Poll - Diamond tier

[melvin]

yes!

[Cyrus]

[Vainiac]

Dominance factor is a problem due of the lack of activity, especially in gold right now.

[Jediluke]

Then a different dominance factor of sorts to compensate for the lack of activity.

[bahamut]

I agree with cyrus' first post i think, the long one.
dominance shouldn't mean as much as being able to hold the top two pilots on the ladder to less than 16

EDIT: I'd like to play soon, I'm gonna have to use the laptop i guess(need a new one, as soon as i can afford I'll consider it)

[Jediluke]

Bahamut below is my concern:

Let's use Cyrus as an example. He could focus ONLY on playing Mark and Myself and develop the skill to hang 16 kills on us on the regular. That's all fine and dandy but that may not translate into being able to set himself apart from the rest of GOLD.

It's not an award for being able to hang with the top 2 pilots. It's an award based on being clearly better than the rest of GOLD and not really belonging in it.

That's a bit different.

Perhaps there could also be some sort of recognition for maintaining an average score of 16 or 17 or whatever vs the top 2 or 3 pilots.

While I'm on the subject, I wouldn't mind seeing a gauntlet award of some kind. My home vs your home vs random core roll (winner gets the award) (would need to be marked gauntlet in the reporting I presume and all 3 games must be played same day: preferably back 2 back)

[Drakona]

Diamond is the best solution we have to a bad situation: too few mutually competitive pilots at the top of the game.

The tiers on DCL are designed to be mutually competitive within themselves -- meaning the very bottom silver pilot should have a reasonable chance, if not necessarily a large one, against the very top silver pilot. When we first designed the ladder, we took a wild guess at what the "line of no hope" was between two pilots and came up with an average score of 20-13, and that's where we stuck the tier lines. That has evolved a lot over the years, as we have come to understand what Descent competition looks like at different levels, but the goal of mutual competitiveness within the tiers remains.

Part of that original design was the assumption that at the top of the game, we would find enough mutually competitive pilots to make a tier. While past eras of Descent have had single untouchable pilots -- most notably Kiln and Birdseye in their respective eras -- the typical case has been a whole bunch of pilots close enough to the top of the game to threaten each other. We found out before even closing the first season on DCL that this was not the case in the modern era: Jediluke, DJCJR, and Mark392 together would have made up the *entire* gold tier if we let the ladder algorithm just do its thing. We decided that would suck, and told the algorithm to ignore a few pilots at the top of the ladder if paying attention to them would make the top tier too small. We left them gold, and created the blue orb, which designated that they were breaking the system, and that it wasn't a hot streak or a momentary fluke -- some sort of deep dominance was occurring.

We went on like that for a couple years, but a curious thing happened: the lead Jedi and Mark had over the pack didn't narrow as such leads had in previous eras. In fact, it widened, and they started to go on respectively longer and longer streaks, beating other pilots by wider average margins and in more and more unusual circumstances. It got to a point where having them in gold actually started to mess up statistics: they would break pilots' gold streaks, and people would say, "Yeah, but....". Or people started breaking out my record into games "vs gold" and games "vs Jediluke".

Which is when we knew we needed another tier.

I resisted this for a very long time, because a tier with two pilots (or sometimes even only one active!) is really not what the ladder is designed for. Medals don't work well. Trophies suck. Stats are weird. A lot of things happen. That's why we went on with the hacked up gold/masters thing as long as we did. But one of the core design ideas on DCL is that the stats are supposed to mean something *real*. When you see a gold record or a gold match or a silver streak or whatever, you are supposed to have a real concept of what those mean as a pilot, how hard those achievements are to get. It's not perfect -- stats never are -- but the goal is for the stats to reflect something real from a pilot's perspective, not just to be stats. Having gold not be a truly mutually competitive tier messed that up.

It became clear that whatever these pilots were, it was more accurate to say they were in another tier than to say they weren't. So we made diamond.

Diamond is weird and special. It's not designed into the ladder, it's not supposed to exist. It's something we tripped over in the evolution of the competitive landscape, a reality we needed to put a name on. If Jeds and Mark stopped playing, maybe it would disappear, maybe for a while, maybe forever. I don't know. It's not set up as an achievement you're supposed to be able to go for. I don't know what's going on, really, only that what sometimes happens in other endeavors, the emergence of exceptional talent, has happened here.

