Ranked Warring Request; Open Letter to Ched

Its simple really you put in a sort of decay that again every other ranked system has if you dont war then you rank down automatically

Ched sims showed that it will be pretty jacked up at first before the ranks settle, but then after 2k wars it was showing roughly 300/1000 unfair fights, he didn't show any sims after that, but I'd like to assume that it will only get better with time.

Punching up once in a while is not a bad thing at all, it becomes a test of fortitude and allows for stategical growth, not to mention, if your team climbs higher than they belong, then it's time to take your L and consider what needs to be done to grow.

You also need to look into the blatant "cache farming" going on atm.
Everyone & their cousin endlessly jumping from 1 farm faction to another to circumvent the waiting period, wars ending in 7 seconds, new factions springing up like there's no tomorrow, etc and all this just to farm caches & make a quick buck.............. I really don't (wanna) think this is what the Admins or Committee envisaged to achieve during the endless decade long discussions/implementation of this system.

1 easy quick way to reduce/eliminate this would be to put a small "eligibility" factor both on members & factions.. eg -
A member can only be eligible to count/participate if they have spent a minimum of xx days in the faction...
A faction can be eligible to participate if its atleast xxx days old.

Running 2,000 wars (across several dozen participating factions) to reach a 70% "good" war ratio is a lot of wars to slog through.

If you have already simulated the rankings, why not promote a result that roughly orders the factions and assigns a rank, and let them sort it out from there? Place the stronger factions at a higher level to start and let subsequent real wars promote or demote them.

We could also go with a league system. You wouldn't expect local National League teams to be paired with Premier teams. What would be the point? A league system in warring would allow the small teams to have good matches within their league without the prospect of facing a HoF faction.

Personally, I still like the idea of having squad battles (teams of 20-25 within a faction) for the top factions. And my logic is, this is the only way to make HoF fighting unpredictable and affordable.

In the current ranked system, the HoF factions just don't have enough pairs. It would take a long time for them to promote, if ever.

Without ranking, they might promote faster, but it doesn't make the fights fun or interesting. The only thing worse than warring when you are certain you will lose is to war when you are certain you will win and the other side knows it and doesn't show up.

At least if you're fighting a losing battle, you're still fighting. But fighting a winning battle when everyone flies or self-hosps is no battle at all. And forcing a mid-tier faction to fight NS or Monarch or CR or PT will result in exactly that result.

Ten months from now, the top five are sitting in platinum doing nothing, because there's nothing to do. A faction like PT Penguins or Nub Navy has at least 30 decent patches, and the difference in stats between them is small. If they make a few changes to their roster or tactics, they can change the war outcomes.

But not only are the top factions fewer in number, they also have wide gaps between them. That means in order to shift their odds for winning, they need to make a big change. There's no easy way to change "up" unless two HoF factions merge and one keeps the best of both. It's easier to change "down" as we are seeing with SA and a drop in members.

Warring as a 100-man top five faction will be pointless. There will be one fight against each faction at that level, and we can pretty much predict the outcome. If we're lucky, we might get a surprise or two. But then that's it. There's nowhere to go from there -- because you can't move the needle with small roster or tactic changes.

Warring with HoF squads, otoh, would allow everyone in the faction to be involved but on separate squads, and the faction success would be dependent upon the success of all of their squads. It is NOT a foregone conclusion that all four or five squads from NS would win every fight. And each squad would have a wide variety of opponents.

At the end of the day, with squad battles, NS would probably still be #1 overall. But in getting there, squad warring would be less predictable and more fun, offering more variations to all participants.

I like the way the system is obviously ranks are not right but it is producing a ton of great match ups and I see a lot of people having a lot of fun I fear if changes are made it will make the wars stagnant and boring then we will see the same people complaining how boring the war system is

Last week, the point was made that CRLF can't provide good war analysis sitting in a retirement faction. I disagree as the analysis is based on data and not my personal warring experiences, which would be different from someone else's anyway.

