After a lot of thinking and a gigantic conversation with another member on the subject, I think I'm much more well-equipped to explain a number of reasons why I really dislike this concept as a whole.
First of all, I don't really understand what we're trying to accomplish here. No matter what, none of this will actually make a difference in terms of who is ranked where, as long as you're looking at the long term and ignore things like alt accounts, or emotionally unstable people who quit the game because of hax. Even if luck were ridiculously dominant in this game, playing enough matches would result in everyone getting the ranking they deserve, eventually.
So right now I'm literally searching for a reason to implement this, and the best I can come up with is "better players will be separated
further from worse players, in terms of their rating numbers." I'm going to say straight up that I think that's a terrible reason to go through the time and effort that it will most definitely take to make this work to any reasonable extent, because the long-term effect this would have on player hierarchy is virtually if not literally nonexistant; okay, player A is now 800 points higher than player B when he used to only be 700 points higher under the previous ranking... what actual, practical difference does this make?
Then again, I'm not even sure if "oh great I'm another 50 points higher than iloveluxray2.0 than I used to be!"
is a possible "benefit" in the first place. I think everyone has established that using player rating to help determine who "wins" is absolutely unacceptable; ok, so if that's no longer going to be a factor, what happens when a good player beats a bad player "with hax?" The assumption up until this point has been that "players with higher ranking have a greater likelihood of winning based on merit," and as far as I can tell that assumption is
necessary for this concept to make any impact, any impact at all, in the long run. The way I see it, we're either looking at giving players an advantage before the match even begins (highly, highly objectionable for obvious reasons), or we're just redistributing victories with no net effect whatsoever, except a ton of wasted time. Someone please explain to me how this is somehow an avoidable scenario, because even if we merely use this formula to throw matches away (as opposed to punishing winners), that doesn't change the fact that we'd be judging the outcomes of certain matches as "invalid" in the face of statistics that would suggest otherwise.
There's also another hurdle to consider. Are we throwing out/reversing
any match with too much hax, or just the ones where the "victim" loses? The latter is problematic because we're rewarding players who miss an attack that they actually benefited from missing, or punishing players who get a critical hit that actually costs them the match. In other words, there will be some edge cases in which this formula will do the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do, and I don't know how we'd go about handling that at all.
If the former (throwing out all "haxy" matches), we are no longer rewarding players for winning in
spite of hax. This is unacceptable because if Player A gets haxed in 100 matches but wins 10 of them, and Player B gets haxed in 100 matches but wins 50 of them, Player B will no longer be recognized as the better player. Again, this is the exact opposite of what our "goal" here seems to be, as it actually makes rankings more ambiguous in the case of two players of similar, but unequal skill. Once again, it's difficult to foresee a scenario in which we won't end up being forced into "accepting" one of these two options; if there's some possible middle ground, I can't imagine it being an easy one to determine.
I'd also like to bring up that all of these issues will probably be somewhat compounded if, in addition to just throwing out matches with "extreme hax," we altered every match's reward in proportion with the "amount of hax." I'm not sure how popular a consideration that is to the supporters of this concept, but all of the same problems would probably only apply in many more instances if we were to take this route.
Finally, I think what Amazing Ampharos said regarding "political implications" is especially important. Obviously I agree with him that blatantly punishing new players for getting lucky would be one of the worst ideas in history, which is probably why some users are suggesting that we only apply the formula to ladder ratings without directly altering the win condition, in effect keeping things "hidden." What I'm more concerned about is the simple nature of a luck-based game like Pokemon, where short-term success/failure is supposed to mean relatively little in the long run. This is a significant part of the appeal of Pokemon to new players: "anyone can win." We all know how untrue that is in reality-- there are players consistent enough to rack up win streaks or reach the leaderboard with multiple accounts, and even tournament results are respectably predictable given that single elimination is the standard-- but the newbie's perception that "anybody can be as good as anybody" is sustained by the fact that even a terrible player can get a few lucky wins with enough persistence. I could directly relate this to another argument regarding "First Person Shooters versus Fighting games," where the FPS genre's huge popularity could very well be directly related to the fact that, because of the team-based nature of competitive play, it is simply more psychologically forgiving to newer players. If you win, you get the glory, and if you lose, it's "because your team sucked," or in the case of Pokemon, "because he froze my Vaporeon." I just feel that it's deeply irresponsible and selfish to try and remove an aspect of the game that might very well be a huge contributor to its overall success, whether or not we happen to be overt when we tell our players "you didn't really win that match." In my opinion, people need to man up and understand that this game's competitiveness is not harmed in any meaningful way by luck factors, or they need to somehow bring forth an argument that suggests otherwise. This completely blind anti-luck mentality has been steadily grating on my nerves and it is becoming increasingly clear to me that a certain portion of this community doesn't really want to be playing "Pokemon" at all, not because they believe it to be legitimately noncompetitive, but because their preferences never should have lead them to this "genre" in the first place. These people probably shouldn't even have anything to do with this community, but are still content to propose gigantic changes to the game itself with, in my opinion, extremely little understanding as to any of their implications. I don't know how harsh, accusatory or close-minded I may seem when I say any of this; these are just my exact feelings on the matter so "there you go," take this paragraph for what you will.
Finally, there's one last thing I feel the need to address because as far as my understanding goes it is quite a bit out of line with everyone else's perception of this concept, though I haven't read every post in the thread so I could be wrong.
Tangerine said:
The purpose of any rating system is to rate the player's skill. The current rating system definitely does not consider this at all - while win is a win, how well you win matters.
I'm not seeing how "how well you win" can be quantified fairly, I'm not seeing how it's necessary given any formula that simply "works over the long term," and I'm not seeing how it's even fair to do something like this in the first place. Starting with that last one, if player A can beat everyone on the leaderboard consistently, but "only barely," but player B absolutely manhandles every player on the leaderboard
except player A, who is the best player? I'd argue Player A without a doubt, unless many of his matches happen to be "lucky wins," which, as stated before, balances out on its own anyway. So assuming that you're not necessarily talking about luck, I still don't see merit to this. Again, you're essentially changing the win condition from what it's always been, "defeat all of your opponent's pokemon," and while the new condition would certainly be more "complex" than the old one, I don't think that'd make this game any better as far as being a determinant of skill (which sort of leads back to my first and second issues). In the end, I view this as a more complicated version of the "should we consider number of remaining pokemon in tournament results?" issue that was brought up a number of months ago, in which a similar conclusion was drawn in the end, but maybe that's not accurate so please elaborate if you think so.
Basically, there is no getting around the fact that this would be enormously difficult to implement from pretty much any angle; I'm even having a hard time seeing it as possible, given that there are a number of significant obstacles that could very well prove insurmountable without at least stepping over a line or two. Most importantly though, I really just can't wrap my head around "why." There is no "best case scenario" that makes me think "it'll all be worth it in the end," and I'm legitimately confused as to why this discussion exists when it all seems so utterly futile to me,
at best. But oh well, maybe I'm missing something huge here; if so, someone please please please fill me in.