Blog

Ben Drago

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the weekly Organized Play blog. I'm Ben Drago, Director of Organized Play.

Ben Drago poses with Alexstrasza, Queen of the Red Dragonflight

One of the things we’ll do here is give you an inside look at what we’re working on weeks or sometimes months before it’s officially announced, so that means that some things may change a bit before launch, and dates could shift.

Last week we launched the Cryptozoic Tournament Organizer Dashboard. This allows tournament organizers and judges to schedule and manage tournaments. Tournament organizers can use the Cryptozoic Tournament Tracker software to run tournaments, and then upload the results using the TO Dashboard when the event is completed.

One of the best things about getting to “restart” the World of Warcraft TCG is the opportunity to take a hard look at what was done in the past and decide what worked and what we want to improve. One of the core philosophies we wanted to make sure was strongly support in our new system was that players should always want to go play in a sanctioned tournament, and get rewarded for every match they play.  

Honor Points

The original Honor system was launched a few years ago for the World of Warcraft TCG. It was created to track and reward active players without worrying about the pressures of the rating system. Overall we were satisfied with how it was used, but there were a couple issues we’re happy we get a chance to fix.

The biggest problem with Honor was that the honor algorithm was very complex, and players could not easily determine what they would gain from each tournament or the threshold needed to move up to the next level. This complexity was intentional, as the formula did a lot of work to ensure the population of players had a good distribution across the levels. The tradeoff was that it was a “black box”, and that combined with a web page that didn’t do much more than show your current points made it hard to do cool things with Honor.

We’ve re-evaluated the system and decided to move to a much easier to explain Honor Points system. Like the old system, players will still earn points for every tournament they participate in, and they will only gain—and never lose—points.

The core of the system is:

1. Each tournament will have a base point reward of 20 points that all players will earn just for signing up.
2. Each round, a player will earn an additional three points for winning the round, and the losing player will earn one additional point.

So for a four round tournament, a player that goes 3-1 will get:

20 points + (3 wins x 3 points) + (1 loss x 1 point) = 30 points,

and a player that goes 1-3 will get:

 20 + (1 win x 3 points) + (3 losses x 1 point) = 26 points.

Tournament organizers and judges that do not play in the tournament will earn a bonus of 2 points per round, so in this example they would get:

 20 points + (2 points x 4 rounds) = 28 points

This system also lets us do neat things like “This weekend all tournaments generate double Honor!” or “Public events at Darkmoon Faires have a base honor of 40 points”.

Player Rewards

So why should I care about Honor Points? Player Rewards will be one of the many ways we reward play. It will be directly tied to Honor Points, and as a player levels up they will earn access to bigger and better rewards.

In addition to rewards mailed directly to players, some levels will earn players prizes that can be claimed at every high level event they attend that year. At these levels, players will be guaranteed prizes just for showing up at events like the Darkmoon Faire.

We are hoping to announce the complete details on Player Rewards on March 1^st, which is the target date for the launch of the Cryptozoic Player Portal that will let players track their Honor Points, tournament history, and personal details.

Ratings and Rankings

In the past, the World of Warcraft TCG used a modified version of the Elo rating system. Ratings were weighed based on the competitive level of the event, so players would gain or lose more points at a higher level event. This was a “performance rating”, which reflected how well you played at recent tournaments.

The problem with a performance rating is that is doesn’t necessarily reflective a player’s skill level. For example, take the situation where Ben is playing at the World Championship and started off 9-0. During the second draft he is sitting between two players that both switch classes and factions during the draft, so Ben ends up with a particularly bad deck and goes 0-3 in the draft pod. His performance rating will plummet because this is a very high level event, but unless he suffered a head injury that morning his actual skill level is still about the same as it was before the draft.  

These short term swings will often cause players to stop playing once they hit a rating level that will qualify for them for an event It’s no fun to not play so you can “sit on” a rating.

We believe we can do better, so we will be using a “skill ranking” system for the World of Warcraft TCG. This is a Bayesian Ranking formula very similar to the Glicko-2 ranking used by the US Chess Federation and the Microsoft TrueSkill™ system used in many online Xbox 360 games.

The advantage of a Bayesian Ranking system for us is that the ranking becomes more and more accurate as more matches are played. A player with an extensive play history will see fewer large swings as the system builds a more accurate model of their skill level.

Finally, we will also be instituting a minimum number of matches played for a player to be eligible for invites based on both ranking and Honor Points. For the World Championships in 2011, we are probably going to set this minimum at 200 matches played starting on January 1, 2011.

TL;DR

To sum up, the important things to remember are:

1. All matches starting on January 1, 2011 count towards this year’s Honor Points, Player Rewards, and rankings.
2. Every match matters so make sure that your tournaments are getting sanctioned and uploaded. If you have any questions, please contact player@cryptozoic.com for help.

Cheers,

Benhameen