The Idea:
Remove Win Rate and Streak Length as categories. Keep them as statistics on the player page.
Add new categories “One and Done Extra Points” and “Streak Extra Points”.
For any given game, you receive extra points as a percentage of whatever points you earned with this game in all other categories.
- Extra points for your first game with a distinct species.
- Extra points for your first game with a distinct background.
- Extra points if you are on a streak, higher percentage for longer streak.
You keep those extra points permanently. No losing extra points, even if you lose points from the other categories again. Someone steals your combo high score: combo high score points gone, extra points remain.
And that’s it. The rest is rambling.
Rambling:
I think this could be an incentive to play many different species and backgrounds, and keep your winrate as high as possible, while going for banners and whatever else at the same time. Just like competitive top players already do. But since playing all categories at the same time is harder than playing one category after another, more points.
This system would not affect players who like to compete in only one category, at least not directly within the ranking of that category (which might still require some other tweaks).
And the extra points should have less negative impact than the current Win Rate category on the overall ranking of, for example, real time speedrunners who want to compete in other categories after their speed runs. Same goes for Best High Score specialists. Since you would burn only your one or two meta combos without many extra points, you could still use all other species and backgrounds to grab tons of extra points, even after a hundred or a thousand world record attempts. No more “sacrifice winrate”.
After exhausting all species and backgrounds (all you find acceptable to play), you could still keep playing what you want, as often as you want, and keep earning points in all regular categories until end of tourney. Just without the extra points. Diminishing returns.
The big question is how high should extra point percentages be? I have no idea. What would you suggest?
Does this hold any water? Does it sound better or worse than the current realease tournament format to you? Any ideas how this could be tweaked to be improved?
I’ll keep (mostly) out of the discussion this time. Either this idea speaks for itself or there’s some fundamental flaw I overlooked, again. I encourage you find it, and I will thank you for it. And who knows, maybe someone else gets inspired by this to come up with better ideas.
Cheers and happy crawling everyone.
Edit: The percentages need not be static. They could be weighed and adjusted on any condition or with any function you can think of. Like maybe your first mummy game provides even more extra points than the other species. Or maybe build diminishing returns right into the percentages.
Edit 2: The definition of streak could be number of distinct species or backgrounds won consecutively, as currently defined for the Streak Length category. Or it could just be consecutive wins. I see cons and pros to both. But what I really like is that while the current Streak Length category discourages risk-taking, the proposed system encourages both streaking and more risk-taking the longer your streak gets. An interesting effect I never expected when I came up with the idea, tbh.