Sounds to me like the best solution is to hide the results of the current leaderboard until it switches over! Then always display the results of the last week(or whatever the period is).  

Posted by Dusty

Sounds to me like the best solution is to hide the results of the current leaderboard until it switches over! Then always display the results of the last week(or whatever the period is).

The best solution is to always show the #1 position as <graalmsg>#n</graalmsg>, because I think that's the only way you'll please certain people. You have to give everyone a trophy and make them feel like the best. Just come up with a way so that everyone is at the top of the leaderboard simultaneously and I bet no one will complain.

Spoiler

The vast majority about the last leaderboard: "OMG, this is BS, all the top spots are taken by laggers and boosters!"
The vast minority this leaderboard: "OMG, this is BS, the last leaderboard showed true skill!"

The vast majority about the last leaderboard: "Spar leaderboards mean absolutely nothing."
The vast minority this leaderboard: "Spar leaderboards are the most important thing on Graal."

It's weird how people switch their argument up, right? You can't please idiots, but what you can do is make sparring more active (and this was achieved thus far). If you ask around and poll the active sparrers and contributors in the sparring community, I'm willing to wager that at least 80% prefer this new leaderboard. It's the ones who don't spar and have no plans to spar actively that don't.

But really, this is going well so far and I hope spar, PK, and BK hats are next.  

Posted by Thallen

You loved it so much that you literally never spar?!

Losing does count against you, in many ways:

1. You gain 0 points when you could have gained >0
2. You waste time, assuming you spar for ranks
3. You get a loss in your profile

"Now spar loses don't affect you and getting on the board means sparring the most," is completely inaccurate, because you can spar 1000 times in a day, and if you never win then you gain nothing. If you win against 1-10 players, you gain close to nothing. If you spar and win against good players, you gain a lot.

I actually spar almost daily; on a different account.

0 is neither positive nor negative; and aw shucks, that darn waste of time; either way, losses are not accounted for on the leader board that people actually look at.

Sure if you lose all 1000 spars, you still have 0pts, but to get on the board, you have to spar a lot to get enough points. So either way, yes, you have to spar a lot.  

Posted by twilit

I actually spar almost daily; on a different account.

Meh. You say that, but I honestly doubt it.

Posted by twilit

0 is neither positive nor negative; and aw shucks, that darn waste of time; either way, losses are not accounted for on the leader board that people actually look at.

IMO, you should reevaluate how you define a loss of something. If there are two outcomes: gaining something or gaining nothing, then the latter is a loss. You lost the opportunity to gain something, and you lost a time investment that you put towards it that could have instead been spent towards a gain. Additionally, you allowed someone else to gain from you. There is no risk, but there is a potential for a gain. What if you only gain 100 points in a day, because you lost so often, and the players around you gained 200? You won't feel at a loss of 100 points?

More specific to this example, if you're sparring in a device-specific or the "main" room, you've lost the opportunity to continue your streak and gain even more. It's the risk of actually losing points that kept people from sparring actively and instead camping on leaderboard positions.

Posted by twilit

Sure if you lose all 1000 spars, you still have 0pts, but to get on the board, you have to spar a lot to get enough points. So either way, yes, you have to spar a lot.

No, you're still misunderstanding. You have to win a lot or win often against very good sparrers, not spar a lot. There's a huge difference. Someone can log on and beat me in 2 spars per day and get 200 points. That might take them 5 minutes. For the average sparrer who is queuing up and only managing to beat 1:1 players, 200 points could take over an hour.

You will have a valid complaint when a player with a negative ratio makes it to a really high position on the leaderboard. The highest negative player on the iDevice leaderboard is rank #18, and he has sparred a hell of a lot. The same goes for the first negative player on the PC leaderboard at rank #20.  

this leaderboard helps less skilled players, the highest position i ever achieved on the old boards was 43rd and on this leaderboard where I have sparred ~300 times in the last couple days and am 30 overtaking people I wouldn't have with the old system. However the good, active sparrers are still running away with it.  

Posted by Thallen

They weren't. I've been #1 on the PC board for probably 90% of the last year. The only other two to hold it for a considerable amount of time were David and Dante. I'm not trying to inflate my own head, I'm just being completely honest with you.

Well now with the new leaderboard unless David and Dante are active sparrers from the beginning of the season or whenever the leaderboard is reset and remain active they don't stand much chance of getting anywhere close to where they previously did. That's just reducing competition as less people who were able to previously compete for the #1 spot will now not be able to.

Posted by Thallen

The same goes to the iDevice leaderboard. For nearly a year, it's been Sarah, Abood, or Kevin. Occasionally, someone would glitch their points and hold it for a week.

So two more people were actually closer or had the #1 spot than with the current system? Just sounds like more lost competition, especially for a system that's supposed to increase spar activity.

Posted by Thallen

It's been 36 hours. Now what happens if Sarah decides, "Whoa, I've been winning spars too much lately, time to take a break?" A day or two later, she loses her spot. If she doesn't decide to do that, good. She spars more, and the sparring community is more active.

