Player rankings are one of the biggest and most sought-after parts of multiplayer games, helping to determine experience and skill. However, a new Riot Games ranking system patent intends to refine the process in order to get rid of those kinds of players who would ride the coattails of others to victory, according to the description.
“…traditional ranking methods would apply an adjustment factor to the rank all players of a winning team equally, no matter if one member of the team contributed far more than another player, who failed to play at all during the game.”
Many players will likely agree that the prospect of someone who didn’t earn their rank dragging the team down in serious play is something that doesn’t appeal to them. But without a more refined system that can tell the system how much each player actually contributed to a game, they’d be stuck with it. The Riot Games ranking system patent, however, aims to address this, based on certain criteria outlined in its description.
“Described herein are embodiments that utilize one or more methods and systems to identify events within a video game, gather event data…and generate a series of sub-scores related to different events within the video game that can be utilized to determine an overall player skill that that can more accurately reflect a player’s true skill/rank level in a shorter number of games.”
The number of different factors that can actually govern someone’s ranking in a game aren’t named, but in things like League of Legends, ranking could be governed by kills, deaths, and other score-affecting actions, so even if you’re on the winning team, if you drag your team down via feeding, your own score likely won’t increase at the end of the match if the patent works properly.
Either way, hopefully this Riot Games ranking system patent will end up helping to make the ranking systems in games more fair. You can read the particulars of the patent by following this link.