Gears of War 2 New Ranking System and Why it Fails.
Recently Gears of War 2 released an update which changes the ranks and added a few more achievements. It also made the 2-piece a lot harder to do but thats besides the point. The reason Gears of War 2 is becoming a huge failure is because like when you reprint the American dollar you may have more money around, but it loses it’s value. Gears of War 2’s original ranking system was basically set up where you would have to actually win a game in order to rank up. It was based on weather or not your team was expected to lose or win how much points you would get or lose per round. This was a fair set up. It made the game difficult to rank up, but when you did actually rank up it was some what of an achievement. It made you feel good like you have accomplished something. It also encouraged people to work as a team and help each other out more often. This really was a good system, sure it needed tweaks but for the most part it was a good system.
Now they have gone and ruined everything. The new ranking system is technically not a ranking system it’s more of a statement of how long you have played the game. You get a level 1-100 based on how many points you get during a game. It’s purely individual and has nothing to do with the team. They also added achievements for you to get to certain levels. This might sound good but there are some very good explanations why this will eventually fail.
- Making the rank system based on personal gain completely causes people to not care if they win or lose anymore. This takes the competitive edge out of the game and will eventually cause people to not care about team work at all. Also because the game is based on the points it will completely ruin all games of Submission, Annex, and King of the Hill. People will not play these games to win the games they will play them because you can come back alive and are able to gain 3000-6000 points easily. Just by running around and killing. The actual point and objective of these games will eventually fade away. This will cause people to eventually quit playing these games who actually want to play them for the objective.
- Making achievements for the levels will increase peoples motivation to standby or cheat in other methods. People will become so obsessed with having their rank higher that they will resort to cheating to get those ranks, which will in turn completely destroy the ranking system making people who are higher level match up with people much harder than them discouraging them from playing the game again.
- The ranking system is nothing to do will skill, only how long you have played. Because you can easily gain a lot of experience points in Submission and Guardian type games you will see that the ranking will not match you up with people who have skill near you, it will just match you with people who have played a long time or who have ranked up with Submission and Guardian type games. This is not Truskill nor is it a fair match for games.
- Eventually people will reach the highest experience level and will stop playing the game because there really is no moving down in this new “ranking system” if you play the right type of games one could reach level 100 in a matter of months. Maybe 3 tops. This will make people bored of the game, and want to move on because they will lose motivation to play. With the tradition difficult ranking system where you often went down there would always be motivation to keep playing well. Once enough people hit 100 there will be no way to gain their interest back. Epic could reset the ranks, causing people to give up and be frustrated or they could increase the amount of levels which would make the game repetitive and eventually would bore people causing them to quit playing. Even if they made new game types or new maps there is still no reason to play them for a long time with this ranking system most people will just try them out then stop playing again.
Ultimately the new ranking system in Gears of War 2 is going to be short lived. It will kill the game off very quickly by taking everything that matters out of it. There will be No teamwork, No goals, and a high motivation to cheat. Just the type of online gaming that everyone wants to play.
It’s sad, but it’s the truth. I think Epic needs to fix this before it gets any worse. They have made everything so easy to get that it basically will loose all value in the end.
They might as well give you 400 points just for joining the game.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:09 am
First of all you are wrong.In your first point you say it will stop people from playing as a team. Actually that is not true. In game modes such as annex and king of the hill you get rewarded for team play. In annex and king of the hill you get points for capturing the circle or breaking it when your enemy captures it. Also in King of the hill you get points just for being in the circle while your team is controlling it. In 2 you talk about standbying. Epic has added a standby detection system in order to prevent this. for 3 the old ranks are still there, you just cannot see them. Therefore you are still matched up based on skill. So if a level 15 and a level 100 have the same skill level they can be matched up together. Also i feel there is no problem with levels rewarded solely on experience. There has been a number of successful games with this type of ranking system. For example CoD 4, BF: Bad Company, RSV2, and CoD: WaW just to name a few. I feel your fourth point is your most valid of them all. People will probably get bored when the reach 100. But this is true for most games. CoD 4 got boring when i hit 10 prestige 55 and Bad company got boring when i reached the highest level. The good thing here is that it will take some time for people to reach 100. A person who plays the game for an average amount of time will not be 100 for along time. The people who really love the game and play it a lot will get to 100 quicker, but the good thing here is they may keep playing simply because they love the game so much. If they did not love it they would not have played it so much before.Please reply to my message,i think we could have a good discussion about this.
