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Is it time to expand the GC tiers?
Squidopus
Member Posts: 1,029 ★★★★★
There’s been a lot of (deserved) discussion about the GC tiering rewards needing to be buffed. That’s certainly true, and Kabam has at least paid lip service to that need. However, while we’re looking at shaking up the rewards, I was wondering if there might be value in making the tiers themselves larger as well, more people can earn placements in the higher tiers and such.
To be truthful, I have no rightly idea how many people make it to the GC every season so I won’t make too many assumptions on that. Regardless, I can’t help but feel that the tiering system as it currently stands is too granular. You know what being the top 9000th player in GC gets you currently? That’s not super high, but you might think it’s respectable enough to earn a decent placement. Nope, that gets you Uru 3, the lowest placement possible. The cutoff for Uru 2 is top 8500. Past that, the tier shifts are very small, with each tiering placement often only having 500-1500 people or even as little as 200 in the higher tiers. The result of this is that, from my experience, the difference between tiering placements is often only a single victory’s worth of points.
To the lazy, that sounds like a good thing, you don’t have to win too many fights before you’re at a comfortable spot. But I feel this is also a major contributing factor to another GC phenomenon: parking. Remember, you lose nearly the same points when you lose a match as you gain when you win, so if winning a single match punts you up a whole tier, then losing a single match punts you down, and that doesn’t feel good at all. I think this is a major factor behind parking; once you get rewards you’re “happy enough” with, you’re encouraged to just stop playing entirely because a string of losses can very quickly knock you down several tiers. Points accumulation means the thresholds for tiers will slowly rise and you might drop a tier or two if you park, but that feels a lot better than sliding down a ton of tiers by your own fault. Now, this may seem like whatever because the rewards between tiers aren’t too different and the rewards themselves are ostensibly not worth it, but if we did get rewards buffed in a substantial way this could become much more prominent. Plus, as I’ve said, losing just feels bad regardless of rewards attached. You can comfort yourself with the fact that losing three matches and being punted down three tiers didn’t actually lose you that much rewards all you want, it still stings when you see that you dropped three whole tiers from what doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Either way, I think a system that encourages players to stop engaging with the game mode is worth addressing.
What’s everyone else’s thoughts? I don’t play much competitive games other than MCOC so I can’t exactly claim some sort of game design knowledge or compare experiences to other games with similar systems. Are tiering systems so “focused” in other games, or is this the norm? Do you all think there’s reason to consider expanding the tiers to accommodate more GC players?
To be truthful, I have no rightly idea how many people make it to the GC every season so I won’t make too many assumptions on that. Regardless, I can’t help but feel that the tiering system as it currently stands is too granular. You know what being the top 9000th player in GC gets you currently? That’s not super high, but you might think it’s respectable enough to earn a decent placement. Nope, that gets you Uru 3, the lowest placement possible. The cutoff for Uru 2 is top 8500. Past that, the tier shifts are very small, with each tiering placement often only having 500-1500 people or even as little as 200 in the higher tiers. The result of this is that, from my experience, the difference between tiering placements is often only a single victory’s worth of points.
To the lazy, that sounds like a good thing, you don’t have to win too many fights before you’re at a comfortable spot. But I feel this is also a major contributing factor to another GC phenomenon: parking. Remember, you lose nearly the same points when you lose a match as you gain when you win, so if winning a single match punts you up a whole tier, then losing a single match punts you down, and that doesn’t feel good at all. I think this is a major factor behind parking; once you get rewards you’re “happy enough” with, you’re encouraged to just stop playing entirely because a string of losses can very quickly knock you down several tiers. Points accumulation means the thresholds for tiers will slowly rise and you might drop a tier or two if you park, but that feels a lot better than sliding down a ton of tiers by your own fault. Now, this may seem like whatever because the rewards between tiers aren’t too different and the rewards themselves are ostensibly not worth it, but if we did get rewards buffed in a substantial way this could become much more prominent. Plus, as I’ve said, losing just feels bad regardless of rewards attached. You can comfort yourself with the fact that losing three matches and being punted down three tiers didn’t actually lose you that much rewards all you want, it still stings when you see that you dropped three whole tiers from what doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Either way, I think a system that encourages players to stop engaging with the game mode is worth addressing.
What’s everyone else’s thoughts? I don’t play much competitive games other than MCOC so I can’t exactly claim some sort of game design knowledge or compare experiences to other games with similar systems. Are tiering systems so “focused” in other games, or is this the norm? Do you all think there’s reason to consider expanding the tiers to accommodate more GC players?
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