However, there's no point in leaving that as an argument point, and I've been wanting to try out warring anyway. So I moved back to JFK from JFR (i.e. "personal" enlistment).

While I don't want to speak for JFK leadership, I can say that JFK has every intention of enlisting soon. Getting paired in a war does not suddenly confer some mystical knowledge of the intricacies of ranked warring. The data is still the data, and one faction's (or person's) experiences do not change that.

I understand the feelings behind the "how would you know?" argument, but in the case of ranked warring, it doesn't hold water.

Most points I don’t disagree with at all (and certainly not about punching up/adopting strategy/learning from mistakes).


Where we differ is in that point about “where you belong”. It just further entrenches an elite getting access to the very best caches while also dominating the other game power drivers like rackets. I think it’s no bad thing to have platinum ranked factions at all sizes - once they start to capitalise on their success and grow their members they will find new challenges or overcome them for further growth. I think it’s no bad thing for factions like yours on the first page and factions like mine on the second to be looking over their shoulders to keep them on their toes.


I suppose when it comes down to it I like the dynamic where the ranking is a measure against your peers rather than an absolute linear one.

That training break wouldnt happen to wind up ending when all of the immediate threats to JFK have ranked up, would it?

I think that is a very defeatist attitude. It's not an 'elite', it's a sorting algorithm. With any sorting algorithm, the first question is obviously "What order do we want them sorted in?". Right now, we have HoF which sorts by total respect.

With Ranked Warfare, the answer becomes "by rank", to which the obvious question is "Wtf does 'rank' even mean?".

Answer that question, and you'll have solved the problem.

No, it wouldn't. And as you can see, no one in HoF is ranking anywhere any time soon. Where is it written that every faction must leap to engage every new mechanism in Torn as soon at it's released?

If you discount Christmas, this release has really been out for a few weeks. Many established factions are on/off for training / chaining over two-three months. Only the noob factions, who often flip members quickly and who have no real warring specials anyway, are on weekly alterations.

I honestly don't see what difference a couple weeks make in the enlisting.

Why would squads be any less predictable?

Atm the most impredictable factor is participation. If you take that away by making sure all participating will be there, if anything you are making it more predictable.

How many squads could a faction have?

If more than one, what would you be ranking factions or squads?

If you are ranking squads, why are factions even needed to be considered at all? The only role they would play would be better war perks.

It would only be true the pool of oponents a team could get would increase if each faction was allowed multiple squads. But that would likely lead to factions having to war themselves (other squads of the same faction) or again having a bunch of people being left out in the cold because they already trained too much (and others would easily even up their squads to avoid them).

Also would not squads exponentially increase the one sided matches considering the current formula of only considering part of the stats of the top individuals?

Personally i think squads would bring more issues than it would solve.

I did try and keep up with this thread - way too much now. I see where both sides are coming from. (HoF not having much to do at the top / the 'lower' factions having "fair" fights and enjoying a new thing to do.

Can't the word 'ranked' be dropped, call it "match-made Warring" - that way people get the fair fights matched up to factions which they have a CHANCE of beating / the war could likely go either way. Can even drop the ranks, just somewhere if you fancy a war, enlist, you know its going to be a good time and you can get a Cache or two out of it. Nice alternative to chaining and keeps territories out of it.

Then introduce a monthly (or other time basis) ladder, for actual ranked warring, which could have greater rewards to encourage enlistment from all factions. Literally just another button next to "match-made warring", exactly same mechanics, but properly ranked.

I guess the issue with my above idea is perhaps only the top end would enlist, making the same issue this thread was possibly about in the first place? But if the cache rewards were enhanced or other things added to the winnings it may encourage other 'lower' factions to join too?

Personally I think the main issue which needs to be tamed here at the moment is those abusing the cache rewards.

