Losing all the time is no fun. The same goes for winning.

When joining an on-line game, rank yourself 0-10 (0=newbie, 10=god-like), and then games can only be played by users within 2 points of each other.

The key here, is AFTER the game ends, each player gets to rate the other players according to what they think the TRUE ranking should be, and these get averaged over time. This way, someone cruel who wanted to beat up newbies would be ranked higher until he could no longer play newbies unless he gave up his profile & started all over.

Pretty soon, everyone's playing people about the same skill level, and it's more fun for all.
-- sophocles, May 20 2004

Hey, guess what this reminded me of ? Nemesis_20Man
And that link leads to ... [normzone, Apr 24 2017]

So the self-ranking really means nothing except initially?
-- ldischler, May 20 2004


Possibly this could be utilized here, too.
-- FarmerJohn, May 21 2004


People will just cheat and vote every opponent really high, so that the chances of meeting a lousy but similarly-ranked opponent increases for the next game.
-- Aerythes, May 21 2004


Are you talking about online video games?
If this is the case, xbox live employs a very similar system.
When searching for games to join, you can usually specify to search for players lower ranked, about the same or higher ranked.
This will then place you into a suitable game based on your world rankings (as you build up points as you play games, and are assigned a ranking automatically).
-- MikeOliver, May 21 2004



random, halfbakery