Deep Dive: Arena (Ranked)

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Wondering what this is all about? Read the introduction here first.

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Overview & Design Goals

Arena is a series of live tournaments with prize pools consisting of ‘coins’ which are collected as entry fees. Winning more coins will permit entry into higher stakes events and progress the player through a series of ranks within the mysterious ‘Arena Society’ – ultimately culminating in access to highly exclusive events at the end of the season.

The primary design goal for Arena is to provide a Ranked experience which is less frustrating, less grindy, and provides much more memorable moments for players. Rather than providing an endless climb where the player throws themselves against the wall repeatedly to gain MMR, we utilize tournament formats of varying stakes & skill levels to create much bigger emotional highs for all types of players.

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How It Works

Each season, players start with 10,000 Coins which can be used as entry fees for various tournaments. Every week throughout the season, players are provided 10,000 additional Coins to help restart if they’ve fallen to zero.

Tournaments vary greatly in game mode, player count, and format, but will typically be designed to feature a large amount of players or teams competing across two to three hours of play. Each tournament has an associated entry fee requirement which is added to the prize pool for that event. At the conclusion of the event, players earn Coins from the prize pool based on their final placement.

By selecting which events to participate in, players are able to set their own stakes, with higher stakes events will tending to be much more difficult but the rewards that much greater.

There are two primary types of events:

‘Rolling’ tournaments provide an always-on way to compete.  These will either launch after reaching a designated amount of entries (e.g. after reaching 100 players, the tournament begins and the next tournaments starts collecting entries); or after a certain registration period (e.g. every 30 minutes, a new tournament begins containing all registered players).

‘Featured’ tournaments are scheduled around peak hours and include additional bonuses which are added to the prize pool.  Additional rewards may include free entries to high stakes tournaments, player card cosmetics & titles, or even physical goods like posters, trophies, or clothing.

To progress through the ranks of the Arena Society, players will enter tournaments and earn coins to complete goals for promotion to the next competition Grade (C > B > A > S > etc.).  Promoting to the next grade will might require earning a total amount of coins, claiming a big prize pool, or placing well in a Grade-Restricted ‘Promotion’ tournament. 

Certain events may come with restrictions which prohibit some players from entering them. Low rank players can find easier tournaments which are only open to their grade, while high grade players may gain access to qualifier tournaments into feed into special Pro Leagues.

At the end of the Season, players receive Rewards & Player Card Titles based on their final competition Grade and leaderboard positions.  For the next season, all players are reset back to 10,000 Coins. Some players may be adjusted to a lower Grade based on their season performance.  

Each season is kept fresh with new tournaments, new formats, additional game modes, and of course new rewards.  In-game tournament posters are created by artists from the community every season, providing a fresh coat of paint to your favorite events as well.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHT
BEAT THE ALGORITHM

Participating in a tournament with hundreds or thousands of opponents can be a bit daunting – after all, only one player can win in the end. To provide goals within this large tournament field, each player is given a predicted final placement for that tournament. If they manage to beat that prediction, they’ll get to spin a Prize Wheel which may refund their entry fee, provide bonus coins, or even grant free entry into a high stakes event.

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Design Corner

‘Grinding Ranked’ aka “Why is playing Ranked so f@$ing infuriating?”

I’m about as competitive of a person as most would meet in their lifetime. I’ve played games professionally across a dozen or so titles, I’ve helped run leagues and tournaments since I was 12 years old, I’ve gifted friends with giant letter L‘s after winning our fantasy football league, and I once received a noise complaint from our office neighbors while working at Epic Games because our team got a little too rowdy during our Little Tykes Hot Hoops championship match (which I won).

All of that said, I’ve always had an intense hatred for Ranked Mode.

This shouldn’t be the case, of course. It’s often the only space a developer carves out and says “This is for you, overly competitive crowd!”, catering decisions to that audience in a little siloed paradise away from the rest of the normal, well-adjusted players.

The root of the issue with Ranked is that it’s a mental grindstone designed to test your fortitude to the extreme, and the emotional payoff for success is immensely unsatisfying. It represents a hardcore training regiment more than it serves as a game experience meant to be fun.

