Most games today have ranking systems. The purpose is not only for you to measure how good you are, but also to make the game more enjoyable by matching you with players at the same skill level. In Vainglory, the ranking system has 10 skill tiers, each with three sub-tiers (bronze, silver, & gold). The highest skill tier (tier 10) is deemed “Vainglorious.”

I’m the type who loves to optimize the things that matter to me, especially my time. Unfortunately for me, the developers of Vainglory want to keep the mechanics of their ranking system secret. So if I want to know how much time I need to put into the game over the next few months to get to the highest skill tier, no dice. Fortunately, I don’t give up very easily :).





Understanding the “Elo” Rating

In Vainglory, one’s rank is based on a hidden number called the “Elo” rating. It’s actually a rating system invented for chess and now used by many competitive sports and video games. The higher your Elo number, the higher your rank. Each match you win you gain Elo points and each match you lose you lose ELO. The amount you win or lose is based on the average Elo rating of the team you play against relative to your rating. Harder opponents give you more Elo while weaker opponents give you less. This is important because it means that as long as you continue to play teams who are about the same skill tier as you, the number of wins you need to go from one tier to the next remains consistent.

While VG doesn’t reveal your Elo rating or how many wins you need to reach a higher tier, they do show you a progress bar that increases or decreases after every match. So there’s a very simple way to reverse engineer the system. Let me explain.





Analyzing the Progress Bar

This is the ranking progress bar. Every tier looks like this and has Bronze, Silver, and Gold sub-tiers. While we don’t know objectively the point values associated with each tier or the total number of points needed to get to the next, we can measure how far the progress bar moves and divide that distance by the available space. Even though each win or loss moves the progress bar a different distance based on an enemy team’s rating, we assume that on average the matchmaking system will pair you with opponents of the same tier.





Measuring Distances on the Progress Bar

Using Photoshop, a screenshot of the progress bar taken on my iPhone 6s Plus from the first tick until the very end is exactly 580 pixels. To calculate the average movement of a win/loss on the progress bar, I took screenshots after 30 different games played in solo-q.

Across 30 different games played on two different days, the average Elo movement is about 39 pixels out of the 580 pixels in the progress bar. When we divide 580 by 39 we get 14.8. So the number of games I need to win to go from one tier to the next is 15.

This also means the number of wins (on average) needed to go from one sub-tier to the next is 5. Pretty logical isn’t it?

So let’s make this actionable. Say I’m Hotness Silver (Tier 7) and I’m about 20% of the way to the Gold tick. This means I would need 9 wins to get to Simply Amazing Bronze. Then to get to Vainglorious Bronze I would need another 30 wins or 39 wins total. If your win rate is 80% and each game takes you 30 minutes, you will need to play 130 games and play for 65 hours to reach Vainglorious.

The one gotcha is the fact that the consistency comes from having enough opponents at the same skill tier as you. The higher your tier, the less people there are who will be the same or higher tier than you.

So there you have it! Got a question or something I missed? Add it to the comments.

PS. For more on Vainglory Elo rating, check out this great post on BrokenMyth.

PPS. Keldegar tells me that “Elo” is actually the name of the person who came up with the system.