The Feast Alt situation: preventing players from having multiple chars in Top 100
The Feast Alt situation: preventing players from having multiple characters in Top 100
Hello everyone, Adalric Adart from Moogle here,
Making this post to discuss an issue that has been arising more and more since Stormblood seasons started for Feast: the use of alt characters and their positioning in Top 100.
1/ What is an alt?
As a lot of people here know, an alt is a secondary character, used by a player that already has a main character on which they did most of the ingame content. Usually the alt is lower-leveled, has less jobs, no Free Company and the barest gear he could afford.
In Feast, alts are usually made by players in order to train another role in lower ranks without disrupting higher-tier matches too much. A Diamond tank player, for instance, could make a healer alt in order to learn the role in Bronze, pitting him against players of similar skill and giving him the opportunity to learn.
Alts become an issue in three cases :
a) The player uses the alt on the same role as their main one,
b) The player makes their alt reach Top 100,
c) The player uses their alt to force losses on players they dislike.
a) Why is using an alt on the same role as your main an issue?
By virtue of not being the main character, alts can falsify the matchmaking due to being of a lower rank. As we know, matchmaking often balances teams by putting lower ranked players with higher ranked players. By playing on an alt, a higher-ranked player can pass themselves as a lower-ranked player in the eyes of matchmaking.
When the higher-ranked player is on a different role, there is mostly no issue since their inexperience on their new role makes them nearly equivalent to a lower-ranked player in skill.
But when the higher-ranked player uses their alt on the very same role or job as their main, then there is a problem: despite being a higher-level player, the alt player is seen as a lower-level player by matchmaking, and is thus made to play with higher-ranked players in their team.
Instead of having one player being the spearhead of their team against an equivalent team, you could easily end up with a team having two very strong players (higher ranked player on their main + alt player) against a regular team. For instance, a Diamond DRK playing DRK on their Gold Alt would be matched with a High-Platinum NIN against a Gold DRK and a High-Platinum NIN.
Alts, especially on the same role as their main, thus cause clear imbalances in matchmaking.
b) What is the issue with alts reaching Top 100?
Here the issue is a lot more clear-cut. Top 100 is meant to be reached by 100 players, but alts take another spot in there. On Chaos, alts represented at least 7 players, meaning Top 100 was occupied by only 93 players.
This cannot continue, even with the server split having a chance to resolve the situation. Top 100 alts are disrespectful to the reward itself (since by definition an alt is not often played, sending them the reward is a waste), and to other players.
For instance, Season 11 alts were seven, meaning the 101st to 107th players were deprived of Top 100 and its rewards by players who took 2 spots.
This issue was solved in FRC by forbidding the use of alts and removing their whole team from the rankings if people made them anyway. But it never was applied in Solo Rankings.
c) Using alts to force losses on disliked players?
Even more of an easy issue: since an alt is not your principal character, one usually cares less about their rating and Top 100 position, and can thus use them to play badly and make disliked people lose rating. And since high score is a thing, the alt doesn't even lose rating.
2/ How can alts be fought against?
Since the community itself isn't willing to stop playing on their alts, with some threatening complainers to play with more alts, Square Enix needs to step up and do something. A few solutions exist that would combat the phenomenon:
a) Making Solo Rating common to all characters on an account on a datacenter
This would prevent players from playing their alts from skewing matchmaking, since no matter what character you play on, you'd have the same rating and thus would have the same matchmaking.
This would be limited on characters on the same datacenter.
b) Making Top 100 common to all characters on an account on a datacenter
This would prevent alt players from taking multiple spots in Top 100 and thus ensuring as much as possible that Top 100 contains 100 players. The displayed character in Top 100 would be either chosen by the player through Lodestone, or simply determined by which character a Feast match was played on last.
Of course this would also be limited to characters on a same datacenter.
c) Applying the same rules as FRC
The easy way: if an alt is reported and spotted, both the main character and the alt are removed from Top 100 and cannot compete until the next season. This is what happened with FRC teams and a good rule that should be implemented in Solo Rankings.
d) One role, one rating
In order to allow players to train new jobs on their main character without relying on an alt, rating could be tied to role instead of character. That way there'd be no penalizing your team if playing a role with no proficiency.
3/ How can Square Enix spot alts?
A few ways that can be applied independently or concurrently to each other:
- Characters are on the same service account.
- Characters are on a different service account but share identical various information.
- Similar or identical character names.
Of course, due investigation should be done for each individual case in order to not have false positives flagged as alt characters.
4/ Alts on other Datacenters
As we know some players have started playing in other datacenters than their own - if we include those in the calculation for alt numbers for Chaos, we reach around 12-15 alts present in Top 100 - unsure about the rest of the DCs. Now, even though one person is taking one spot on one top100, some have expressed their disagreement with this state of matters.
Solutions to solve this are unclear - making players linked to one Datacenter while the others do not show them in Top 100 is potentially possible, but how does the "Home DC" get determined? Nonetheless, this is another issue the SE team should look into, especially since those alts often use their mains' name on other DCs.
5/ Why have alts started to appear so much only since Stormblood?
Lowering the level limitation for Feast allowed people to make alts way more easily than they ever could during Heavensward, where alts were present but not rampant.
6/ Conclusion
Overall, the use of alts made Feast a much less enjoyable game mode than it could be, and defeated the purpose of Top 100. While one may argue that having two characters in Top 100 is simply a proof of skill, it remains a striking display of egoism and flippant disregard for the rest of the players.
Square Enix needs to act on that matter (among others in the way Top 100 and rating is handled) so that players, especially new players that still struggle and could have reached Top 100 without the alts' presence, do not become disillusionned and keep playing.
Thank you for reading, and I do hope other player do say what they think of this issue.
Best,
Adalric
EDIT : Title limitation removed the final zero from "Top 100"
EDIT (Kaposhipi): it's ok I got you.
OTHER EDIT : added some stuff about alts from other DCs.
ANOTHER EDIT : added a new suggestion from thread comments.
