The Problem

A solid ranking system is required for a healthy, competitive online game. You want same-skill players to be facing each other – you want your newbies playing and your veterans playing veterans.

A good skill system will allow high-skilled players to quickly rise in the ranks and only face like-skilled opponents. You want these good players away from the lower-skilled players as quickly as possible.

The more granular the system you have, the better matched players will be. Having numerous ranks gives players goals to work towards and the more goals the better.

But what happens a couple years after release and your game’s population dwindles? You may still have a small, but dedicated, set of players who can no longer find matches due to your ranking system. What was previously a great feature of your game has become a detriment that will kill your game’s community all the faster.

This unfortunately affects the players at the top ranks the most. These are your most passionate players and they are already in the smallest population pool. They will be punished the most with the longest matchmaking times.

 

A Solution(?)

A system that adjusted the number of searchable tiers separately from actual ranks would be better to offset population reduction. These searchable ranks would  shrink and grow depending on average concurrent users.

In our previous game, we had 4 ranks and 14 sub-ranks. We did matchmaking between ranks, and then allowed to expand to more ranks after a set time. Five minutes per rank, if I recall correctly. This means a high-rank player might have to wait for 15 minutes to search the entire player base for a match.

What would be better is something along the lines of:

• Player population high = Matchmake as 4 ranks
• Player population low = Matchmake as 1 rank

And some couple gray areas in between. This would mean when the game is healthy there are loads of ranks and similar skill matches, but as population dwindles you sacrifice skill-matching for getting games started at all. I think this is a sound trade-off.