Let’s consider a typical Ranked session – you’ve got 3 hours to play.

You complete six matches, it goes: Win, Win, Loss, Win, Loss, Loss.

From an emotional perspective, there were some minor highs (winning) and some minor lows (losing). But we’re impacted more emotionally from negative stimuluses than positive – especially when strung together in the form of a streak, or ending the night on a loss.*

* Yeah, I know – I’m not citing a scientific study here. But anyone who has played knows this to be the case. Our wins are expected because we’re the best, and our losses are infuriating because someone else is to blame.

From a progression perspective, this player has ended the night as precisely where they started.

They performed exactly as well as the system is designed for them to perform (50% Winrate), and still they’ve had more negative emotions than positive. And they have made zero ‘progress’ towards any goal – in fact, they never really had a meaningful accomplishment at stake, just a tiny percentage towards their next Rank.

This represents an average, typical night of Ranked play! With just a little bit of bad luck it could have been 2 Wins, 4 Losses and now we’re really questioning why we do this.

With that said – it’s no wonder that Ranked Mode & ‘competitive players’ get such a bad rap as angry gamers who take the game too seriously: The only ones who survive this grindstone are Sisyphusean masochists pursuing an impossible goal of pushing that boulder up the mountain of frustration towards Challenger, where they believe there may be an end to their eternal torment.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Players clamor for ‘Ranked’ because that’s all that most of them have ever seen, but they just simply desire new goals to strive for with their hundreds of hours of play. There’s no reason that competition can’t be made fun at all skill levels.

Competitive design should to borrow more from youth sports, recreational leagues, the beer league at your local bowling alley, online poker tournaments, the NBA Playoffs, or even the improvised Cornhole tournament you throw together at your family reunion. These manufacture heightened moments of emotional stakes, elevating the importance of certain plays or matches to provide something that’s memorable and addictive. They are crafting narrative arcs which allow for players to become heroes, if just for a moment.

Swiss Style Tournament Matchmaking

While working on Fortnite Battle Royale’s tournament system, I was heavily inspired by the Swiss formats which were used by Lichess (www.lichess.org) and ladder formats which were used by early esports leagues (shoutout to the Cyberathelete Amateur League, circa 2005).  In both systems, you’d be matched with players who were of a similar ranking to you on the ladder.  Lichess was particularly cool because it does that in real time, for any amount of players.

This form of matchmaking is best done by waiting for a chunk of players to queue, gathering them all together, then creating the best matches possible based on their current score in the tournament.  As long as the scoring format doesn’t allow for players to leap-frog past the top of the standings from deep in the ladder, it’s a nice way to give all players more enjoyable matches while still presenting a fair tournament where everyone starts from zero.  This approach scales to events of any size, doesn’t eliminate players, and the high intensity matches at the top of the ladder as the event comes to a close are precisely the emotional highs which you’re looking for with any tournament format.

Many games which have endeavored to add tournaments to their game client make a mistake of mirroring high profile esports event formats, especially Single/Double Elimination brackets.  But when designing for recreational competition, I feel there’s a lot more value in choosing formats which map well to online play – let players churn through lots of matches, give the event an emotional arc, provide opportunities for drama and comebacks, and embrace the spectacle of massive events featuring thousands of players/teams.  And especially don’t require players wait for 30 minutes for another match to finish because it’s a Best of Three tournament and your opponent’s match-up went to Game 3. That’s the type of thing that turns a cool feature into a graveyard.

Celebrating Accomplishment (Coins) vs Measuring Skill (MMR)

Arena’s Coins are what systems designers might call a ‘Ranked Currency’, and in this design they are effectively replacing Matchmaking Rating (MMR) in the sense that they are the main goal of the player. But unlike MMR, Coins aren’t really intended to be an accurate measure of skill.

While a player having won a ton of Coins means they’re almost certainly skilled, it’s really a measure of accomplishment. This enables a skill-based progression system that is centered around the fun of winning mountains worth of Coins from a single, intense tournament rather than watching your skill rating go up and down slowly over a long period of time.

