Yomi Online Rankings

We're trying out making online Yomi matches best of 3 instead of best of 1 in the free online version at www.fantasystrike.com. You can leave feedback about that here.

In this system, think of taking the opponent's like down to 0 as winning a "round" in a fighting game. So when press Quickmatch and find an opponent, you play best of 3 "rounds." You can't switch your character between rounds. After someone wins a "game" (meaning they won best of 3 rounds), you can get a rematch. If you rematch, the loser can switch his character, but the winner cannot, as is customary in fighting games. Rematching can be good to do for your own personal improvement, as it will let you get deeper into the nuances of playing against a particular opponent. If they are exploiting some bad habit of yours, you might never really figure that out if you don't play a longer set. Up to you though!

The main reason our system was 1 round before instead of 2-out-of-3 was just time. If it takes 15 minutes to play Yomi, you'd have to set aside 45 minutes to play a best of 3, which is unreasonably long for the default way to play the game. Looking at the data, an average "round" lasts between 8 and 9 minutes though. This is shorter than we expected. If you figure that half the time a best of 3 will go to 3 rounds and half the time it will end in two rounds, the average for a best of 3 set is 22.5 minutes or less, which is acceptable for us to try. The benefit of more rounds is that you have more time to get a read on the opponent and exploit their weaknesses, so it's a better test of skill.

Leaderboards

We're resetting the leaderboards now, because of this change. From now on, leaderboards will be showing people's perforamnce in best-of-3 situations, rather than best-of-1. Congratulations to garcia1000 for taking the top spot on the first season's leaderboard. Garcia's hobby is making statements that sound plausible, but that are actually false. Also he plays Lum and is a poker master in real life. (Those two things are plausible and actually true.)

Stats from Season 1

Here are the stats for ranked games (with mirror matches exclude) by character:

Midori	2238 / 4238  52.81%
Geiger	2358 / 4492  52.49%
DeGrey	2731 / 5257  51.95%
Lum	2202 / 4310  51.09%
Rook	2367 / 4689  50.48%
Grave	2516 / 4987  50.45%
Argagarg2592 / 5172  50.12%
Jaina	2503 / 5107  49.01%
Valerie 2486 / 5231  47.52%
Setsuki 2924 / 6436  45.43%

Yomi's balance has held up remarkably well, so we're very happy about it. It remains closer balanced than any known fighting game. What's interesting about these stats is that Midori is often ranked last in tier lists while Grave is often ranked first. Grave doesn't even crack the top half of the chart here though, and Midori is #1. That said, all these percentages are very close anyway.

Now let's look at those stats ranked by popularity instead of by win-rate:

Setsuki 2924 / 6436  45.43%
DeGrey	2731 / 5257  51.95%
Valerie 2486 / 5231  47.52%
Argagarg2592 / 5172  50.12%
Jaina	2503 / 5107  49.01%
Grave	2516 / 4987  50.45%
Rook	2367 / 4689  50.48%
Geiger	2358 / 4492  52.49%
Lum	2202 / 4310  51.09%
Midori	2238 / 4238  52.81%

Midori is dead last in popularity even though he was first in win-rate. Lum is second to last here, and he is complicated to play well. Setsuki is considered easy to play and is the most popular character. This is ironic because Setsuki's original purpose was to appeal to Magic: the Gathering player who could understand her weirdness more readily. Because she can draw a lot of cards if her hand is empty, it means that doing strange things to just throw your cards away is actually good, even if it's counter-intuitive. It turns out that Setsuki is a favorite amongst new players though, even ones who aren't from MTG. It turns out that people just really love drawing a lot of cards.

Another note here is that players who are not really familiar with asymmetric games such as fighting games often say "but if one character is the best, why doesn't everyone play only that character??" Of course this never happens, as evidenced by: all fighting games, ever. There are a lot of reasons to prefer one character over another. Maybe you think someone is just cool. Maybe you enjoy the game mechanics of that character more. Often what happens is that your own personal skills allow you to be better at "mechanic A" that some character can do than "mechanic B" that the supposed best character does. Your personal win-rate can be higher by choosing the character you're more suited to play, rather than what some tier list claims. And again, these percentages show that ALL characters are capable of winning just fine, so you can play whoever you want. The spread is surprisingly even across all characters.

Matchmaking

When you click the quickmatch button, you're ranked with someone as close in skill to you as possible. The matchmaking system uses an Elo-like system (as is common in Chess). Note that it does NOT use the feature of Microsoft's TrueSkill that makes a win later count for much less than a win now. I think this stems from a fundamental disagreement I have with that system. If you win 10 games in a row a year from now against very strong opponents, you deserve to move in the rankings by the exact same amount as if you won 10 games against strong opponents today. You don't have to worry about the system "judging" that it thinks you're terrible and handicapping your gains to conform to its beliefs. Winning is winning and you deserve your points.

It's entirely possible that you are pretty good with one character but terrible with another character. Our matchmaking takes that into account. You choose your character before the matchmaking step, so if you are used to rocking everyone with DeGrey, you'll be ranked pretty high with him and face good opponents. If you suck at Geiger though, you can pick Geiger, click Quickmatch, and face other sucky people like you. Another way of putting this is that you can lose all day with Geiger without even affecting your DeGrey ranking.

You can also still play "custom games" that are outside of the matchmaking system. Here, you can play anyone you want, with settings of your choice, including a "best of 1" game. You can practice here without worrying about ranking (not that you should worry anyway!)

