Just to jump in… the problem was that every simple solution had potential exploits.
The current implementation took about 10-12 hours work in excel to model, and it seems to be exploit free (we’ve been watching plenty of players TRYING and FAILING to exploit it on the server!!!), BUT just sub-optimal for a very small number of you up the top of the levelling curve. I’m not saying that you guys and gals at level 1000 aren’t important to us - you obviously are - just that the best course of action was to solve 99% of the problem, and review/solve the remaining 1% when we had some better data to work with.
For the record, after level 20-ish, games actually get just a little shorter as players level, but not by a significant amount
The plan next week is to simply take the accumulated data from the last 10 days of PvP, and make adjustments to our formulae so that players of level 500+ need roughly the same number of games for their points as players of level 50.
Oh - and banded leaderboards aren’t on the agenda at the moment, since they promote all sorts of bad play patterns with players attempting to slow-level in order to maximize their gain at lower levels.