This Wednesday, December 10th, will be the end of the current ranked ladder season in Scrolls. This time, we’re doing it a little differently. Read on to find out how.

Ladder reset incoming

With another ladder season ending comes another ladder reset. In the previous ladder resets, we’ve pushed everyone back to a fresh start. This is fun, but we worry about the experience for new players in this case. If everyone is reset to a fresh start, then the #1 player on the ladder from the previous season could reasonably be expected to play a brand new player at the beginning of the next. We want to avoid that, so we will be doing it a little differently from now on.

The simplest way to explain it would be to call it “accelerated rating decay.” Your current rating will be gravitated back toward the baseline. Everyone will lose their rank medal, and have to play a few matches to earn it back. When you earn it back, you’ll see your new rating and rank medal. Once you see your rank medal, you will know you have completed “placing” yourself on the new ladder.

In this way we hope to provide players a renewed sense of competition, while not grouping more experienced players with newer ones on the ranked ladder.

In addition to this change, we’ve previously awarded the Top 10 players for the season these special Avatar heads seen at the top of this post. We want more players to have a chance to earn these in the future – so we are extending the reward to the current Top 25 players at the time of the season ending. Hmm, let me clear my throat.

The top 25 players on the ladder at exactly 9pm GMT (or 10pm CET) on Wednesday, December 10th will be awarded the ladder season heads!

We believe this will encourage more competition for these prizes. After release we plan to bring in new season heads and retire these, so think of these as the “beta” season heads. We realize this announcement is in short notice, but we plan on announcing post-release ladder season ending dates much further in advance.

Aaaand…. go!

-Gary (@Atmaz)