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Hello again!
Today we’re going to talk about Leagues, Spellbreak’s system for ranked play coming in Chapter 2. Like yesterday’s post about Dominion, we’re going to start out by explaining our goals before diving into the details.
League Goals
When designing Leagues, we had four high level goals:
- Competition - Obviously, a ranked system hinges around players being able to compete with one another in fair and exciting matches, but it also extends to being able to brag and show off as well.
- Progression - However, we didn’t want to only appeal to competitive players. Leagues should also give new players a sense of mastery and a way to see that they’re improving over the long term.
- Flexibility - Any system we used should be flexible enough to work for a variety of game modes and with different content. We don’t want to have to constantly rework the system or make lots of special rules for future modes.
- Evergreen - The League system should remain a source of content and play over time for anyone who chooses to engage with it, be they new or veteran players.
How it works
Leagues and Tiers
At the core of the system is the concept of Leagues and Tiers. Each League represents a fairly wide band of player-skill and achievement and is in turn divided up into ten Tiers, going from ten to one. Each Tier requires earning a number of Crowns to advance to the next Tier (more on Crowns below). If a player earns enough Crowns in the top Tier of a League, they’ll be promoted to the bottom Tier of the next League.
For the launch of this feature, we’ll have six Leagues for players to climb: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Legend.
For example, at the time of writing (this may change before launch), it takes 1500 Crowns to go from Bronze 10 to Bronze 9. If a player were in Bronze 1 and they earned 15000 Crowns, they’d be promoted to Silver 10.
Once players reach the Gold league, entering a match costs Crowns as well. These costs scale up in higher Leagues as well. This means that if a player does not earn enough Crowns in a match, they’ll lose Crowns and possibly drop a Tier as well. However, every five Tiers, we’ve introduced a floor that players cannot drop below. If a player manages to fight their way into Platinum 5, they won’t ever drop back to Gold until the next Season when things reset.
So how does a player get Crowns?
Accolades
Each League has a set of Accolades that, if achieved in a match, result in the player earning a number of Crowns. Players can earn numerous Accolades in a single match and they come in a variety of forms but all generally represent “good performance.”
Example Accolades include winning a match, exiling your opponents, doing damage, and so on. Accolades also scale with performance (so doing a lot of damage is worth more than doing just a bit).
It’s important to note that not all Accolades are available in all Leagues. For example, in Dominion, vanquishing Vowguard NPCs awards Crowns in Silver and below, while capturing a zone solo is worth Crowns in Gold and below. Things like winning a match, doing damage, and so on are always worth Crowns, no matter what League a player is in.
Players can see their current Crowns for a match on the map screen.
https://reddit.com/link/mbkylm/video/8yvfhfu3sso61/player
Seasons
The last major point for Leagues are the Seasons. As it stands now, each Chapter has a Season tied to it 1:1 and the Season provides a limited window of time for players to compete and rank up. At the end of the Season, players are rewarded with an exclusive season-specific title and badge, based on how high they’ve climbed. At the start of the next Season, players have their Crowns reset to a lower League and will get to climb again.
(Un)ranked
Players can choose whether they want to play ranked (default) or unranked so if they want to mess around with friends or try out new builds, they can do so without risking their current rank.
In a party, this choice is based on the leader’s current selection so make sure you’re paying attention when grouping up.
Dominion
At launch, Leagues will only be enabled for Dominion. Based on feedback and evaluation, later Seasons may include other game modes as well.
Matchmaking
Finally, Matchmaking in Dominion is based on a player’s current League and the system tries to match up players of similar Leagues. With the launch of Leagues, since all players will be in Bronze, it will likely take some time for things to shake out and for players to reach a comfortable rank of their “real” skill levels.
In terms of a group of players in different Leagues playing on the same team (e.g. one player is in Bronze and another is Diamond), matchmaking factors in all of the players and their ranks to come up with a composite score that can be used to determine how they should be matched against another team.
Matchmaking also attempts to balance teams based on “stacking” such that if there’s a team of 5 players grouped together going in, they’ll be matched against a similarly organized team.
An important note: the ranked and unranked queues feed into the same matchmaking pool. This is to ensure matchmaking times stay reasonable for everyone. There’s some additional logic at play to ensure things are still fair (so you shouldn’t see someone in Diamond playing unranked against a bunch of Bronze players in ranked), but we’re going to keep an eye on it post-launch.
Wrapping Up
One last note: we expect to be iterating on Leagues based on metrics and your feedback. Simulations and models can only go so far and we’ll need long-term player data to help balance it.
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to seeing which of you can rise to be the best of the best! Drop any questions below and we’ll try to answer as best we can.
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