Arena Points Algorithm

[Andrewsmile]

Hello all, I was wondering if the arena points algorithm is working as intended, as climbing once you hit gold becomes incredibly statistically unlikely even with a high winrate. As it stands currently, I gain one star for 1st place, lose 1 star for 2nd place, lose 3 stars for 3rd, and I assume lose more than that for 4th but I haven't seen that happen because I can't make it more than 3 stars past the gold rank floor without falling back to 0. You can see this from the rankings, no one has been able to make elite league and the players on top have very high winrates but quickly fall back down. In any other game on the site I have played winrates of 70% will get you to elite league fairly quickly, but not here. If this was a game like chess with no randomness this would make sense, but despite there being lots of strategic elements there is a LOT of randomness in Challengers which makes a punishing ranking system difficult to climb from a statistical perspective without a very large amount of games played. Just wanted to hear other perspectives and see if the algorithm couldnt be tweaked maybe.

[msclark]

This is just how it is with any game on here that has a significant luck factor. I don't think Challengers is particularly special. It'll get better over time, though. Eventually more people will get to gold so you'll have more gold players in your games and your wins will be worth more / your losses will be less punishing. And then when you're in Elite your losses will "help" other people get up to Elite themselves. It's a bit of a weird system, but it usually works out pretty well in the end.

[Andrewsmile]

Reopening because I think this issue still persists, especially with the lack of a rank reset between seasons. I don't think Watno (the number 1 player) can be challenged with the current Arena Score algorithm, he placed 1732 and didn't play another game that season to my knowledge. (Nor should they have to keep #1 lol). They are a great player, but reaching elite league before anyone else made them pretty unchallengeable (pun intended). I reached the 1700s numerous times and at that point I would get on average 9 points for a win and lose 5 points for 2nd place, and if I didnt make the final I would fall back to the 1600s. At that time, my winrate was 79-81% depending on the day, which is about where Watno's is and is beaten only by a few players. As far as I know I was the only player other than Watno to make it to 1700, and the luck factor in this game makes climbing past that very difficult based on the point distributions I shared above. I'm not proposing any radical change to the algorithm, but a ranked reset would make the top spot more competitive in my opinion.