March 27th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Wow… i completly agree this new ranking system will ruin the game and just take the fun away from it
March 27th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Hi thanks for your comment
First of all you are wrong.In your first point you say it will stop people from playing as a team. Actually that is not true. In game modes such as annex and king of the hill you get rewarded for team play. In annex and king of the hill you get points for capturing the circle or breaking it when your enemy captures it. Also in King of the hill you get points just for being in the circle while your team is controlling it.
This might be true, but I have spent the last few days playing a few games like these and it’s just not how people are taking it I personally don’t have time to play a lot of gears of war but every time that I have played an objective game so far people have been more focused on kills more than the objective. I was in a game of annex and for the first 3 minuets of one game the score was 0 0, not even one person tried to go for the hill but you can believe how many chainsaws were running off.
2 you talk about standbying. Epic has added a standby detection system in order to prevent this.
This is sure to fail. It will be difficult for Epic to detect people who are actually using the stand by button from people who are having internet troubles. Especially those who are on a college campus or at apartments who share connections If someone starts uploading a large file or downloading a large file while you play it will cause the same effect as if you are using stand by. They might say they are banning people but it’s actually really difficult for them to figure out who is actually cheating and who doesn’t have control of the lag they are causing. This has the potential to hurt a lot of innocent people. Not a good thing.
3 the old ranks are still there, you just cannot see them. Therefore you are still matched up based on skill.
The old ranks were based on TruSkill where the came matched you up with other people and the system would take “bets” if you were expected to lose and you won you got a lot of points. If you were expected to win and you lost you lost a lot of points etc etc. This isn’t true anymore really. I might be mistaken but I believe they said that it is now based on individual points. Not winning or losing at all and looking at how easy it is to get points I think this does degrade the idea of truskill compared to the old ranking.
Glad you agreed with my last point, I think that one is the most important. This way is just much more boring than the last because it’s a one way street. Once you go up you don’t really go down which makes the game come to and end rather quickly. The other ranking system you went up and down all the time at least I did between the 2nd 3rd and 4th rank. Whenever I went down I actually wanted to play more to get back up, but when I was at a higher rank I felt like I had nothing really to go for.
edit: Another thing I wanted to mention is that people are stealing kills WAY more than they ever have since it’s been based on personal kills. This makes the game very distasteful to me nothing gets me more angry than when someone takes your down right in front of your face. I have even had people try to run up and shotgun the person while I am performing one of the long executions and sometimes the game actually gives the kill to them! grrr
March 28th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
One thing i have against this entire thing is the Annix/King of the Hill comment, you get 1/4th or 1/5th of experience gained in the match, meaning you have to get at least 6000 points to get any decent experience, where as execution can offer upto 3500 experience points. Get your facts straight before having ago about the new ranking system. I for one prefer it, as sometimes i got paired with people who just sucked, like not doing team work, or just wanted to go Rambo and i wouldn’t rank even though i’d of done well in the match because of other players, where as now i’m getting ranks for the things i do weither or not i win or lose, and personally, what does ranking have to do with playing a game. I really dislike people who play games for rank, i play COD: WAW and Gears because i enjoy playing with mates, my ranks are sucky but it’s how real gamers play, ranks mean nothing and i don’t really care if i get to 100 or not, but as long as the game remains fun then that’s all that matters
March 28th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
You have a good point it is only a little experience now in objective games but I believe what I said is still true for guardian which I am getting stand by with a lot now
even beyond that point my others I feel are good Still. I also hate people who play for rank only but sadly it’s how most gamers play so it really effects how people play a lot I wish it was just gears of war one match making style where you just host. That was fun but I like the friends aspect of multi play now. Hopefully they will just go back to that and I can delete that post 
sorry about any bad typing doing this from the iPhone app haha
Actually what you mentioned about people who really love to play it will play beyond 100. That’s a good idea. I bet once all the people playing for achievements and rank get bored of it the game will be real good then because only the people loyal to it will be playing and then who would even want to stand by then?