Diamond being different, the qualifications are different. It's not just the best pilot and those mutually competitive with them. It's pilots who become the best, stay the best, dominate everyone, and in spite of playing in odd circumstances, publishing demos, pursuing challenges, won't stop *beating* everyone. So the rules are set up to recognize -- that. We tried to put into mechanics the long streaks and undefeated seasons and just all around rediculousness on display, and came up with the dominance criterion, and set the threshold somewhere between what Mark and Jeds had never fallen below, and what no one else had ever risen above. It is there so that if we lose our diamond pilots, we will know when another one comes along. Or at least have a reasonable statistical case?

Perhaps it can be gamed. I take a great deal of pride in having designed the ladder in general to be hard to game, but any set of rules can be gamed. That is why DCL is not fundamentally reliant on rules, but on people. The rules are not the game. The rules are guidelines. If they fail to align to excellence in piloting, it is the rules that will be fixed. But with that being said, I don't think the strategy Cyrus outlined would work -- avoiding pilots and levels where you match up poorly. For starters, the challenge system (and the community!) would prevent you. And the staff would *certainly* take a dim view of that. As diamond is supposed to recognize broad dominance, we definitely wouldn't allow someone to try to angle their way in. Surely you've seen us do this before? Someone gets some achievement in a lame way and we're like, "Um . . . no."

The stats still say to me that if Jeds and Mark went back to gold, all that would happen is that no one would know what gold records and streaks meant anymore. They'd just signify how much you played those two pilots. They belong in another tier. No, getting into it isn't necessarily achievable. The fact that it may be impossible for any given person is not a flaw. It's not meant as a goal. It's mean as a recognition of where the skill levels in the community stand. Changing the criteria to make it easier misses the point entirely. It's not a challenge. It's an attempt to describe what's happening (and happened) in the game.

Nor is being competitive with them enough. Jeds early on had DKH as an achilles heel. DKH wasn't spectacular against gold in general (though he was quite good!) the way Jeds was, but he seemed to be able to beat Jeds pretty regularly. He also beat Mark back when people were starting to whisper that it wasn't possible anymore. In spite of this, DKH wasn't diamond. He wasn't absurdly broadly dominant. That's what diamond is supposed to recognize. Pilots who do *that*, which is not necessarily exactly the same thing as pilots who can compete with pilots who can do that.

Are the rules fixed? Of course not. The criteria are a best guess at what another diamond pilot would look like, and a public way of showing a statistical difference between Jeds and Mark and the pack without relying completely on the algorithm for everything. (It gets wonky when there are no other pilots near your skill level anyway). If another pilot consistently exceeded one of the criteria and was consistently competitive with Jeds and Mark, maybe we'd look back at what diamond means and what's the fairest way to score matches with that pilot as far as record goes. I don't know. It hasn't come up yet, though, so I don't know what we would do. It would depend on what seemed fairest, what seemed the most honest representation of the state of the game, the most reasonable way to score competition going forward.

Low gold activity does make the 50 matches needed for a dominance profile harder to get. If that becomes a long term problem and someone starts breaking the ladder, we'll revisit it. For now, it's what we have. Everyone always wants to get promoted, and I always tell people not to focus on that. It's such a long term goal, and it'll both feel like it takes too long and like it surprises you. It's a good long term goal, but focus on short term goals: defeating rivals, building streaks, going after home level wins, learning new styles, whatever is meaningful to you, whatever you think makes you excellent as a pilot. On the path to diamond, expect to do something unreasonably dramatic like collecting all the trophies, going a full season undefeated, routinely holding gold pilots to low single digits in circumstances where they're strong, or building up a 100+ win streak in gold. I don't know what the next diamond pilot will look like if one ever comes along, but the last two were not even a little bit subtle.

[Sirius]

Birdseye is quite possibly good enough to qualify, but he isn't into this whole thing anyway.

[Jediluke]

It takes both SKILL and WILL. He doesn't have both. He's welcome to prove me wrong though.