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I like the idea with hours played.

When auto-balance is turned on, commanders feel that they have an advantage with a team with more numerous but less experienced players (at least Ozzy has complained when he was continuously down a few players in an auto-balanced game). So in their opinion, newbies are underranked. There has also been a proposal to make newbies always count as (5) when it comes to auto-balancing purposes. That also indicates that newbies are underranked.

If I understand you correctly, you want to limit players' helo. You want them to have lower ranks. This would mean that they would be even more underranked. Why?

I assume that you want to improve the ranking system by making it more accurate. I think it's easier to do that by adjusting how quickly pilots promote from different ranks (ie. adjust how many points there are between Novice 6 and Novice 7). Then again, the best solution is probably to move from the home-brewn HELO to the True-skill implementation.

Or do you just feel that newbies should have newbie-tags longer (maybe have newbie numbers up to (12), like it was in the Good Old Days) ? That's probably as easy as changing one line of code somewhere in ASGS. Then again, with R4, pilot ranks will be displayed in-game, making newbie tags a bit redundant.

Seperate issues really.

First the part about the subject at hand...

Newbies are not under-ranked... that's certain.

Returning vets that came back from post-AllegAge change in ranks will always have the issue of showing as newbies, not much management can/will do about that. At least with this system the returning vet can jump up in the rankings quicker to their normal level and more accurately as they are only limited by their AllegAge, which is likely to be higher anyway.

As for why I want the system, several reasons already mentioned, but can be sumed up by saying I'm sick of hearing nov6(6) say "what's a nan?" or inter7 (14) say "I didn't know we could build FOUR miners"... The system currently has one huge issue, playing the game for a short period of time (days) gets you into inter rank and gives others the impression that you know how to at least probe and nan, and it just gets more and more distorted as time goes on.










And then this is unrelated and can be skipped since it's not about the thread really...


This has nothing to do with the helo points and ranking other then to have a maximum achievable based on time, and that certainly makes more sense. The idea of making newbies count as (5) for the purpose of calculating a games balance was I think TE's originally, the idea was that a (0) is better then nothing... it was meant to actually work with autobalance which when on could mean a side could have 100 (0)'s and one vet comm that could easily beat a any 10 player team (the shotgun effect)... I had thought that calculating them as (1)'s for autobalance would be good, but have since changed my mine long ago, I feel that for autobalance count the (0) as a (0), simply make sure that player imbalance can't get off by more then 10% (<15 players imbal=1 effectively, 16-24 imbal=2 effecitvely, and so on).

As for the newbie numbers (0)-(4), I agree, in r4 with the rank shown in the lobby and in f6 that it's mostly redundant, though not completely (it saves the hassle in game of figuring our if the clueless newbie is piloting the bbr or something else... I'm still in favour of the (#)'s displayed as is, or, even to show (0)-(7). I don't have any major needs in that area though.

Limit the top Alleg Age rank to Five years IRL. (or some other appropriate time period)

At least it allows some chance of people getting to the top.

Having Alleg Age increase as the age of Allegiance does means that people who join now will have no chance of getting anywhere near the top ... ever.

Caddy, this change isn't going to affect very many people on the high end, for it to do so those people would have to have very high skill in the game in the first place and as can bee seen the very top level, let's say Expert level, isn't a huge club. Also, while it may seem that your suggestion would make it easier for people to have the option of reaching that level, it won't as 5 years is pretty restrictive... many people should have the helo to get to rank (20) in less than 5 years- if they can, to get to AllegAge 20 is only 1-3 years.

/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

[quote=""JGBaxter""]Returning vets that came back from post-AllegAge change in ranks will always have the issue of showing as newbies, not much management can/will do about that. At least with this system the returning vet can jump up in the rankings quicker to their normal level and more accurately as they are only limited by their AllegAge, which is likely to be higher anyway.[/quote]

You're saying that by introducing something which slows down advancement will help them jump up in ranks quicker? WTF?

Returning vets(the kind who use their old account) would have their old age(unless they were from before a reset)
new newbies would start with 0

is the only way I see it working like that

Being here from the begining, id say say your on the right track with age,but not extensively enuff,,, there are people who have been here since beta, and since u cant track there login from then how areyou going to determine there rank,,, hours played isnt going to do it, there are people who play an hour a day to every second day but yet are qualified to ranked as hi as someone who plays everyday every hour,,,,,.

Global Ops ha a tracker system,for every gun that was used they collected stats on it,same should be done with alleg,, take every ship they fly and grade them on it,, use stats and percentages,,, then get a combined calculation of every ship to get a general ranking.

Take me fo example i can fly an int and turret like crazy,but get me into a sf or a bomber and i suck.... this should effect my ranking . This will also allow coms to see actually what they are gtting for players ,they can search a quick referance card on alleg.net for player by doing a quick search and see where his pilots weakness really is and avoid making commmand errors cause u dont give int whores sf's to fly.

Gappy, because of the AllegAge component, returning vets will accelerate in rankings faster comparitively with other new players.

ArcAngel, that's true, it would be interesting to use a tracker system to get huge stats, one day hopefully we'll get something like that going.

I just hope it doesn't turn out like when I stayed a (2) for a few weeks, despite actually getting some kills on winning teams, whilst my other cadet fellows were climbing like crazy /glare.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":glare:" border="0" alt="glare.gif" />