I have a much easier idea than last time, so I figured I'd share it and see what people think. Mastery titles could be based upon peak MTL rating. To determine what rating requirements could be used, I counted the amount of people who reached certain numbers. The five strongest hundreds were reached by the following numbers of people (players are only included in their highest group, so a 1900 player isn't part of 1800):

2200 by 2 players
2100 by 8 players
2000 by 23 players
1900 by 27 players
1800 by 48 players

A number of different ways to use that is imaginable. You could argue that a good Grandmaster requirement would be 2200, but I think a title for just two players is a bit odd. However, I think ten players is fine and higher titles should generally be held by fewer people than lower titles. Before someone points this out again: I ignored the title FIDE Master (FM) because it makes no sense for Warzone. The other titles are based upon chess.

So my first suggestion is the following requirements:

Grandmaster (GM) for 2100
International Master (IM) for 2000
National Master (NM) for 1900
Candidate Master (CM) for 1800

Edit: As I agree that my implementation idea was unrealistic last time, I think we would need to ask Fizzer for that. If someone has a better idea, please share it! :)



Edited 5/22/2021 13:44:34

"Why are mastery titles a good idea?"

The new Warzone updates didn't add relevant content for the strategic community since forever, they were aimed at beginners and the bigger casual player base (which is perfectly understandable). Therefore, I think it would be nice to add something easily implementable for the strategic community which would offer a goal to achieve. Many players have many trophies, but only ten would be Grandmasters on the spot with the system I suggested. So many people would try to become! :)

So this is back.

Why not just do a warzone hall of fame? You could add some requirements, have a group of people who would nominate people each year and then people in the strat community vote on who to add (you could define strat community as like member of clan A-C in CL or 1800+ on MTL).

Benefits over proposed grandmaster idea:

1. Doesn't require Fizzer implementation. I think we all know this is unlikely, he's done some stuff for strat players with clan updates, even if it was admittedly targeted toward introducing people into strat (although imo that's not a bad thing), I don't think this would be high on his radar. Instead HoF would just have like a master thread on the forums with the requirements and inductees.

2. This allows us to take more into consideration than just MTL. While MTL would probably be the most considered factor since it's the most reliable indicator of skill, including things like strong CL performances, seasonal wins, AWP performance, etc would all be a benefit of the HoF.

3. It's, in my opinion, more likely to attract attention and enthusiasm from the community. Instead of just (maybe) leading to MTL participation, HoF encourages participating in more of the strategic events like mentioned above. This would make it seem more accessible to people, and would probably be an attractive event to newcomers who see it as a reason to participate in more events.

4. This could also allow us to recognize HoF community members. Imagine having a HoF with two categories - strat and community. This would allow us to recognize people like Ekstone who keep key events running and help build the community.

Potential drawbacks compared to grandmaster idea
1. It might not be elitist enough for some people. Admittedly "grandmaster" referencing chess is more elitist than "Hall of Fame" referencing sports and music, so for those who just want an elitist circle jerk, this might fall a bit short. Seeing as it'd be highly selective, it should still suffice for these people, though.

2. It's more work. We'd need a committee of active and high skilled player to come up with nominations and then would need voting, however this committee would only need to meet like once a year, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

3. It's more subjective. I see this as a positive, because, as I mentioned above, it allows us to consider factors like CL performances and longevity instead of just one good stretch on the MTL. However this could lead to worse decisions.

Standards for entry to please the elitists
To keep the HoF selective and make sure it's accurate, you could mandate standards for entry.
Possible standards include:
- At least 1 trophy
- Minimum rating on ladders
- At least one of the following: certain AWP ranking, certain CL performance, 3+ trophies
- At least 3 years of activity

Standards would be different for the community member category - that would be more subjective but would probably have fewer members. That could look like:
- At least 3 years of activity
- Significant benefit to the strategic community that could/would not be replicated by most strat members.

I think this would ideally include people who consistently organize large events, like Ekstone, consistently design good, strategic maps, like Lionheart, or add things in other ways such as very helpful userscripts, like Muli.

