Current Thesis Statement and the Adventure so far.

As you know, my previous thesis was met with some relatively negative feedback and concerns. I have spent the last month and a half trying to discover my passions as well as what I want to directly effect within the game industry. Through many sessions with different professors, long discussions, and free writing exercises, I have found that my passion is rooted in competition. That brought me to the different ways that competition can effect games, but the majority involve a look at the psychology or sociology of competition and the environments they create. My strengths are in analysis and mathematics, so I decided that taking a bite at psychology and sociology just weren't for me.  That being said, the impact that mathematics can make on competitive games is the ranking systems that they employ to order their player base. After much deliberation and iteration on a new thesis statement, I have come to this,

Ranking systems in Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) Games require a new system to better calculate a player's skill after a reset.

I initially wanted to tackle all competitive online games that utilized a reset for the ranking system, but determined that it was too large of a scope and focusing on a genre of games would provide more beneficial overall. MOBA's are currently one of the largest played genres of video games and the most successful one, League of Legends, utilizes resets once a year for their ranking system.  Some other MOBA's do not use resets, but the experiences I have seen in League of Legends have not been very positive with respect to the ranking reset.  The primary problem I see involves the greatest extremes of the players in the system, where they are effectively squished towards the "middle" or average player by averaging their rating with a predetermined rating. Players that are already near the middle do not see much impact, but those that are greatly below are freely given a bump up, and those at the very top are unfairly plummeted.  League of Legends uses a tier based point and promotion system for their rankings, yet none of that seems relevant with regard to what a players starting ranking is before their ten required placement games.

I need to look more into other MOBA's to find others that use a reset, otherwise the entirety of my focus will be on League of Legends, which is not necessarily a bad thing considering the thousands of papers, journal articles, magazine articles, websites, blogs, and theses on World of Warcraft. I am fearful that getting too narrow will limit the amount of knowledge I can bring to the community of games as a whole. I have very recently considered looking at the overall impact of resets, and determining the pros and cons of these resets and what games would best benefit or be harmed by resets used in ranking systems, but that is getting back to the more psychological and sociological research methods, which I have some weaknesses in understanding and utilizing since my mathematics degree lends all of my strengths to more analytical and algorithmic based thinking.

Through a literature review, I have found out that competition seems to only improve gameplay experiences, as the people who do not enjoy competition in games will stay away from that portion of a game, and the players that look for competition tend to flock to the game more often with better results. Reading a few papers on "metagame" has also gotten me interested in what a ranking system would look like that did not allow for any out-of-game strategic elements to take place, but instead putting the ranking on pure skill based game-play. Mostly just a passing thought, but could be interesting nonetheless.