March 31st, 2009 at 12:15 pm
You Have some good points there exept the annex and KoTh they have balanced how much points you get in those game types so you dont just ride on those game types for XP and i diagree with your opinion on the game getting boring after you reach Lvl.100. i disagree with this simply because Gears of War is a unique 3rd person shooter and there is no other game i’v played like this and after playing this game since its release of GoW 1 and 2 thats all i play on multiplayer granted i do play pther games
Thanks for reading. not trying to start an argument just stating my opinion as you did but message me bak i would like to here your input hit me up on live GT:xFKSx THRASHER
PS:if you know of any other 3rd person shooter please let me know
March 31st, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Sorry I didn’t respond to your message! I have not even looked. Yeah it is pretty unique but I was just making a point once it hits 100 a lot of people will lose interest and if they just add more levels thats just repetitive and annoying. I don’t think I know any other 3rd person shooters off the tip of my head…I know I have seen a few that weren’t as popular but not that I know the name of right now.
April 1st, 2009 at 1:33 pm
The first guy has the facts, have you read the update post by Epic? http://gearsforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=667510 it talks about the under the hood improvements the normal player doesn’t normally see and I’m not sure if it was mentioned in the link but there is also a new anti-bad host feature that give the host no exp if the game is laggy not matter if they standby or not it has been annoying quite a good amount of people
April 1st, 2009 at 1:37 pm
actually it’s supposed to ban them, which they have not done at all yet as far as I have looked into it. It’s probably just false hope. I know someone online who did stand by for a hole night just to try and get banned and nothing happened, got an impressive boost in XP too. I don’t approve but at least he was willing to test the theory.
I disagree it’s not all under the hood. There is a lot of changes in the game that effect how it’s played. One thing i noticed now is that when you pick up a gun sometimes you will glitch and shake a bit. This makes it difficult to play. I noticed it so far on the mortar
If epic REALLY wanted to fix the problem of just “”bad host”" they would create a better method of picking hosts to begin with. It’s not really the hosts fault that they got chosen and their ISP can’t handle enough to host a game. That’s Epic’s systems poor choice. I think it would be unfair to punish just a “bad host”. Stand by is the only real thing to punish.
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I completely agree this new ranking system will ruin the game and just take the fun away from it. I sold my copy because of this system and now plan on staying away from any new Gears game. Narrow minded? I don’t care my money I’ll buy what I want to. I waited for a long time for GOW2 and to have them pull this crap well I am done!
annex and KoTh have become JUST as you said they would, completely filled by people just running around and not focusing on the objective. It just plain SUCKS! Oh well ODST is coming out soon and I think it will kick the crap out of GOW2.
April 6th, 2009 at 11:27 am
all people did in GoW1 annex is run around and kill people and not focus on objective location so im kinda already getting sick of hearing people say thats the only thing people do in GoW2 annex & KoTh after UT3 but yet say GoW1 is better which makes these people hypocrits
Whats ODST…..
April 10th, 2009 at 9:09 am
when you play annex submission or king of the hill your total points gets divided to be fair to the other modes.
April 14th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I DISAGREE THE NEW SYSTEM IS BETTER ITS NOT ABOUT STARS AND STRIPES ITS ABOUT STATS I ONLY CARE ABOUT KILLS,ROUNDS WON MATCHES WON,AT LEAST NOW WHEN PEOPLE LEAVE THE MATCH CAUSE THERE LOOSING THEY GET POINTS TOOK OFF THEM I DONT KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I HAVE BEEN IN A MATCH AND PLAYERS HAVE QUIT BECAUSE WE ARE LOOSING THEY DONT GET DE RANKED THE REST OF US DO FOR STAYING HAVING GOLD STIPES IS NOT A REFLECTION OF HOW GOOD YOU ARE ITS MOST LIKELY DOWN TO NOT LOOSING GAMES BECAUSE YOU HAVE QUIT AND NOT TAKEN THE LOSS FOR IT
July 20th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
interesting material, where such topics do you find? I will often go