bluescouse: It's just occured to me, and forgive me if its been mentioned before, or is completely unworkable, but what if stats for unfinished ranked games were just added to your profile in the same way as those for completed rounds? Surely that would put paid to a lot of the quitters. Or am I missing something?
Sean,
The intention of the reputation tracking feature is to have it built into the game creation menu, as a criteria, so that the game creator can determine which reputation level he will or will not allow into the game. So yes, this information will need to be collected in order to maintain an accurate reputation %'age.
The problem with this is the amount of time it is going to take WGT to police this. WGT has NO way of knowing why a round was disconnected or a player dropped.
-do you give someone a rep drop if their power goes out?
- do you give them a rep drop if the game freezes?
etc etc etc
There are many valid reasons for someone to leave a game, and it will happen regardless of what we want or think individually. It simply is too complicated and time consuming for WGT to have to act on every complaint about a reputation drop, and should NOT be on their list of things to do. It is believed that many drop rounds as a function of trying to artificially raise or lower their average. Most likely so. The only way to handle this situation, is to make each player finish each and every started round. The programming is already in place to take you back to a dropped round when you launch the game client. All that needs to be done, is to remove the 'forfeit round' option.
- it can be in place TODAY
- it removes any issues of WGT having to justify someones drop in rep rank
- it prevent manipulation of scores, or at a minimum, makes it more time consuming and more effort for those who wish to do so. How perfect is that.
The best part of this idea, is that the problems go away. It doesn't create more work or more issues, it makes the problem go away. When quitting isn't an option, it can't happen. When their IS a valid disconnect, you just finish the game, like most do currently when there is a valid disconnect. But now there is no option to quit, so again, it goes away...... And as an added bonus, when those manipulating their scores realize they have to play out each and every round, and it takes a lot longer to manipulate their scores, they won't be so quick to create another alias - BONUS