The Shrine

A quick look at any kind of PvPish game (say, WoW) and you'll certainly find more than a fair share of people talk about how they own at this and that. If you assume own means 'win more than 50% of the time' and if your average message board is supposed (certainly something like the BNet board doesn't seem like a high standard to hold gamers to) to represent a cross section of the demographics, then that'd mean the behavior observed is reasonable to extrapolate to the whole. However, PvP is a zero sum game. If someone wins, someone else has to lose. If people on average wins more than 50%, then something is wrong here. Now I've come up with a few reasons for why this is observed:

People who lose probably don't talk about it as much as people who win
People who say they win are probably lying or at least having selective memory

But something still doesn't seem to quite add up. When I played Warcraft 3 it is rare to see anyone with a losing record. Now it's true people who lose a lot probably get a new account name and start over, but I don't think that can account for all the wins that appear to come out of thin air.

To remedy this problem, I think games should keep track of the bottom 10/100/1000 instead of the top. We all know if you reach the top you don't get any respect unless you're good enough to go to gaming tournaments and win money anyway. People just say you hack/have no life/whatever anyway. But what if you are the bottom #1 player? No one can accuse you of doing anything underhanded for achieving that! If people indeed do win more than 50% on average, then someone has to be losing a lot to keep everything balanced. These people are the true heroes!

on WC3 i have seen some really good people who had losing records. They also had a ton of games and a record of something like 550-600. These are the people who had seen it all, liked to play, but maybe just dont adapt very well or try too many fun strategies. When on your team if you asked them to really try hard to win this game, then they usually were very impressive.

Anyways, i guess i am saying i agree with you.

Who brags about their loses? :p

Don Wang wrote:To remedy this problem, I think games should keep track of the bottom 10/100/1000 instead of the top. We all know if you reach the top you don't get any respect unless you're good enough to go to gaming tournaments and win money anyway. People just say you hack/have no life/whatever anyway. But what if you are the bottom #1 player? No one can accuse you of doing anything underhanded for achieving that! If people indeed do win more than 50% on average, then someone has to be losing a lot to keep everything balanced. These people are the true heroes!

Completely disagree. You're telling me you don't think someone on the bottom 100 ladder wouldn't get incredible amounts of shit for being "owned" on a regular basis? My guess is that would only accelerate the tendency for people to ditch their accounts and start over. I mean, I can't tell if you're being serious, it seems like you're being slightly humorous with this, but my opnion is that an actual and better solution would be give players one account per CD-key and don't allow restarting on a new account name. That way, people's records would reflect a complete and accurate record.

In EverQuest 2 there kept track of who had the most deaths and you can tell someone was definitely try to stay ahead of others because the guys on the top 10 death list were dying more than what was humanely possible.

Of course in that case the bottom 10 is really just like another top 10 list...

Yes.

Yes what? You need a question to answer for a statement like that.

I do agree with Mental's point of trying to keep the amount of losses bound to the CD-Key, at least with somebody who is going for ladder play. Though, I think the ladder being based on wins-losses is incredibly stupid, as there's plenty of playing on a casual level, or at least practicing.