With the new system, a few ten thousand active players are drowned among millions of accounts. This is both turning the ladders into a mess and is immensely stressing the loading times.
The inactive ones will not bottom out either, as they are immune to demotion (but likely able to be promoted by default). And once a significant portion of veterans on the coming top tiers stop playing, those brackets will be increasingly inactive as well.
It is not possible to have an account only become part of a bracket at its first fight, as brackets are required to have 30 members each, and also there is a significant risk, that they would end up extremely uneven, depending on whether one joins in a rush time or not, or maybe even delays the start.
Instead I suggest a system similar to guild wars.
A single (absolutely unmissable!) button at the entrance of the Pvp area, that lets you register for the upcoming week.
It will automatically balance out. The top third in each bracket will move up each week, the bottom third down. In a few weeks, inactive players will hit rock bottom, only getting paired with other inactive players. All the crazy active players will find themselves lumped together in the topmost league, only competing against each other for their top 3 bracket reward.
I guess there’s going to be some major unhappiness once the crazy active players fully realize position 4 - 30 doesn’t get anything at all, so the best reward strategy is to intentionally drop down a bracket every other week. Which will have ripple effects by requiring those in the brackets below to also intentionally drop down to have a chance at rewards. But that’s not something that can be mitigated by a registration mechanism.
Wrong. There is a protection for players, who cannot participate.
That’s where the whole problem stems from. And now imagine, how many of those, who reach the highest or second highest tier, will stop playing at some point.
Trouble is, there’s so much inactive junk in all these brackets that they’re are going to end up getting promoted by default. It says there’s relegation protection if you don’t play, but nothing about promotion prevention.
Yup, there definitely needs to be a grace period for inactivity not relegating players, but having it indefinitely is asking for real issues down the line.
Like I said, I would have the demotion protection remain indefinitely, but simply not have inactive players participate. If you are in top tier and drop out for half a year, let’s say for medical reasons, being unable to play Pvp in your first week back hurts less than having to work through all the ten tiers again. Plus, the (seemingly too high) server load will be reduced, if it does not have to keep an eye on every single player.
Player inactivity is already tracked for guild purposes (Zzzz).
My improvement suggestion would be for PVP to exclude players who have not logged into the game for 21 days+ (Zzzz)
That would both reduce the PVP pool to only active players and provide protection for players who are away for a week or two (vacations, real-life events, etc)
If this is causing the loading times between battles to be as ridiculous as they are now, then please fix this asap. It now takes about 11 sec for the new opponents to show up to choose from.