Hun Tzu's Pastebin Attempt: Public Ranks (Draft)

Updated 21:45 UTC 2019-03-07

Preamble:
Just a draft here, don't have time to proofread or make it sound good right now, so proceed at your own peril I've probably made these comments before. And some of the wording here may be a little emphatic.

Intro:
I think that the way rank/whr is currently displayed is a huge issue, both socially and psychologically. And I actually do think it's urgent for the health of the playerbase. I don't know if my broad view of rank/whr signalling is the same as what's meant by ladder, but it is nice to see people interested in changing anything related to the ladder.

The Progress bar:
There is no such thing as "progress" in a relative system. You can all get better and gain whr, and yes the stupid (yes, stupid) progress bar will show nothing. The "progress" bar on profiles needs to go ASAP. It should never have been there in the first place. That's just not what the word progress means or what bars are for. How many loading bars go backwards? And even if someone does "lose" progress (APM-wise or whatever), psychologically no one wants to see that they have.

Rank Groups/Colors:
The next issue is the arbitrary, random, discrete ranks that basically guarantee the generation of a class-system developing among the players, and a psychological attachment to your color.. "I'm purple, you're blue." "Oh, you lost purple, what a loblob". If you're going to show it it like that, make it 256-bit (or whatever the color vocabulary is), with each rank rank being an indiscernably different color, and maybe even narrow the existing color range so you can't perceive the difference in color unless it's like 100 whr or more.

Psychologically, big losses mean the most to people, so simply granularizing the losses (even if the gains are granularized, too) is a big benefit.

Why Rank Matters:
The whole reason rank matters in general, (and ZK is probably not immune at all, although honestly - in my limited experience - I haven't actually seen much importance placed on other people's rank in this community, more just a fear of their own ranking; so perhaps this barely applies) is because other people can see it, and with it comes status and discrimination. That's just how humans work.

Edit: No, I partially take that back. I think there are a lot of players (myself included) who care about rank for just personal info. I think the prioritization between public status and personal info can vary greatly person to person and culture to culture, although perhaps the public status is generally prioritized, and perhaps it is a greater source of fear.

Now, some of this will be globally associated with anything that resembles a rank/ladder, such that even if public ladders were removed, and you could only see your own rank, there'd still be some residual anxiety. But also plenty of it would fade over time in relation to ZK specifically.

So anything you can do to reduce
1) rank visibility
or 2) the perceived severity, frequency, or likelihood of losses
will help.

Possibilities:
 - You can decrease the time-granularity of publicly-displayed ranks, such that they only update once a week, month or season. (and clearly indicate that they only represent point-in-time snapshots)
 - You can smooth them out over time, such that the displayed ranks only creep towards the actual calculated rank (with like a max 20 points/day or something), and big jumps aren't allowed to visibly happen.
 - You could choose to only show the ranking order by default (1st, 2nd, 3rd, place etc.), and specific whr only after specific requests.
 - With any of these you can still allow specific values to be viewed, and if you want you can time-delay it like 24 hours or only allow you to check yourself.

Also:
Why Public Ranks/Ladders Exist:
They exist so that people can see roughly how they compare to their ingame opponents, who the top players are, and check on how their personal rank improves or declines over time. If we can distill those requirements into a ranking viewer, without any excess consequences, I think it would be ideal.

More Possibilities
 - add selectable options for matchmaking for ranked and unranked. So like, just 2 checkboxes, one for if you're willing to be put into a ranked game, and one for if you're willing to be put into an unranked game. You can select both, or either. The only way a match won't start is if there are only 2 players searching, 1 only selected unranked matchmaker (and has unchecked ranked), and the other only selected ranked matchmaker.
 - better yet also, add a slider for the +- range of elo you're willing to play, and a checkbox saying "manual" to enable it. Otherwise is uses the automatic algo.
 - perhaps you can also make any game with greater than 150/200/250 elo unranked