The 'where we belong' or a proper ranking isn't the only thing to consider here, but regarding that you also have to take into account that the factions asking for this are factions who have worked their asses off for multiple years to try and become (one of the) best, like any team of players in a competitive game would. They have a lot of very active, long term players that have been loyal to the game for years, so I think it's now strange to call for a system that ranks according to power. Besides, when it's non-linear, it will result in a gradient system where a 'weaker' faction gets more rewards than it's slightly stronger peer divided into another pile by the system, or simply again results in inability to find proper matchups. By dividing factions into proper tiers decided by strength and widening parameters for matchmaking, you will eventually get less mismatched wars and on top of that always have matches around, which brings me to my second point.

We also want to participate more often than we currently can. Seeing faction get matched within a day each time while your faction is in queue for 7 days just sucks balls. Does that mean getting matched with a monarch, PT or NS main for us for example? Yes. But that's still more participation. This will also mean that besides the odd real small faction vs a current HOF, it would more likely result in those matchups, whereas they didn't happen when we were enlisted in the same period as in this case Monarch. I understand you don't want to get stomped by a HOF faction as a smaller faction, but simply barring them from participating at the same rate doesn't seem like a fitting solution either. We're also players in the system that want to participate; the general disdain for the HOF by non-HOF factions here is insane and completely looks over that aspect.

Also everyone has to get over the whole caches thing; we don't care. It's currently being abused by players in farming factions because the current system allows it, but that's individual players and not faction families. I know that in NS2 we keep all of them because they're fun toys, but half of them are unusable in a proper fighting meta. Besides, they will drop in value significantly when more enter the system and won't even come close to covering the costs of a war when that happens, since they currently go for ridiculous prices.
Also, the point

It just further entrenches an elite getting access to the very best caches

shows that you obviously haven't researched how ranked warring works. The caches don't get better, you just get more of them in higher tier wars. It's still the same RNG. A bronze faction can still get all reds while a diamond faction only gets windup knuckle dusters. And trust me, they suck, we own them :')

The previous system, where small factions would get abused for everyone and their mums as ranked war fillers was a bad system for noobs. A proper ranking system where you have uneven matchups isn't. You can't really call yourself a competitive game or encourage active and competitive playing if you completely dismiss that aspect of it.


edit: My sentences aren't sentences in long posts, still says the same thing

Disclaimer - my small faction has not warred. We've been flirting with 10 active members and will sign up at some point, but we have no experience in the current system.

I think everyone would agree that a single "Ranked Warring" system should intuitively result in the top factions eventually getting to the top ranks and factions like mine running around near the bottom... last is a rank too. I also think, if pushed, everyone would like the HoF factions to be able to find wars, it's no fun for those players to not be able to use the new shiny ranked warring toy. Lower factions just don't want the toy wrecked for them in the process.

The fear I'm reading (and I've read much of this thread, i hate flying) is that factions do not want a series of wars in which they are the unfair underdog. Maybe one every once in a while, but no one wants to fight an unwinnable/uphill battle a bunch of times in a row, it's discouraging and takes the fun away.

In your post, you clearly have a means to identify what the matching system deems an "unfair war" in the simulation - so let's use that criteria somehow to prevent factions getting bad matchup after bad matchup.

As there is a "Recently Fought" criteria in the matching process to prevent immediate rematches, could a similar "Recent Unfair Underdog" criteria be added to prevent a faction from matching multiple wars in a short time frame where they are the underdog in an unfair war per your matching criteria? Maybe this is five wars, so if they get an unfair matchup as the underdog faction they can't be put in this position for their next four wars. They could still be an underdog in a relatively fair matchup of course. I would ask that these wars be identified for the lower faction leaders, as in they get an event noting this war is outside the "fair" matching criteria, so they know they will get better matchups next time - better to keep morale up I would hope).

The drawback I see is that this could slow the sorting process for the ranking table, but it would prevent an individual lower faction from bearing the brunt of the long-term rise of the HoF factions in some weird bad RNG matching streak (we know RNG happens, so someone would get screwed by a pure ranked-based system with a series of unfair underdog fights).