Entrance
At a set time every year a chosen committee of like 7 players would nominate people they think meet the requirements. Members of strat community could vote yes or no on each member - every nominee who met a certain percentage of yes votes would be accepted.

Edited 5/22/2021 14:23:08

Very good idea, Checkmate! But how is it comparable to mine? We already have the Warzoners of the Year event with many categories. Neither is this something people are particularly trying to achieve, nor is there a guarantee that you will win it if you pass a certain bar (a Hall of Fame seems to have the same issues, at least I don't see why it wouldn't). It's certainly nice, but something completely different.

In my subjective impression, facing a Grandmaster of Warzone would infuse much more respect than someone who wrote in his bio that he won a subjective "Best player" award in a certain year. Another aspect is that this would be one person a year (or a couple). That's a very long time horizon you have to wait for.

Edited 5/22/2021 14:33:27

I don't think it's that different from yours.

First, compared to this, the warzone awards are:
1. Yearly, not forever. Hall of Fame you get in once, you're in. If you get nominated but don't get in one year, you could get nominated again the next.
2. Targeted to a larger community than this. Warzone awards have categories like best new player, best map, etc. It's much broader and focused on the community as a whole. This would be based solely on strat skill OR contributions to the strat community.
3. Much more subjective. It's decided solely but a group of around 5 people, nominations happen by the community as a whole, and more nominations = greater chance of getting in. This means that larger clans have more award winners because they have more nominees and more voters. However, in the HoF the nominees would be done solely by the committee, meaning even clans that have a thousand people to vote would still have to have players who are good enough to get nominated in the first place. It also has thresholds that must be met that make it less subjective.

Now the reason I think it's comparable to yours is that both are trying to achieve a way to recognize the top tier of warzoners for the rest of their time playing. I think a better way to recognize players would be through a Hall of Fame system instead of a grandmaster system, although like I said it does have drawbacks. You could, of course, do both, it'd just be a little redundant.

Here's my rather simple strategic Hall of Fame proposal:

Vote per gold trophy, excluding mapmaking & beta trophies. RTL, 3v3 trophies are worth 0.5; 2v2 worth 0.75. 1v1 is worth 1. Seasonal starts at 1 but each Seasonal win counts for 3/4 as much as the last one, so 2 = 1.75, 3 = 2.3125, and you converge to 4. MTL gold trophies are worth 3 votes. We can add votes later on for P/R league wins, CL performances, etc., But I think starting with gold trophies makes sense.

Hall of Fame voting and nominations are always happening (just like Uservoice). Anyone with a vote can nominate. The voting is simply approval voting, where to get into the Hall of Fame, a nominee's upvotes-downvotes have to be greater than 70% of the active votes in the pool (and above a constant threshold, for when the adoption rate is small). Following from this, if their downvotes are more than 15% of the total active voting power, their nomination gets shelved as it can't reach 70%. Renomination of the same player has a 3 month cooldown, because 3 months is forever on this site, and the renomination has to come from a new nominator.

Your voting power is per-nominee, so if you have 10 votes, you can +10 to two nominees, or +7 one and -3 another, etc.

Basically, Hall of Fame membership in this world would be based on recognition from elite strategic players. I think this makes sense, because Rufus' and AI's and mod's and Deadman's opinion on who belongs in the Hall of Fame should have far more weight than most others'. The criteria will be fluid and more authoritative, since if elite players say someone is really good but they haven't met some hard criteria on the MTL, they're still probably really good. And it should be an actual achievement to be in the WZHoF. The only shoe-ins should be Deadman, mod, Rufus, AI, etc.

As for the non-strategic stuff (mapmaking, diplomacy), I don't think we need to care about them. Let those communities build or suggest their own mechanisms- we're out of touch with them ourselves and it would be foolish for us to try and build this system for them instead of waiting and listening to their ideas.

