"The problem with GBL and its reward structure"

#PokemonGO: Pokemon Go PVP is structured around a ranked ladder, in which every player has a rating and are matched with similarly rated players. At the end of a set of five matches, depending on whether the player achieved a winning or losing record out of 5, their rating moves up or down between 10 and 20 points.A run up to rank 7 with nearly all wins results in a ranking of around 2200, so you have to play a lot of GBL to reach 3000 rating and get the pose and outfit for your seasonal reward. Only about 1000 players out of the millions who play GO completed the grind to rank 10 in season 2.Pokemon Go is also structured around the five-round set, with increasing rewards for the number of matches you win out of five games.The purpose of a ranking based matchmaking system is to place players in matches against similarly-skilled opponents. The result should be a win/loss ratio of around 50 percent for all players, regardless of skill level. That feels really bad when the reward structure is designed around giving you the most stuff for winning five games in a row.It also feels really bad to be the players who carries other people to victory in raids when they are using underleveled and suboptimal Pokemon, only to be faced with perfect, optimized teams in every single one of your matches.The solution to this has been people intentionally losing to tank their rankings so they can get matched against scrubs and dunk on them. This isn't much fun for either the players tanking to optimize their reward acquisition or the players getting dunked on, and incentives to behave like this are unhealthy for a game. There are several possible solutions:​Keep ranking based matchmaking, but get rid of the progressive rewards for each 5-round entry and just reward people according to their ranking - In League of Legends, everyone who hits Gold, about the top 5% of ranked players, gets the end-of-season reward, which is typically a special skin. This would likely require shifting some of the rewards from the five game set to the end-of-season drop, with the primary reward for an individual session being progress on your ranking. This would end ranking tanking, because there would be no incentive to do it, and it would help players feel suitably rewarded for playing at a high level.Keep the 5-round system, but get rid of rankings and have totally random matchmaking. The limit on daily entries, combined with the relatively small number of players who have extremely powerful Pokemon should keep lower-end players from running into fully-optimized players constantly. A system that rewards getting 5 wins in a row should consistently reward players who can usually beat most other players, and random matchmaking facilitates that. No ratings mean no rating tanking.Something different. Hearthstone Arena lets you draft a deck of cards and then play against another player. The first match is totally random against other players who, so far, have zero wins. When you win a match, you get matched with a player who also has a win, when you win two, you get matched with another two-win player, and the set ends when you get 3 losses or 12 wins (very rare). This makes a lot of sense for Pokemon, because it feels like the journey from the starter town to the championship. It also gives good players a balanced opportunity to feel powerful in matches against less advanced players while also giving them high-stakes matches against tough opponents later on. The poses and outfits could be rewards for hitting the maximum number of wins, or for reaching a high number of wins in the season.Whatever they do, it needs to be something. The current system gates top rewards behind a grind that isn't fun, and the result has been widespread abuse of exploits, ranking/reward manipulation and low levels of engagement with the feature even when it is completely free and unlocked. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/30XkAGW