Ranked is live for Wars of Stone, Champions of Stone and Shards of Fate. The older post on how ratings work says there isn't a queue and that I'd rather be honest than promise one. There is one now, so treat this post as the current answer.
Everything you already play is untouched. The lobby browser, custom games, community maps, room codes and every game against the AI stay exactly as they were, and none of them can move your rank.
What you can queue for
- Wars of Stone: 1v1 and 2v2. Pick your faction before you search, or pick Random and the server rolls it.
- Champions of Stone: 1v1 and 3v3, with a blind champion draft after the match is found.
You see your own team's picks, and the enemy's only once the match starts.
- Shards of Fate: Duel, against another person. This is the first time the card game has been playable against anyone but the AI.
You can search several formats of the same game at once. Whichever fills first wins and the others stop.
You need an account with a verified email. When a match is found you get 20 seconds to accept, with a sound and a browser notification if the tab is in the background.
Ranks
Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond, each with three divisions counting down from III to I.
- Your first five matches in a format are placements. Your rank appears after the fifth.
- Reach a new rank and you can't fall out of it for three matches.
- The ten best active Diamond players in each format hold the top rank: Warlord in Wars of Stone, Legend in Champions of Stone, Mythic in Shards of Fate.
Each game has its own emblems, and your best one shows on your profile and beside your name here on the forum. Before you place you get experience chevrons instead, counting games played. Chevrons never go down.
Leaderboards
The ranked leaderboards list the best players in each game and format, and every name links to that player's profile.
They will look empty for a while. Somebody has to be first.
What the rank number actually measures
There's a hidden rating that decides who you play, and a visible rank that follows it. They aren't the same number on purpose.
The obvious choice for the visible one would have been the cautious end of the hidden rating, which is what your profile has shown until now. I simulated a season of 15,000 matches and it turned out to track how much you'd played almost as strongly as how good you were. That's a participation bar wearing a skill badge.
So the visible rank chases a less cautious figure instead. In the same simulation it correlates 0.93 with real skill and 0.13 with games played. Play more and you get a truer rank, not a higher one.
Leaving early
- Quitting a ranked match counts as a loss and gives a short cooldown before you can search again. Do it repeatedly and the cooldown grows.
- If a teammate leaves a team game and you go on to lose, you lose half the usual amount.
- Declining a match you searched for gives a short cooldown too.
Matches are issued and settled by the server, so closing the tab doesn't dodge the result any more.
Some fixes that came with this
Building ranked meant reading a lot of code that decides what your record says, and some of it was wrong.
- Multiplayer matches could desync, and one cause is now fixed. A 25% miss chance for
shooting uphill was rolled separately on every player's machine, so one client saw an arrow
hit and another saw it miss. From there the two games quietly disagreed. Same dice now.
- Draws were recorded as losses. They're recorded as draws now, and they count as a game played with that faction rather than a defeat.
- Champions of Stone results were landing in your Wars of Stone faction record, so your hero's faction was skewing Faction Mastery. They're kept apart now.
- Quitting a multiplayer match recorded nothing at all, so the quitter dodged the loss and the winner's win was never confirmed. It records.
- A team win counted as a loss if you'd already been eliminated when your team won. It counts as a win.
- In a 2v2, one player conceding ended the match for their partner too. Now it eliminates
only the seat that conceded and the game carries on 2v1. That fix is why 2v2 could open.
Custom games have never counted toward your career record and still don't. They now keep their own statistics instead.
Rough edges
The player pool is small, so searches can take a while at quiet times. That's the thing a new ladder can't fake its way around.
Wars of Stone 2v2 runs on three maps rather than the four I planned. The fourth was a river map, and when I measured it the river wasn't mirrored the way the rest of the map was, so one team could end up further from a crossing than the other. Not by much, but a rated match is exactly where "not by much" matters. It's out until the generator can fold a river properly.
Nobody has played a ranked match yet, so the first few days are the real test. If something looks wrong, post it here with roughly when you played and I'll go and look at the match itself.
This is Season 1. There's no end date. I'll reset ranks when there are enough people playing for a reset to mean anything, and I'll say so well before it happens.
Adam