Edited 5/22/2021 15:52:45

Regarding alex's initial suggestion, having this tied to peak MTL rating seems somewhat problematic, since ratings at the top are correlated with the number of people on the ladder. It is easier to get a rating over 2000 now than it was a year or two ago. I don't know how much that matters, but it is worth mentioning.

Regarding the Hall of Fame, I think that would be a nice thing for someone to organize. We'd have to think carefully about who votes, how, and how often. However, there are two rather distinct phases of populating a new Hall of Fame and we'd also have to be careful about how to handle that. By this I mean that initially, we would want to be able to quickly induct many people who have been Hall of Fame worthy over the past 10+ years. Once we've caught up to the present, you want the rate of induction to slow dramatically, since people should now be considered based on whether their candidacy has improved in the span between two induction cycles such that they now merit induction. If you have a process whereby a certain roughly constant number get inducted every cycle, either that number will be too low, and it will take too long to induct all the historically deserving people, or it will be too high, and we will quickly run out of deserving candidates and the Hall of Fame will become watered down.

As for the non-strategic stuff (mapmaking, diplomacy), I don't think we need to care about them. Let those communities build or suggest their own mechanisms- we're out of touch with them ourselves and it would be foolish for us to try and build this system for them instead of waiting and listening to their ideas.

I both agree and disagree with this. If you're saying we shouldn't have the strategic community manage a Hall of Fame for the best map-makers, and should instead let the map-makers handle this, I agree. However, if this is framed (as I believe Checkmqte intended) as the strategic community managing a wing of the Hall of Fame in which they induct the map-makers who have had the greatest positive impact on the strategic community, I think that's perfectly reasonable. There might be considerable overlap between the people the map-makers would choose and the people the strategic community would choose, but I do think there are distinct criteria for those different honors. Someone like Ranek (https://www.warzone.com/MapsByCreator?p=44380) has made beautiful maps and deserves to be honored for that (which he obviously has been with his Beautiful Map trophy), but his maps have had no impact on the strategic community. On the other side you have someone like Troll (https://www.warzone.com/MapsByCreator?p=4562) who has made only three maps which might not be the most aesthetically pleasing, but one of them is the second or third most significant map in the strategic history of this game (depending on whether you think of ME and MME as distinct maps).

Generally the idea of titles is appealing to me (no bias), it would certainly encourage more people to play to get them and also be quite a nice permanent achievement of course. On the other hand, I can see Check's point of reinforcing elitist thinking.
If it were to be implemented, I like alex idea, mainly because it should be very simply. Mtl is good for that, because it's the only thing that's both easily measurable and focuses on a variety of templates. The specific ratings of course can be discussed and should be adjusted over time, for the reason that Beren brings up.

A community managed hall of fame isn't a great idea imo because firstly it's gonna be rather subjective and also non-transparent and secondly the people who would be willing to be in the committee are not the people who should be in the committee.

+1 :)

Not saying I support this idea, but I couldn't help thinking that if you want a title for 2200, why not use super GM

+1, would be quite epic to get a title grandmaster :P I agree Beep is a super GM, Rufus too

So is the idea people would just write this in their bios? If so I don't see much different than just linking my MTL profile (which I do anyways so I can find the link easily). Also you could run into a problem that people claim a title without having met the requirements.

Putting that aside. I agree generally with the rating benchmarks. They "feel" right in terms of how good I think players are for the most part. Although, trickier to implement, I think there should be some sustainability requirement much like the MTL trophy itself. Especially at the lower elo marks a player who can sustain 10 games at 1900 is a much better than a player who can have a hot run upto 1900.

@Phobos

That was my idea in the last thread, but people legitimately argued that anyone could write that. This time, I suggest an easy introduction by Fizzer. Either as an achievement (like the MTL trophy) or, ideally, in bold letters in front of your name.

If going with the bold letters idea (which I think is way cooler than another trophy that most players won't see anyway), I think there need to be hard requirements to get a title. Letting the community decide seems like a bad idea.

+1

What do you think about this concept, Phobos? :)