Anyway, it's probably too much of a compromise, but every other solution (except for the either/or you present) seems way more complicated than just preventing a faction from getting beat up multiple times in a short timeframe.

EDIT - typos

It’s only temporary you mong. It will balance out.

Personally we already have a war system that pits factions against those that are unfair. I've been looking forward to this war system as a mid tier faction.

Currently with territory wars 90% of ours end in Raid threats from bigger factions so we've done little wars since raid system came into effect.

With the Ranked War I personally feel it needs to not be "Ranked" wars but rename it to something else and keep this current system in place. I like the idea of having a fair, uncontested one on one fight. We don't have that right now and I think changing the system we will end up with too many wars that are one sided.

I get the HOF want to have some sort real rank, so have a tournament style war system that can run every few months so they can Duke it out for top dog.

This goes in Suggestions bro

The way I see things, the current ranking system shows how skilled at *relatively even* wars a faction is.


Factions at the top have long sought to monopolise players, territory, and rackets in order to advance fastest. While this is not a bad strategy, it harms the competitive element of the game that many of said factions wish to see. You may see the problem as stemming from the system, but I see it as stemming from previous abuse of earlier systems.

Without the financial dominance offered by such a strategy, I doubt the situation would be as it is today. Simply, HOF factions have monopolised to the point that they can’t possibly be matched apart from with their immediate rivals. A single system that doesn’t suit their personal goals is apparently worth this uproar.


I appreciate that without HOF factions, many players and areas of torn would be much poorer. The cost of keeping them happy should not actively discourage newer players though.

The current system encourages players of all levels to commit, learn and apply knowledge, as well as tightening bonds and rewarding activity. The parameters may not make for a ‘fair’ top end, but scrapping the system to rebalance seems too heavy handed (especially so early in the ranking period).

EDIT (ps)
300 per 1000 being unfair fights is simply not good enough IMO - 1/3 wars being pointless morale crushes would kill the system very quickly at the lower end.

If anyone can make it to platinum just by warring long enough then it's not truly ranked warring now is it? Which is the same issue people had with respect rankings - it shows who's farming more, not who's preforming the best.

Im not sure what you meant about the elite getting the best caches, I think all caches are the same in their respective category, and higher rank is only increased number of caches, a bronze faction could still open a bad-ass red gun.

The 'elite' dominating the top of a ranked system is how it should be, after all having a true ranked war system was the main point, and caches with new gear is just a bonus, if you look at it the other way around then it just becomes cache farming with ranks as a side effect.

I covered this in detail previously, but at 70 pages in, you could be forgiven for missing it.

Squads would only be used for the top dozen or so factions.

The squads are a subdivision of the faction, and the trickiest part (from a coding perspective) is managing multiple chains and wars for a single faction. It would require adding a squad primary key.

Squads would mean that instead or 12 factions fighting, you could have 48-60 squads fighting. This provides more warring opportunities and a wider variety of pairings. While member changes to a squad would be possible, they would not happen quickly, to avoid simply rotating your top players.

Inevitably, some squads in a faction will be stronger than others, and one person being away for a fight could determine the outcome.

If you asked me to predict the outcome of PT-Fam vs NS, it would be a short conversation.

But if you grouped all PT-Fam members into squads and all NS members into squads and then randomly picked a squad from each side... that could be very interesting, depending on who is in each squad.

The people actually fighting those battles would want to see what happens. The other members in their factions would also be interested. And the community as a whole would find it engaging.

As for why the faction is even important... if you do not see the value in your 100-member community, then I can only say that I am sorry for you and I hope that is a personal failing and not a reflection on your faction.

For many of us, our faction is our family, and the extended faction is our extended family. Top factions aren't just top stats. They are also top in a sense of community. Most people in these factions won't want to give that up. If they do change families it's usually after giving it some serious thought.

The squads are a part of the faction, period. Think of them more as raiding parties. The squads do rank amongst themselves. But the faction's rank is a total of the squad ranks, and it is the faction's overall rank that would allow it to move up or down.