its sad. mp gaming is something that brings large numbers of people together doing something they enjoy, but then you have people that wanna wall themselves off behind their veneer of elitism. these people that spend silly amounts of time playing a game becoming a "pro" and often dont have a job, still live with their parents and have very little social life. then they sit there feeling great behind their walls, but really they have nothing. nobody is gonna give them a medal for being in the top 30 of a game, nobody is gonna give them a pat on the back or anything. all they have is a meaningless self proclaimed title, which in a few years will be stripped from them when the game servers are turned off (for most games, which are not played over vpn). they totally miss the point of mp gaming, which is to bring people together, not separate them from each other.
Drrrrrr wrote:Also this community is too small to have such an important ladder...
that we can agree 100% on. the last thing we need is all games to count towards their skill level (or equivalent ranking). we'd never get any new players. or we'd get only hypercompetitive new players who think they know everything but dont. they think they can compete on their very first day but they immediately get stomped as all new players do, then take it extremely personally and dont wanna hear criticism.
Dircome wrote:Ok what about anonymous stats meaning that they are not tied to any particular person they are just stats.
i was typing the stuff earlier before you made this post. as i said before i think this would be a great idea, as it would give some stats for the devs to use mathcraft on, but not lead to any form of rankings.
), but it's very frustrating to go online and see a number of games tagged "TOP30 ONLY" (and yes, I have seen those in other games).