Badges for Accomplished Players on Official Smogon Ladders

[X5Dragon]

Hi,

I think there is a need to recognize ladder players for their skill and efforts in maintaining high ranks and quality for the ladders they participate in. Not only will this encourage more quality users in joining already popular tiers seeing how they are gonna get recognized officially by smogon as being accomplished ladder players, it will also encourage great players to try new official tiers as well. Tournaments will still be the highest honors a player can achieve (cups will be cups) so there will be no overlap or taking away prestige from them.

Something representing a mountain peak would be a great idea for a badge icon (we can make different icons for different tiers, double mountain peak for doubles ladder, etc.):

Now to make it a worthy achievement we can request that you must reach 3 peaks in a given official ladder with a certain deviation, or ask the tier leaders to come up with their own standards and methods of proof. The badges get greyed out after every gen and until the player proves himself again.

Anyway this has been an idea I've been thinking about for a while, let me know what you think of it, thanks.

 

[mkizzy]

tiering contributor

and if you're a good player you'll probably end up getting a trophy from tournies anyways

on top of that, some of the top ladderers are not skilled at all and definitely should not be rewarded lol

 

[Stratos]

what are you talking about kenny grey knight topped the ou smogon ladder and it was the greatest accomplishment of his life

 

[X5Dragon]

^LOL

In all seriousness, I don't think all official tiers have the possibility of gaining a tiering contributer (and we all know how much hard it is to get them in the first place #punny). As for getting tournies eventually, I have no doubt dedicated good players will participate in them, but we are talking about a different skill and effort here, laddering and maintaining high ranks, as well as encouraging more participation from quality players on the ladders.

In any case, all opinions are appreciated regarding any of the three options listed.

Edit: Birkal corrected me, all tiers give the tiering contributing badge, my bad.

 

[Mizuhime]

fuck no

 

[PDC]

yeah pretty much every tier at one point or another has had a chance to get tc

are you saying winning a tournament takes less effort that getting #1 on a ladder?

 

[X5Dragon]

Not at all, I clearly said that as a competitive player Tournament wins are the highest honor. However many great players take the time and effort to maintain top 10 ranks and help make the ladder a better place and that I feel personally that some form of reward should be granted based on their activity and efforts. The plus side being you would encourage player activity in between tournament times or even learning new tiers as well.

 

[Nails]

Obtaining #1 on the ladder is not a sign of skill, it's a sign of poor competition on the ladder.

 

[X5Dragon]

Well it seems this thread got me banned on the IRC for some reason, thanks for participating but I think the thread should be closed.

 

[Curtains]

I wonder what caused the disdain of the ladder compared to "shoddy battle" times. I say if people don't see any value in the ladder then smogon shouldn't have an official ladder and should go to having smaller tournaments all day.

 

[Stratos]

I wonder what caused the disdain of the ladder compared to "shoddy battle" times

the fact that there's so many redditors on ps! compared to shoddy; you can hit top 10 without meeting someone who knows what smogon is

 

[Arcticblast]

Basically, people are complaining about the ladder now because it's not 100% Smogon users, and as a result the skill level is lower (there's also the rating system, which is being actively addressed). Now that we have PS (which was made for Smogon) we aren't an elite club, we're the elite members of a much, much larger group. Here is where the concept of "ladder heroes" comes in. They aren't necessarily big on Smogon, but they're good enough that they were able to top the ladder. The fact that two of them have gotten their asses kicked in OU BotW should be showing how good our battlers are. I personally would be mildly afraid if I were to run in to DrCiel or ben gay on the ladder - I'm not an amazing player, despite my time here, and they'd probably destroy me.

If anything, we should be complaining that PS is increasing our ego since we're the best.

 

[tennisace]

There's also the issue that ladder accounts aren't currently linked to Smogon accounts, and no amount of screenshots or "proof" will prove anything in this day and age.

 

[X5Dragon]

Well I think the part about the badges is pretty clear by now, but there are other suggestions such as giving RMTs with peaks a different coloring or category and as such can be filtered out if someone wants to search such teams and as a reward of some sort. Someone mentioned in the IRC a ribbon system although I wasn't there to see how it works. There is of course reforming the ladder by making the matchmaking, especially in the top 100 ranks more strict, throwing regular tournaments between top 12 players and rewarding players who win them over and over, or even making a separate ladder where tournament players get automatic access to and ladder achievers get invited to it.

 

[SOMALIA]

No.

 

[Myzozoa]

i feel like badges are intended to give prestige to users who contributed to the site in some significant way. Laddering by itself does not contribute to the site. The TC badges are easy to acquire through skill at the game alone, combined with a dash of intelligent posting and I think that most users know that if you voted in 4 suspect tests you're reasonably competent at the game, so if you're a compulsive ladder, the way you contribute is by expressing your experienced and knowledgable opinion in a democratic way. There could be an emblem (like the frontier brain emblem) for users with a rmt in the archive, as these teams are significant contributions to the site imo, but laddering by itself is not enough.

 

[kokoloko]

lol why would you create this thread without a "no" option