Richard Garfield blogs about the differences between a ranked ladder and tournaments for competitive play.
Recently I started playing a digital game. There was a tournament announced for the top players. Although I wasn’t a top player – the game was new enough and there was enough luck in the play that I thought maybe I could qualify, and so I started paying attention to my ranking.
Quickly I noticed that I was having less fun because I was no longer experimenting and trying new things – I was focusing on what I knew worked. I began to lean more heavily on what other people said was correct rather than finding my own way. Losses were setbacks rather than learning experiences. When I rose to a level that corresponded to my actual skill, I stalled. Then the games became more samey, with the players mostly playing similar styles. I noticed that I felt like a mediocre player even though I was in the top 10%.
The experience brought into focus and made personal some of the misgivings I have had about extensive player rankings in games. […]
A lot of what he’s saying here matches my own experience playing ranked games on Arena. I made it to Mythic (playing Standard) a few days before the end of December. When I finally broke in, my rank was 92%. That’s a pretty high number, and it’s actually even better than it sounds: I’m not just in the 92nd percentile of all Magic players worldwide, I’m in the 92nd percentile among people who take Magic seriously enough to play ranked matches on Arena.
Surely an accomplishment one could be proud of, right? But the whole time I was getting there, I felt mediocre, because I kept losing about as much as I was winning. I also wasn’t experimenting. I wanted to get to Mythic, so I stuck to decks that I knew were good and that I was experienced with.
As soon as I reached my competitive goal, I switched to playing more offbeat or experimental decks. And honestly, I started having more fun, if only from the change of pace, even though my rating dropped into the 80s. And then something interesting happened: I got more comfortable with those decks, and/or started facing lower-ranked opponents, and my rating climbed back into the 90s.
So I think Richard is right about ladders’ capacity to suppress one’s enjoyment of the game. However – I’m still not sure I would want to play without one. From time to time I play unranked games with decks that I think are fun, but pretty far (even intentionally far) from Tier 1. But I can never put up with it for very long: the caliber of the decks that I face varies too widely. I’ll stomp someone’s precon in one game and then get stomped in turn by a tournament deck in the next. I keep coming back to the ladder because, as unfair as the cards and decks I see there may be, at least both players agree at the start on what power level we’re aiming for. (Having separate lobbies for “unranked play with tournament decks” and “unranked play with casual decks” might sound like a solution, but some players would still join the wrong ones.)
As for tournaments: I’ve been on Arena for two or three years now and I’ve never joined a constructed tournament. The prize structure makes them effectively single-elimination, and I’m not sure I’ve ever won five matches in a row on the ladder, so what would make me think I could do it when there was even more on the line? My gold and gems are much more wisely spent doing drafts so I can build my collection.
But that may not be a refutation of Richard’s point so much as a criticism of Arena’s tournament structure. If Arena had Swiss-style tournaments, with flatter prize structures, I would be more likely to join them.
To me this is a problem w/ ranked ladder games for sure, but it’s also the main reason I don’t play as much anymore. Card acquisition is so expensive for non-drafters that you pretty much cannot brew on Arena unless you pay a lot of money every set.
I still vividly remember crafting 4 mythic WCs for a playset of Body of Research for a bad combo deck. I played the deck 3 times, don’t think I ever won with it, and then never played it again. Those wildcards are $20-30 of in-game currency never gonna get that back. Being able to dust/de-craft those cards would get me back. Still makes me mad when I think about it.
Yea I also have never played a constructed event on Arena, and have never had any desire to at all. I don’t think those tournaments are better than a ladder, and I don’t think asynchronous leagues work. I think the ladder is better than the alternatives, it would just be nice maybe if there was a literal play queue that wasn’t using deck strength and/or mmr. I’d love to see what random brews people are playing with. It would be even better to share decklists mid-game or after the game.