TruthScape.com - Dueling Tournaments - Ranking System, Rewards and Fairness Problems

Obviously players have different levels of game skills, real world skills, equipment and experience, and any tournament system has to take this into account; a World Series consisting of the New York Yankees and a Little League team wouldn’t be too interesting. The “classical” way of addressing this has been to use combat level, but Jagex decided to go a different way by implementing a ranking system. The idea is that your rank increases as you win duels and drops as you lose them, so that in theory, after a while only players of comparable abilities face off against each other.

Like so many aspects of this new minigame, I think this is a great idea, particularly because we all know that combat level doesn’t really mean much in RuneScape anymore. Basing matchups on actual successes and failures makes a lot more sense. Unfortunately, also like so many aspects of dueling tournaments, the implementation is so poor that the ranking system simply does not work.

When you first start dueling, your rank defaults to 1,600 plus your combat level, so if you are level 77, your rank begins at 1,677. It then goes up and down based on how you fight; in general, if you die in the first round your rank goes down by somewhere from 7 to 15 points; if you die in the second round it goes down a little, and if you go beyond the second round it increases more and more with each win.

Having a system that is not entirely based on combat level is smart, but the current ranking system is not based on combat level at all, which isn’t smart either. I am combat level 121 and when I first started dueling, I found myself paired off against players as low as level 40. Does that make any sense? Of course not. Do you think that poor guy would want to keep trying out tournaments? The money he lost might have been a lot for him, too.

Okay, so the answer I frequently hear to this complaint is that in time, the high levels will keep winning and the low levels will lose and so they will naturally sort themselves into the right ranges, with the high levels in the 1,750 to 2,000 and 1,900 to 3,500 tournaments. And this is true to an extent, but not entirely. The problem is that new players join dueling every day, and it only takes one level 115 player to ruin a tournament mostly occupied by players under level 100.

The problems just above are made worse by how easily this poorly-thought-out system can be gamed. Okay, suppose I’m level 115 and I just started dueling; my start rank is 1,715. I play in a rank 2 tournament twice and intentionally lose both in my first round; my rank now drops to 1,692 or something like that. I then wait for a rank 0 to 1,700 duel that I think I can win, enter it and cream all the “newbs”. I win easily, and my rank goes up to, say, 1,731. No problem, I just throw a couple of more matches and repeat.

This is not just theoretical; it is happening already; see Figure 55 for an example. In fact, I was in a rank 2 duel yesterday; there were quite a few players from level 80 to 105 at the start, but none after the third round.

**Figure 55: Throwing a Duel to Drop Rank**
While I was doing some testing I ended up in a match against this level 119 guy. He told me to “kill him” and I asked why? The dialog in the chat box then occurred, with him openly admitting that he was throwing the duel. (Sorry about the ugly name-blocking here, I wasn’t on my own PC when I captured this, and didn’t have proper editing tools.)

If you were going to set up four skill ranges from 0 to 3,500, would you make it so that two of the ranges had a width of 150 and 250 points each, while the other two span 1,600 and 1,700 points? I sure wouldn’t.

The current system means that someone who has lost 100 consecutive duels could face off against a level 100 player who is an experienced dueler. On the other end of the scale, a player who just scraped his way to 1,900 points could get matched up against the number one ranked tournament dueler in all of RuneScape. Once more I am left to wonder: did anyone really think this through?

The rank 4 duels (1,900 to 3,500) are a complete write-off for any RS player who isn’t at least level 120 and very rich. Every tournament is a competition between players with top equipment, using very expensive food and tossing around Ancients like runes were water. Okay, fine, the best should win, but why set up a system where lesser players who succeed are forced into contests they can never win?

You enter a tournament with all combat styles, potions and food. You fight valiantly through many rounds, even beating a few players higher level than you are. In the process you spend not only a 10k stake, but about 75k worth of pots and food items. With some luck and skill, you make it to the final! There you face off against a very good player. You both switch between combat types and exhaust each others’ food. In the end you red-bar him, and he gets off one more shot before you and kills you.

He wins up to 640k, depending on how many people entered. And you win nothing. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario; it happened to me almost exactly like that yesterday.

Oh, but it gets worse. In exchange for finishing in second place, your duel ranking goes up by something like 40 points. This will probably bump you into the next range of rankings, so you face even more difficult opponents next time. In fact, you can end up in Registrar 4 being forced to play against the very best duelers without ever having won a tournament.

Does this make any sense? Can you imagine a golf or tennis tournament where only the guy who finished #1 got any money? Okay, some people will say that they like seeing their rank go up as they can get listed on the high scores, but this is staking—it’s supposed to be about winning money. Especially when you beat 5 or 6 players, and given the cost of some of these contests.