Is it Time to Rethink Competitive Ladders?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
- In his article, 'Keep Your Numbers Off of Me: Why Tournaments Support Better Communities than Ladders', Richard Garfield makes describes two different kinds of competitive players: Honers and Innovators or players who refine existing strategies and players who create new ones. Modern competitive ladder play has shifted the player base substantially towards a honer mentality by giving rewards to that style of play and leaving innovators in the dust. Join us as we discuss these two types of players and what game designers can do to bring back the innovator.
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What's up, honers?
Did you just call me a honer?
@@marczwander893at least they didn't call you the N word. Net Decker.
Better than being called a boner
My Honies!
sup hon
On "ladder systems that reward something other than winning" - I remember Gwent playing with the idea of per-Faction MMR. After you got to the local Legend equivalent, your rank would be an average of your peak rank with each of the available factions, helping combat the idea of just grinding out games with the single best deck.
We see Wolverine situations all the time, where a character gets underestimated for what turned out to be little justifiable reason, when someone actually skilled picks up and pilots it to demonstrate that it is way more viable than anyone ever suspected. Particularly in competitive Pokemon (non-TCG).
It's the Jigglypuff pipeline in smash
6:58 I play bridge! Colored points (Silver, Red, Gold) are given out for placing highly in larger tournaments. Small tournaments will occasionally reward colored points to attract more players. In order to be recognized by the American Contract Bridge League as a Life Master (highest rank) there is a minimum requirement of each point type.
An idea for tracking innovation decks in magic would be: gather everyone's deck list, tally the number of each card being played at the tournament, a player gets points for: (each card/ number of that card at tournament) * games won. Ignore cards in sideboard (as that could easily game rankings).
Honer is not a person who refines a build. They are people who just focus on playing (or "main"ing, depending on the game) that build as best as possible. They don't refine. They just play what others built so much that they become better at playing that build.
That too.
Thank you. I've been thinking about this for so much time as to why digital card games are unwilling to capture the feel and fun of a tcg in person. People always talk about how cheap it is to rise up the ladder with a cheap straight forward aggro deck but i think ive always been an innovator at heart. The fun for me is making niche decks and piloting them to victory. I wouldn't play card games if i didn't want to build a deck
God im such a honer for this episode of distraction makers
The idea of a ranked ladder being a PvE game more than a PvP game is *brilliant*. I know that Wizards is committed to "digital play mirroring paper play," but playing on the Arena ladder is a lot closer to playing WoW or Elder Scrolls Online rather than being a 1v1 competitive experience.
I actually found it helpful to think of it that way as a player too. In League and Runeterra, I learned to think of ladder as a roguelite where each match was a single run in a roguelike game. Helped me tilt a lot less.
Okay well that feels VERY healthy. Love it.
Mtg arena is actually garbage just play hearthstone if your gonna play online
@@danewirostek1903 any specific reason or are you just hating? i’m mainly a limited player and found arena to be an awesome way to get in multiple drafts a week since most stores only run 1 per week (if any)
There is a human element to these games though, but I am not through the video yet
I think most great players in games see ranked ladders as a field for practice, both creating and honing, rather than a goal in and of itself so the logic is there.
My hot take about digital card game ladders is that netdecking is the symptom, not the problem.
Nobody wants to innovate, because nobody is being encouraged to try new things. If draft was MUCH more accessible, had good rewards and good support from the developer, then you’d see more competitively minded players in general trying it and naturally learning how to make better decks to help improve the health of the meta game.
Hearthstone’s new attempt at draft is to allow you to draft new cards while you’re playing the run, which I think is an exceptional idea and how the game should’ve been on launch.
My favorite rogue deck of all time: Owling Mine. A great, great Innovater deck.
I'm honing so hard rn.
Would you guys ever do interviews with other distraction makers? Massacre's Mansion has two different games he has made in Massacards (Hidden role game) and Chemicards (Uno Amalgam/card shedding game). I was just wondering because I love both of your content and I think it could be a cool collaboration.
What I would like to see on arena would be a system where the top 100 players have weekly mini tournaments, where e.g. every Saturday they play around 5ish high stakes best of 3 matches and that (rather than the daily grind) decides their rank in the next week. After the tournament all statistics are published, so players have full knowledge of the meta and about a week to figure out a deck that beats it (let's say decks are registered a day or two in advance and the lowest 10 places go to the top 10 ladder grinders). This way, you would see more games between the top players and get rid of the warped arena incentives of getting in as many games as possible in a given time. Streaming would likely be an issue in high stakes games between known players though.
Magic Arena's Ladder shows an interesting interpretation of the "meta turnover" metric you guys mentioned.
I happen to be one of those ppl that just want to finish their daily quests and end the month in mythic (standard is my medium of choice) for maximum "payout". What this leads to is, that I tend to gravitate to decks that let me do this more efficiently, so decks that can a) win fast and b) don't have too many bad matchups.
and b) is the key component here - once the other decks on the ladder pack too many counters to my deck, going through my daylies becomes far less efficient and at that point I tend to just switch the deck to something that looks interesting and fulfills criteria a) and b).