Before, she could make that same decision and never lose her #1 spot. As long as she spars 5 times a week, she is #1 forever. That just sucks. I was actually going to consider personally asking Sarah not to spar for a day or two, because I knew that she'd poop on the new leaderboard (just as she did the old one), and I wanted everyone to get a good first impression of the new format. But then I had to ask myself how much sense that actually makes, and how is that even fair to her? I mean, she delays badly and skips at times, sure. You can hate her for that if you choose to. But can you even deny that she spars and wins a whole lot? If not, then no one is right to try and stop her from being #1 by a million points.

System just seems to be overly favorable to her as no one else has enough time to dedicate to sparring as she does, making it even easier for her than before. I'm not saying it should hold her back but it seems to be holding back other good sparrers who would normally have been competing for #1 spot from getting close to her.

Posted by Zetectic

if u wanna encourage noobs to spar, let them hide their loses. im a noob, idc about pts system. all i care about is w-l.

THIS!!! It was never really the points that bothered players that much it was always the win-loss stats, this system was supposed to remove the hesitancy that players had towards sparring but its not really doing that. I know the previous system wasn't perfect, but i feel it could have been tweaked to get rid of some issues about it. Instead of just implementing a completely new system, that will just give the illusion of spar activity increasing until the novelty wears off.  

Two more bugs for you FP4.

I don't know if you care about this, but "showrating" now constantly resets (I think it resets just the deviation/denominator to 350). It isn't shown anywhere, so it's kind of like deaths, but it's still kind of cool to know what your rating is.

There's also a slight issue when players swap from an iDevice to PC. It was happening to a friend of mine last night and I see it again just now:


on one leaderboard, then on another:


The #3 PC player in the first screenshot is #6 on the iDevice leaderboard. When they switch from iDevice to PC, their score is mirrored to both. It seems to happen when you spar on one device, switch to a new device, then check the leaderboard on your other device.  

Rating should properly update now.

That second bug should be fixed now as well, any instances of it have likely already been removed due to the hourly scan that validates the board.  

Posted by fp4

Rating should properly update now.

That second bug should be fixed now as well, any instances of it have likely already been removed due to the hourly scan that validates the board.

Nice, thanks, and just one more thing actually (and the hourly scan may already be correcting it): I had someone just tell me that their PC score was actually going up while sparring on an iDevice. This is again a person who uses both different platforms often.

If it helps, the player who had the problem was leader of the guild "Beautiful People". I can get her to replicate it for you if you need that or anything, you can just add me (leader of "Enguard") in-game and PM if needed. Thanks again.  

Posted by Thallen

IMO, you should reevaluate how you define a loss of something. If there are two outcomes: gaining something or gaining nothing, then the latter is a loss. You lost the opportunity to gain something, and you lost a time investment that you put towards it that could have instead been spent towards a gain.

Sounds stretched. Again, im just so bummed by that darn loss of time.

No, you're still misunderstanding. You have to win a lot or win often against very good sparrers, not spar a lot. There's a huge difference. Someone can log on and beat me in 2 spars per day and get 200 points. That might take them 5 minutes. For the average sparrer who is queuing up and only managing to beat 1:1 players, 200 points could take over an hour.

Thats what Im saying. winning a lot means sparring a lot.

I win a spar vs Sarah and get 30pts (less than your 100pt per spar claim, and she has more than you). Then I make 9 more wins on people who are very skilled sparrers, but only gained an average of 4pts each. The only difference is that these people havent sparred much yet, therefore their wins arent worth much even though they are good sparrers.  

Posted by Zetectic

if u wanna encourage noobs to spar, let them hide their loses. im a noob, idc about pts system. all i care about is w-l.

genius  

sparring is the only thing on Graal where you can get a rough idea of how "good" someone is judging by their stats so I don't personally support hiding them (and if it was allowed, it should hide both, not just losses IMO), but I don't care all that much either way  

Posted by Thallen

sparring is the only thing on Graal where you can get a rough idea of how "good" someone is judging by their stats

lolno  

arguing against that makes close to no sense so that's not even a conversation I want to get into, especially if your argument is "no"

good luck convincing anyone that someone who is 30000-5000 isn't a good sparrer and that someone who is 5000-30000 isn't a bad sparrer
if you want to conspire that every sparrer with a high ratio at a high volume "only spars noobs" (an obsessive theory that this community has, for whatever reason) then feel free, you'll just be wrong
and if you want to judge players with a low volume of spars then that's your own fault as well  

Posted by Thallen

arguing against that makes close to no sense so that's not even a conversation I want to get into, especially if your argument is "no"

good luck convincing anyone that someone who is 30000-5000 isn't a good sparrer and that someone who is 5000-30000 isn't a bad sparrer
if you want to conspire that every sparrer with a high ratio at a high volume "only spars noobs" (an obsessive theory that this community has, for whatever reason) then feel free, you'll just be wrong
and if you want to judge players with a low volume of spars then that's your own fault as well

My arguement was "no" only because it's obvious, and yet my arguement
was better than yours.

Someone who just started to spar and went good months later may be a really good sparrer even though his score would be something like 1234-4321. Again, your arguement(s) is/are invalid, and a joke only.

inb4 you post some of your usual crap, lolno.