Little User, Big Reviews.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.