As I was saying, my topic of choice was Tetris DS and I wanted to elaborate on the online system, since that’s what I’ve been playing a lot of lately.
You’re assigned a username based on your cartridge and given an initial ranking of 5000, then you play in matches where winners gain x points while losers lose x points, the amount of points exchanged is dependent on your respective rankings (e.g., if you beat a player much more highly ranked than you, you get a lot of his points, but if you beat someone lower than you you gain relatively little). Players can only choose to wait for an opponent, they cannot pick who they play against.
It is really similar to Yahoo! Games, which I’m sure anybody who reads this has heard of or tried.
What I find interesting is the natural ramifications of this simple system. Since the network is worldwide, logging in at different times of the day produces opponents from different time zones and skill: around 4 p.m. for kids during the school year, 9 or 10 p.m. for older Tetris gamers, 1-3 a.m. for Japanese players (either that, or American players who stay up late and use Japanese characters for names). If we assume that most players of a certain category play within their “assigned” timeslot, this actually creates what I’ll call “score banding”, where the same score can denote different skill levels based on the time of day of play.
This is most pronounced when I try playing later at night, when I get absolutely destroyed by a good Japanese player of the same score, but then go back the next day and establish a godlike win streak against some kid late in the afternoon. Fortunately, there’s enough cross pollination between groups that the effects aren’t as pronounced as they could have been.
Another phenomenon with this scoring system is “score inflation”, the idea that scores tend to go up over time. The game’s been out for less than six months, and already people who used to be in the ~5500 range are now up to the 6000′s and the 6000′s are well into the 7000′s. Even taking into account players getting better over time, the skill difference between a 6000 player today and a 6000 player three months ago is certainly noticable.
The culprit, I suspect, is the injection of new players with their 5000 points. It’s almost a study in economics: when a government recklessly prints money and inserts them into an economy, inflation happens and the value of each individual dollar decreases. This can be countered by players leaving the game (1), but since Tetris DS is a growing game, inflation wins and scores tend to go up. I wonder if a complex equation, taking into account the scores of players playing in the past month in addition to the scores of the players in their deathmatch, will be able to stabilize the overall rankings.
Yea, sometimes it takes a while to find an opponent, and the mind wanders.
- in the real world, this is analogous to simply losing money, so it probably doesn’t happen often (↩)