StarCraft II

Key Features

Leagues: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Masters, and Grand Masters

Numerous 100 player divisions within each league

Insignia reflects if you're in the top 10 of your division

Portrait rewards to reflect achievements

Points gained/lost only revealed after the match

Only league (and if they are in the top 10 of their division) are revealed before a match

A slider shows which team/player is favored

True ranking (the actual numeric ranking or point value) is not disclosed to the player

Benefits

No pre-match judgement. A player or teammate is purely judged based on their skill in game

Players are given a decent amount of information (League, Division Rank) without it being an obsessive amount

Players enjoy having a title/league

Teammates are generally in the same place as you (e.g. same League and either rising/falling in rank)

Disadvantages

You don't know exactly where you are ranked

There's a lot of information to keep track of due to each party and team size having its own ranking

Division ranking carries little weight

Multiple Rankings

DOTA 2

Key Features

As of now, there are only 3 tiers: Low, Mid, and High Skill Level

No one can see any ranking/rating beyond that

Alleged rating system that is not based on Elo or any other system

Stats are also kept pretty hidden, if you click on someone's profile you only see the number of wins (not even the %), that is without digging through their match records

Commendation system that reflects players who were friendly, leaders, teachers, and forgiving (also supposedly included in the match making algorithm), however, a peer must go out of their way to give you a commendation

Ranting is personal and changes with each game (presumably)

Benefits

There is a lot less judgement

System is very simple, you're in one of 3 skill sets

Supposedly get matched with people with similar amounts of commendations (e.g. nice players matched with nice players)

Disadvantages

You have no idea how close you are to getting into the next skill set

Hard to tell where you rank compared to others

Unable to gauge your opponents and figure out who to target (usually you want to keep the best player in check so they don't get out of control)

Having 3 groupings/leagues makes for very wide skill margins between the top and bottom of the league

Nothing to distinguish between your personal performance as a solo player vs your performance in a group/party

Heroes of Newerth (HoN)

Key Features

Each player's rating is on display down to the hundredths digit

Player statistics (e.g. Kills/Deaths/Assists, Average Gold Per Minute, Average Experience per Minute, etc...) are on display upon mousing over their portrait

Player's last 10 games are on display (i.e. Hero chosen, Kills/Deaths/Assists) upon mousing over their portrait

Able to see anyone's rating at any time

Able to see how a particular game will impact your rating

Grouping/forming a party with others changes match making, but does not have its own separate group rating

No leagues, just pure numerical ratings (which has generated leagues to some extent such as 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, etc...)

Groups with vastly different ratings gain less rating points in a match to avoid artificial inflation of skill rating

Benefits

No secrets about your rating, you can see it clearly

More able to gauge teammates' and opponents' skill

Generally matched with people close in skill rating (except when there is a group)

System tries to match a group of x vs. a group of x so that one team doesn't have an advantage

System works against artificial inflation of rating

Disadvantages

Many people use the system to justify their decisions (e.g. "STFU, I'm better than you, we do what I say)

There is a sense of elitism in any setting within the community

Players are judged before the match starts (e.g. the lowest ranking player picks a Carry type hero causes teammates to be angry with them)

People put more weight on stats than the ranking itself (e.g. "you're rated higher than I am, but you have a low Kill/Death ratio, therefore, you suck and I'm the better player")

If a player sees that they won't gain much rating points for a match, they care less about it

Conclusions

Hidden rating

Several leagues to remove some of the mystique and give players a vague label

Hidden statistics (or statistic only available to the player, and not accessible by API or any other system that could leak into websites)

No revelation of how the game affected your rating

Solo rating different than group rating

Provisional rating system to help accurately place players

Commendation system where only people you have played games with can give them to you (i.e. weed out the commendation farmers)

Take commendations into account in match making to avoid putting troll-ish players with nice players

Custom algorithm to fit the game (for instance, DOTA2 & HoN should take preferred role into account to avoid having 4 Carry-type players in a game), given a large enough player base to handle such

Knowing ratings brings out an elitist attitude in a game

Leagues give players some feedback, without giving too much information

Statistics are fun, but they take away from the ultimate objective: to win

Knowing how a game affects your rating will change your attitude on the game ranging from overly stressed to carefree

You play differently with a group of friends vs. with random players. Ratings should be different for each of these scenarios

Provisional ratings are needed to place people where they should go and to help weed out smurfing players

Commendations are a good positive feedback system (whereas people will give negative feedback for even trivial scenarios)

Keeping the nice players around promotes a better community. By not constantly matching them with rude players, they will have a better time.

Algorithms need to be fine tuned to fit the game. Every game plays differently, player compositions and roles change.

Match Making, or Ladder, is an incredibly fun part of competitive games. If you're a competitive person, it's fun to see yourself rise through the ranks. It also keeps the game fresh because you're rarely going to be put in a position where you're not being challenged.There are, however, pitfalls in a Ladder system. If you have teammates, your ranking might not be 100% accurate. Also, each piece of the system revealed changes attitudes toward a particular match up.The implementation can vary drastically from game to game though. In this post, I'm going to look at three games and how they handle it.SC2 has a fairly hidden system that's multi-tiered. On the surface, there are leagues like Bronze, Silver, Gold all the way up through Masters and Grand Masters. This is nice because almost anyone can catch onto the system. If you were to explain your ranking to someone who didn't know the game, they'd have some idea of how good you are.Within each league is a number of 100-player divisions. Without over-complicating the system, players have some idea of how well they're relatively doing at their level, as well as how close they are to ascending.Behind everything else, there's a numeric system which gives each player a "rating" that shifts with each win/loss (observable in match outcomes with a +/- point value).One other nice piece of the SC2 system is that you get a ranking with each party you join. So if a really good player and a mediocre player team up, that particular duo will have a shared ranking in 2v2 play. This is nice because you cannot "carry" another player to a high bracket then, or otherwise skew rankings.Likewise, you have separate 1v1, 2v2, and so on rankings. While a good 1v1 player should be decent at 2v2, they may not be the best. It requires different strategy and therefore should be judged differently.The DOTA 2 system keeps players largely in the dark. As of now, there's one way to find your vague ranking. That is by searching recent games you played in and setting the filter constraint to Low/Mid/High Skill Level.Unlike SC2 and DOTA2, HoN takes the approach of giving a ton of information about your ranking. Similar to Chess, HoN has a numerical rating. New players come in at 1500 and shift based on each games. Early games can have a larger impact on rating because certain events (e.g. having 15 consecutive kills with no deaths) trigger massive rating gains to help reduce smurfing (good players on new or reset accounts and thusly winding up in low-rating games).Players want to see as much information as possible. It lets you see where you are, how your statistics rank up, and what you need to improve on.However, from a game quality perspective it appears as though the less a player knows, the better the game is. No one likes to be judged and told what they should and should not do even before the game starts.Also, statistics are not a tell-all. A player with a high Kill/Death ratio in a game like HoN or DOTA2 might be opportunistic, coming into the fight only to take the kill without contributing, rather than a good player.When more information is shown, people put more weight on that and try to impress others. This detracts from the point of the game. If units taken was a statistic in Chess, people would gravitate towards trying to destroy as many units before winning the match.In my opinion, a good system would take all these things into account and try to accommodate the player, the community, and the system. Therefore, I would suggest:My reasoning is as such: