Planeswalker Points and the WoW Daily Dungeon Quest Problem

With the emergence of a new non-ELO ratings system, Wizards of the Coast has sought to fix a significant flaw in the system: that the ELO rating system actively discouraged players from playing. However, with the change to Planeswalker Points, we now have another system that itself may actually have the exact same problem, albeit, via a different set of incentives. To explain why this is, I first want to take you to a little game called World of Warcraft.

In World of Warcraft: WotLK and Cataclysm, when playing at high levels, you earned points by defeating high-level bosses in 10 and 25-man groups that could be translated into personal rewards. And to encourage high-level players to still use the 5-man systems, the developers put into place a system that gave you points for doing the 5-man dungeons once a day. However, this change ended up being a double-edged sword for the game. High-level gamers want to Min-Max (they’re Spikes, after all), and as min-maxers, that meant that if you weren’t able to get online and grind a 5 man each day, and make every raid that week, you would fall behind your fellow players. And if you were to fall behind to far, there’s a chance you could be replaced eventually by someone else. The incentive to get on and grind the game was one that eventually led me to quit the game, as I was not able to keep up, due to school and work commitments. Being able to hop online for at least an hour or two a day just wasn’t feasible for me. I’m not the only person who felt this way, either, as earlier this year, Blizzard changed the Daily Dungeon quest to a set of 7 Dungeon runs that could be completed at any point during the week, due to the negative impact this incentive had on their playerbase.

Why does this matter to Magic? Because with the advent of Player points, we can easily just replace WoW with M:TG, and replace Daily Dungeon with Weekly FNMs. With the system changing from the Zero-Sum ELO system to an “All-Upside” system, the incentive is now to play as much as you humanly can. The system is now in danger of essentially rewarding “those with no life” instead of “those who play the best”, due to the system’s inability to judge how good your opponent is. A win against Kai Budde at a Grand Prix now gets you the exact same amount of points as you’d gain against a 5 year old kid who started playing two months ago. And because of this, the system now rewards your # of wins, more than your quality of wins. The system now says: “You have a full time job and a kid? Better win a PTQ or be able to get a special invite from WotC.” The incentives are now perverted.

PVDDR noted that with “results: GP 1st, GP t4, GP t16, PT t64. My ranking in #pwp for that time period: 51st. 1400 points behind Alex who didn’t even attend the PT.” This is the sort of problematic issue that can potentially drive top-tier players away from the game, as if they’re unable to compete with the college/unemployed grinder types in quantity of events, there needs to be a quality mechanism in place to try and correct this. Apparently there is supposed to be some sort of placement bonus for the T8 at these major events. I would suggest that the bonuses need to go far deeper than that, in order to try and make these events more than simply the equivalent of 5 or 6 large FNMs. Another solution would be to simply maintain the Pro Player’s Club, in addition to the current system, in order to help players who are only able to make large events due to their professional and personal commitments. The greatest danger with the current system is the frightening possibility of a player winning a Grand Prix, yet not qualifying for the PT on rating because they simply didn’t attend enough events. Hopefully it will not take a robbery of that magnitude to induce changes in the new system. While the old one was not perfect, it at least was a way to measure “skill” in the game. The new system seems to measure one’s willingness to sacrifice one’s free time far more instead, and hopefully, there will be some way in the future for the two to come into balance.