Not sure why you quoted me together with that?

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My concise guide to balancing

What features would said hypothetical system have, assuming no time constraints?

Something simple, like Gameinsky's idea, or...?

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Yes. Very simple. Get X points for winning, lose X points for losing, perhaps weighted in some fashion by match performance (K/D/A, structure damage, etc.). It would not take long to come up with an algorithm at all; the only effort would be in replacing the values on the ingame leaderboards with these values, which would be maybe five business days of programming.

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Match performance is a horrible way to balance rating, look at Overwatch for a prime example of that. Players playing as Mercy would gain much more rating per win because as Mercy is a true support she doesn't *really* do any damage at least while healing so Blizzard would use their healing stats as a way to judge their performance meaning that they'd lose less rating than dps/tank players and gain more than dps/tank.

If I were going to have a system in place given with what I know of nauts' current system and what I'd personally want (in a hypothetical dream situation):

-Straight change in how ratings are done.
This would mean a need for a new system, something like Hearthstone's where if you win a certain amount you go up could work but this would naturally be incredibly beneficial for any kind of stack. For the lack of a better system out there (imho, and from what I know of personally,) I will use Overwatch's 0-5000 rating system as a base and adapt as I go. Overwatch's rating is a split into several different groups with the lowest being Bronze which advances to Silver, Gold and then Platinum (this is where the large majority of players are) before advancing to Diamond, Masters, Grand Masters and Top 500.

Keeping with the Nauts leagues: Top '500' would be League 1, GM would be rank 251 (using current numbers) to around 550-650 most likely. Masters would be 651-1250, Diamond would be 1251-2250, and so on. There would be a pre-season lasting let's say a month, this pre-season would result in a season reset using a changed current system or this new systems leaderboards (the changes will be stated later in this post,) and the goal is for people to play and win as many games as they can for this to act as a placement system. A changed version of our current boards would be more beneficial for this as it keeps you placement in the new system a bit ambiguous but that being said if you're #1 on leaderboards you won't be placed as #1 in the Top '250'. You would have to win a certain amount of games before you're actually counted into the Top '250.' What I mean by this is you may have the rating to place you as #1 but you won't be counted as #1 until you have finished the required amount of wins.

The one month pre-season would only be for the first season to determine your skill, as this game (and system) demands resets happening every 3 months there could potentially be a week of pre-season placements before the next season happens. The obvious issue I can see with this is people not playing during this period due to other things. Could potentially make it as a choice, something like 'Didn't like your last season's ending place? Use this placement period to get higher.' For players not playing in this period it'd just sort out their rating dependent on their last seasons ending rating. Although one week would be quite short, the performance (win%) would be added/subtracted from their last season's results to either give them a higher or lower rating. For this to be fair it'd have to have something like a 20-30 game baseline though that does seem quite demanding.

These new leagues would influence matchmaking, players in Top 250 would be given other Top 250 players to play against, if there are not enough to fill said games then players in the GM/Masters bracket will be pulled into the queue. To expand upon this a little with queuing with friends, they would have to be within a rating bracket to play with, in Diamond and below this would be either non-existent or incredibly lenient. As an idea for Top 250, they'd be able to play with people as low as Masters.

Rating distribution would have to be looked at as well, if you're classified as the 'underdog' meaning a lower average rating (this would not be shown in game) then you gain more rating for the win. I do not believe performance based rewards are healthy for games, while it seems to be healthy with how nauts' statistics are distributed I think it's unfairly biased to characters that can steal kills (likewise this system would encourage kill stealing and even afk'ing due to it.) So perhaps a flat rate of gain would be more advantageous but that could result in leaderboards feeling like a harder-than-it-has-to-be grind. For now I'll say 20-25/win.

-Rating decay is a must.
This is important for people to not hog places, and also to promote play. This system would be put into the placement system also.


-Don't punish players for playing.
What I mean by this is to stop the awful system where after like 150 games you seem to gain way less rating in games. While I do not believe there is evidence for this existing, it is at least noticeable.

Obviously the first issue with a system like this would be 'We don't have enough players' but as I stated earlier this is a hypothetical dream situation where we would have players to sustain this system. For a more realistic version of what we currently have:

-Add rating decay.
-Remove the 150 games rating thing I stated earlier.
-Active resets that happen automatically every three months

Keep in mind this is a personal opinion and it's relatively late so I may have left out crucial details.

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Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, that sounds like a problem with numbers, not with the base concept.

If healing for a healer is worth too much rating compared to damage for damage dealers, that just needs balanced.

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I was using that as an example as a bad implementation. For nauts there is no consistently good way to judge match performance other than *maybe* damage done vs enemy nauts. Everything else can be cheesed and abused to gain as much rating as possible as all of Awesomenauts' in game statistics are like that. It's not like in Overwatch where it's a pure team based shooter where roles are defined, nauts' pub games aren't really team based. Sure you can have a good or bad comp but one single player makes a difference immensely to the outcome of a game whereas in Overwatch while it may be a true that a single good player may swing a game in their teams favour but it doesn't almost guarantee that win as the whole team has to work together. In nauts you can literally have one person frag the entire enemy team and leave his teammates to push which isn't *really* teamwork.

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I don't understand how teamwork is relevant. The whole point of weighting contribution would be to prevent players who are doing nothing/dragging their team down from getting as much for winning, or a player who performed very well despite his team getting less of a hit for losing. The whole mechanic is the antithesis of teamwork.

Abusability, however, is a potential concern. That said, it's not one that can't be balanced. A Voltar who just spams heals all match doesn't get as much consideration as one that's both healing and dealing damage, simple as that.

As for how to measure it, there are many stats the game already records that would be useful in determining contribution. K/D/A (assists already account for CC), structure damage, droid kills, and ally healing, assuming assists don't track that. I don't recall if they do or not.

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I am sorry but where did I quote you along with that..?

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last post of the first page.

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My concise guide to balancing

Leaderboards are and have been the biggest problem in this game for quite awhile.

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Not a

Mafia stats.