Some players who have spent thousands of hours in traditional Ranked Modes might question this approach, asking ‘What is the point of Ranked, if you aren’t working towards an accurate representation of your skill?’.

Unfortunately, algorithmic approaches like Elo/MMR/etc which accurately measure player skill are really, really awful at making players want to keep playing the mode. Player skill is not something which grows very quickly (if it grows at all!), and oftentimes those skill formulas can be extremely mystifying to players. Hell, sometimes the algorithm is correct in reducing your skill rating despite having won the match simply because you didn’t win even harder. Having straight MMR/Elo be the goal of a Ranked system is a recipe for player frustration and lots of confused, angry posts on social media.

Instead, game designers want to be able to reinforce our player actions: ‘You did good, here’s a reward!’ is the very foundation of game design. Connecting your ‘MMR’ directly to your ‘Rank’ prevents this from happening – it’s just a measure of your skill, nothing more.

Many games solve this problem by separating ‘Rank Value’ from ‘MMR’. ‘Rank Value’ is a number which can be used to allow the player to progress as quickly as the developer desires. This allows developers to dial in the ‘You did good, here’s a reward!’ feedback loop to keep the player engaged and climbing the ranks even as their actual skill rating improves much, much more slowly. Great, now we’re cooking.

However, in order to accomplish this feedback loop without weak players being forced into endless losses, most systems will lie to the player and say ‘This Rank Value represents how good you are at the game.’ even though the more accurate, hidden MMR is what it actually uses to match you against other players. All Platinum ranked players are not created equal – it’s not a measure of skill, but a measure of progress much like an experience bar.

Over time this causes all sorts of issues where the Rank itself becomes pretty meaningless. Developers often address this by making the highest Ranks work with a different set of rules, more closely aligning the Rank Value with the Hidden MMR for a Diamond/Challenger/Masters ranking. This tends to become especially evident during low population hours, highly ranked players are getting matched with lower ranked players (and often require additional matchmaking rules to prevent exploiting this). Then we add on the possibility for advantages inherent in playing in a party with friends vs playing solo, or by playing specific roles. This boat is springing a lot of leaks.

The studio updates the numbers behinds the scenes every few months, releases a new matchmaking blog, players complain about certain situations, and the cycle begins again. Repeat as the boat collects more and more patched holes in an attempt to sufficiently serve all audiences.

The end result of all of this is a jumble of systems, complex matchmaking rules that one developer sorta, maybe understands in entirety, multiple representations of ‘skill‘ with varying meanings, and a player base which has lost the sense of skill-based achievement which ‘Ranked’ originally set out to achieve.

The truth is that all of this is entirely reasonable game development.

If a game simply showed MMR and used the best algorithms to measure it (in accordance with predicting who wins the match), players would grow frustrated. Improving enough to go from Gold to Platinum might take 6 months for a dedicated player. They’d go many months without seeing their MMR move at all, or watching it go down despite their best efforts. They’d quit the mode, population would drop, matchmaking would suffer, and then progression would get even more difficult as all that remains are the best players and our Sisyphusean grinders.

It’s all reasonable, but the heavily patched boat and its drenched crew are indications that we’ve reached the endgame of this approach to Ranked design. It’s not working.

Arena represents a way to reset the problem entirely. Rather than focusing on being an accurate measure of your skill, it aims to celebrate your accomplishments. Beating a personal best placement in a recurring tournament, competing in a field with thousands of other players, managing to place top 10% in a high stakes event, earning more Coins than your Rivals for the week, beating your predicted finish from the skill algorithm.

These are simply more fun. They’re moments you can share with your friends. They can get you excited for upcoming events. They can make a single night of play memorable in a way that several Ranked matches could never.

As developers it’s easy to get lost in the idea that ‘losing feels bad, how can we fix that?‘ and forget that it’s the emotional highs which make all the efforts at self improvement worth it. Competition is great because of those narratives it allows us to craft, and the stories we tell our friends decades later, those brief glimpses where we pull off something we didn’t think possible and feel like a hero. Even if that simply means having become the best Little Tykes Hot Hoops player in your very grown up office.

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