This dynamic leads to _some_ turning in the arena meta and is a driver for this, that has not been present yet in this form before.
Issue with brewing (it is more fit then "innovating") is how magic economy is structure. It is hard to brew anything with wildcards, rental, or crads priced as AAA game per piece of cardboard, multiply that on required time incestment.
Cubes, Drafting and genres like Autobattlers and Roguelikes do such a good job catering to brewers, the opportunity cost is way lower in limited formats! for example Regional Dex only + no Legendaries Pokemon formats (VGC).
There's definitely moments where I play against a deck and think "Oh I wanna do that!" This happened to me recently when I played against a Harald Unifies the Elves/Moritte of the Frost combo deck. I already had a Tyvar Reanimator deck to staple the combo into! And then other times when I read a card and a deck idea just pops into my head. Most recent example was The Mindskinner... Bonecrusher Giant/Stomp has always been one of my favorite cards. As soon as I read Mindskinner... Knew that I had to give it double strike and OHKO somebody with Stomp... It's really silly (you can get it T4 with Lizard Blades!) Sorry for the novel, I love brewing
On the point of innovators wanting to do their thing in commander over tournament formats: I think in large part it's due to the environment of 60 card tournament play. The competitive landscape of magic has degraded significantly over the last 5 years and change in my opinion (roughly since war of the spark I'd say) and that's what's driving out innovators.
Speaking for myself here: I used to try my hand at both innovating and refining in modern, but nowadays it feels like there is next to no point in engaging with that format so I've instead devoted my time to creating commander decks with my friends (who also used to play modern only). That feels like the most worthwhile time investment in magic at the moment by a fair margin.
If a game mechanic seems to appeal to a honer strategy then it should be called honie.
I remember seeing Titan Bloom maybe a year before it got big. I thought it was kinda weird and was probably as effective as Teferi Knowledge Pool or something. I remember kinda liking Amulet of Vigor.
Then Summer Bloom got banned.
They seemed to Hone in that word a lot this episode hahaha
It would be interesting to see if they could take all cards played in a week and allocate points for cards played less. So you would gain more points for playing cards no one else is playing.
Or make it even more complex. Combinations of cards.
"Paladins" seems to track the best healers and supports
What was that principle/law you talked about? Sounds real similar to the doorman's fallacy.
Also, i don't know how much of a discussion you all could get out of it, but I'm curious what are your thoughts on LLMs (A.I.) and playtesting.
Like in Magic, if i wanted to test the balance on cards, i think LLMs could be useful for doing massive simulations. But there's a question of whether you should try to simulate the player experience and have the bots be blind, or go ahead and give them perfect knowledge. i.e. They would know whether a counterspell was in hand rather than tey to simulate bluffing.
Goodhart’s law. It’s usually used when looking at incentives and data collection. Basically, when you use something as a measure it will influence behavior and potentially create unintended consequences.
As for LLMs, some great AIs have been developed for playing games that have a lot of gameplay data already established, like chess and go. I’m not sure how useful it would be for playtesting because you might be able to get your answer just by collecting the data to feed the LLM. There’s some really great software called machinations for modeling systems that feels more useful to me alongside playtesting data.
An outro, what channel is this?
Lantern is goated
8:39 This sums up what Activision have said about the (mostly community dubbed) ‘Engagement Optimised Matchmaking System’ they use for Call of Duty. The actual players who remember the games from 2007-2012 are all saying ‘this is less fun, and it’s not just nostalgia’ but Activision come back with ‘yeah but look at the increased playtime’. They’re manipulating people into playing longer instead of making a game that just does a good job at being fun. Those older games didn’t struggle to sell.
The system also means it’s difficult to know if you’re even getting better, because it’s impossible to tell where the other players exist relative to you in terms of skill, when matchmaking was random, yes newer players died a lot more but they could also feel themselves getting better until they died a lot less. Now it just feels like getting a punishment lobby for winning too much or an easy lobby for losing too much.
The 2007-2012 games had some protections for super new players, but for the most part we’re just ping based, which itself led to better connections and meant you didn’t have to wait 2.5 minutes between every round while it finds players of a similar skill to you on the other side of the world.
p.s. watched the whole video first this time :p
i think you're wrong. the incentive for innovating in a meta on ladder is that you can win more if your rogue strategy is good and you can execute it. if your rogue strategy is ass or you can't play it well then you don't get anywhere ofc.
if most people are playing a certain meta strat and you can innovate something to counter that then you're going to win because the ladder won't adapt instantly fast to counter you or to adopt your strategy. it's no different than a tournament where something new is only new for some time and then it gets figured out. and you have to at least achieve some level of success with it to get everybody to pay attention in which case you already were rewarded by the time people adapt to it.
9:45 is this the discourse about the midcore player?
Yeah sort of.
@@yourdagandidn't you also comment on the Jimothy Cool video about ABR's gen 3 viability ranking?
@@naqib_2365 Surely.
Synthesizer is another possible term for refiner.
Honer Simpson
Matchmaking punishes innovation. If you get queued against red aggro 6 times in a row because the algorithm thinks that’s a fair matchup, you miss out on a huge percentage of interesting games that otherwise would have occurred.
