I'm totally against betting points. The ranks are supposed to show the participants' skill in textual combat, which includes a variety of things - from knowledge of combat to analysis of your opponents strategy to forming one of your own - and allowing to bet points will skew the results, as a lucky bet based on simply the reputation of a fighter, and not an independent evaluation of their skill, could bring one higher up into the ranks than they have earned.
Betting anything else? Fine by me, that could actually be pretty fun.
I'm holding off on any sort of wagering/betting system from the initial release anyways since it adds complexity. I'd rather open up a discussion on that topic once the basic ranking system has been live for a while.
Here are some screenshots of what I've got working so far locally:
Users can opt-in to displaying their arena stats in their userbit:
Ranked games clearly stand out when viewing the Arena:
An Arena mod can update a ranked roleplay's outcomes (one for each participant).
They can make these changes on the "Edit Roleplay" page of a ranked Arena roleplay:
Added Ranked vs Unranked setting to the "New Roleplay" page when creating a roleplay in the Arena forum:
Thoughts?
I figured the simplest implementation would be to require Arena mods to manually update the outcomes of ranked games. Maybe there's a stickied Arena thread where GMs enqueue their their ranked roleplays once they're ready to be judged, and the Arena mods can work through the queue. It's the opposite of "nice and streamlined", but I can improve that in time. My goal right now is to build a starting point that is easy for me to change in response to feedback and better ideas.
So far I've implemented the point system that Rilla explained in his PM proposal:
- Everyone starts with 1,000 Arena points
- Wins = +100 points
- Draws = +50 points
- Losses = +0 points
It's something we can always change (and recalculate for everyone) in the future.