Ranking Up

When you first start playing Yomi at fantasystrike.com, you'll have a rank of "Student 1." Here's a list of the ranks you'll go through:

Student 1 (Flower)
Student 2 (Grasshopper)
Student 3 (Mouse)
Student 4 (Dove) 
Student 5 (Bunny)
Student 6 (Ferret)
Student 7 (Penguin)
Student 8 (Gazelle) 
Student 9 (Dolphin)
Student 10 (Monkey)  

As you win games, you rank up through the student ranks. Losing does NOT subtract anything. This makes the newbie experience a bit more friendly in that you can only get positive feedback, really. During this student phase, you can play any character you want (or multiple characters) and it all contributes to your account's overall Yomi student ranking. The matchmaking system is still in effect here, so if you win a lot you'll be playing better people and if you lose a lot you'll be playing worse people.

After you pass Student 10 (Monkey), you graduate to the Master Ranks. Here they are:

Master 1 (Disciple)
Master 2 (Journeyman)
Master 3 (Adept)
Master 4 (Veteran) 
Master 5 (Expert)
Master 6 (Virtuoso)
Master 7 (Hero)
Master 8 (Champion) 
Master 9 (Paragon)
Master 10 (Legend)
Grandmaster

These ranks work differently than the student ranks. First, they are separated by character. For example, you could play Rook and Valerie during the student phase, and you'd reach Master 1 with ALL your characters. If you continued to play only Rook and Valerie, your Rook and Valerie will reach higher Master levels but your other characters will remain at Master 1 level.

Next, these ranks are not as forgiving as the student ranks. Losing really does make you lose points here. That said, you will still probably progress at least a bit through these ranks, even if you're a bad player. Imagine that in reality, you're in the 40th percentile of players, meaning that you're only better than 40% of the people, and most players are better than you. The ranking system is tuned so that your Master Level will eventually be about Master Level 4, after you play enough games. You'll still have the experience of progressing, but the ladder is a skill-based measure in the end, and it converges to Elo score. So just to be clear, that means the top players are there because of their Elo ranking (their ability to win) and not simply because they played more.

We will probably reset the ladder each season, and keep records of winners of previous seasons. We will also probably hide names in the leaderboard that are inactive for too long. If you're top, you should actually play instead of retiring on a high number.

Tournaments

Player-run tournaments are highly encouraged, and you can get involved with them on my forums or on boardgamegeek.com. Hopefully you can also start a local tournament scene in your area. Feel free to practice online to learn the top strats first, then crush your friends locally.

Enjoy!

Comments

[Rik Newman (Remy77077)]

I just read this again because Sirlin linked to it from the fantasy strike forum and thought of a few more comments to add.

I was joking re the "Dolphin" rank thing. :-) I am indeed past that now and almost at Master 1, as I knew I would if I played enough, it's just that, being a fan of the Miami Dolphins NFL team, I slightly tempted to never play any more once I reached Dolphin rank, just because I liked the rank name so much! Whilst I have little time to actually play Yomi, I'm anxious to get to Master 1 to really see if I'm actually any good and to start to keep an eye on how many points I get to my rank changes with every win/loss as I presume that will then start to reflect what my true ELO is.

I do think that the 'rank grind period' to even starting to get a visible real ranking at Yomi is a little too long for me (52 games and counting, even though I'm winning over 50%). I know from this article that my true ELO is there being calculated behind the scenes for matchmaking, but personally I'd have rather been seeing where I was in some kind of true skill rank system much sooner. But that's very hard to gauge from player to player as it depends how much time the player spends developing their knowledge skills outside of playing actual matches, and also on that players personal attitude to "being really ranked" & how much positive feedback they "need". As a comparison, StarCraft II (battlenet 2.0) essentially gives you a visible skill score (your league level) after only 5 matches! But of course it's likely to be very wrong & they risk giving negative feedback to players a lot. Halo Reach Ranked Mode (Arena) has varied, but it's somewhere in between, I think at one point I played you needed to play around 30 matches to get a visible rank - which was skewed downwards by the negative variable in trueskill so was extremely likely to be lower than your 'real skill'.

I feel it would also be nicer if all of this information on the ranking system was more clearly displayed in the game (or at least in the fs.com guide) rather than being somewhat hidden away here on this article! I commented about that here before amongst other things.

Regarding Setsuki's popularity, I am sure it's more because she seems 'easy' to play, once you understand the basics about her, rather than just the 'drawing lots of cards' thing.
Because of her abilities, you can, for the most part, ignore the card/hand management part of the game, and even parts of the yomi/options part of the game. ie: at least as a beginner Setsuki player, you can choose to reduce the game down to either Attack or Throw every round, and then attempt to dump your hand as quickly as possible at all times! I imagine the subtlety of becoming a good Setsuki player is to move beyond this simplistic approach, but still, it's always there as an option for any player. And I'd note, with this approach, when it doesn't work it's easy to blame it on "luck" too - so there's an immediate 'excuse' in any self-analysis by a losing player. These are all very attractive qualities for many players, especially those who are not especially competitive, or who are just not sure how much time they can invest in a new game or how much they really understand it (or want to understand it) - or they just don't like admitting mistakes (which is probably just about everyone to varying degrees! ;-) )

It's a vague analogy of course, but in M:TG terms I'd equate Setsuki more to playing a fast aggro Red deck - dump everything and attack with everything as fast as possible.
I feel someone like Grave appeals more to the card draw / hand management interested player (ie: Blocks are a card draw engine, and Grave can draw even more off a block!). Arg I'd compare somewhat to a M:TG Control style of deck and someone like Geiger would be more like a M:TG combo deck.