It’s important to lose to Omniscience. It’s important to win with a blue red spellcaster strategy. It’s important to play against that one guy who only ever plays enchantment decks.
Experiencing that variety is literally Magic as Garfield intended.
if your innovation is "lose to rdw" when the meta is rdw then maybe your innovation makes no sense in the context of the established meta. why would you expect to be rewarded for coming up with how to beat something that people aren't playing? that doesn't make any sense in a competitive setting.
@@zengamer321 A more interesting (and related) question might be whether the Magic Arena ladder feels like a competitive setting, in any meaningful way? And is it the same way that, e.g. a weekend soccer tournament feels like a competitive setting? Can you meaningfully compete against an amorphous aggregate? Can you compete against a meta? It seems to me that in Arena, ladder grinders are competing only indirectly -- they are competing with each other to see who can do the best job of grinding the ladder, but they aren't competing against each other to see who can win individual games of magic.
@@icecreamemperor i dont play magic arena and based on what i heard it doesn't have a real ladder. it just has some stupid grind with the paint job of a ladder which is nothing like the ladder on lichess or starcraft.
Who up honin' their deck rn?
Idk if this was mentioned in the other vid but ladder is a significantly larger time investment then tournaments. You are greatly incentivized to just play an agro deck that wins or loses by turn 5 because you need hundreds of wins to place on the ladder. Meanwhile, in a tournaments setting that maybe has you playing a dozen games, you can just run slower decks without much penalty
that's not true. you're not incentivized more for winning faster unless the ladder is fake. a system that makes you play more games to get a higher rank isn't a real ladder. a real ladder might have a minimum number of games to deter inactivity and because if you only play a tiny number of games it can't rank you, but a ladder will not reward playing faster games because in a real ladder you converge to a mmr and you need to improve your winrate to climb. playing a worse strat that can get in more games actually only helps you converge to a lower rank faster.
@@zengamer321Almost if not all ladder systems require you to play a lot of games to climb them.
@zengamer321 it's not like you choose a 40% winrate agro over a 60% winrate slow deck, you would just choose the good agro deck over the good slow deck. There is also the variance to consider, you can get very unlucky for a long time. If you are able to grind out a larger amount of games, the law of large numbers will reduce your variance and it's simply not feasible to run a bunch of games on a slow deck
@@heyimbilliejean you need to initially play a lot of games to converge to your correct mmr. except that's not necessarily climbing the ladder. it could also be going down the ladder. and once you converge there's literally no point to just making a game go fast
@ do you not know how a ladder works? i dont give a damn about stuff like progression based "ladder" because those aren't ladders they're fucking uncompetitive treadmills.
a ladder isn't something you climb by playing more games. you need to get better at the game which can include playing a better strategy that wins more. playing games faster only helps you converge faster which can include losing mmr.
Improver
Thing-better-maker
Close but that gives them too much credit off the bat.
What if you just had to lock in your deck/build each week on thr ladder? Maybe you can change mid week but your rank starts over? Maybe every season?
Innovator vs Imitator
The guy who comes up with a new thing to pilot which is surprisingly effective, and then other people who copy the build and either do or don't make alterations, which aren't necessarily more optimal than the original.
Imitators are typically too lazy or unskilled to craft original builds/comps. And sometimes, their adjustments are more based on personal complement and satisfaction rather than an overarching concern for optimization per se.
you get plenty of "innovators" burning the kitchen with whatever they're cooking. both types of players can fail or succeed at what they're doing and the best players can both innovate and refine. but it's usually some self identified innovators who make up some trash they call innovative, get destroyed by the meta and then whine about it. at then end of the day the results speak for themselves. if somebody is winning on what they copied, great they're winning. if somebody is winning on something they made up themselves, also great cuz they're WINNING. people need to stop coping and blaming a competitive ladder.
"Imitators are typically too lazy or unskilled to craft original builds/comps".
Try imitating some time. Winning does wonders for a person's competitive mindset.
I don't want people in my team that are trying to do anything else other than winning.
One thing about innovators is, that they have a natural "comback" mechanism. The fewer innovators there are, the easier it gets for the other innovators to find something new.
if they're in your game then you deserve to be in a game with them. if somebody is playing some dogshit strat on your team, remember that the matchmaking put you 2 together. you're bad enough with your good strat and they're good enough with their bad strat that the matchmaker thinks you two are actually on the same level.
@@zengamer321 As long as they are trying to win with the bad strategy its ok. It's not ok if they are activley not trying to win, maybe because there is some achievment that you can unlock if you do something stupid etc.
You don't get a higher rating as a tennis player by playing left-handed if you're right-handed.
Oh pleeease!
I lowkey dont like honers... atleast when theyve done no innovation to hone but are just copy pasting and the current systems all incentivize replication of successful strategy to the point where its hard to care about their achievements.
I made this comment under one of your previous videos already. But i only care about the 1st tournament of each successful strategy. The 2nd ends up being clones, with slight variations (if youre lucky, sometimes they dont even do that)