Duelyst has an interesting ranking system in that you need chevrons, or in other words, more wins than losses to level up. But how are chevrons created? How many do you need?
For the sake of simplicity, we’ll ignore bronze division (since each rank is basically a tier).
To climb to rank 20 to 10, you need 3 (chevrons) x 5 (ranks 20-16) + 4 (chevrons) x 5 (ranks 15-11) for a grand total of 35 chevrons.
From 10 to 5, you need 25 and from 5 to 1, you need 30. From S-rank, rankings shift to MMR based, so we won’t go into detail there.
Now we know how many chevrons you need, but how do chevrons change hands?
A single game will result in one of the following changes to chevron count (ignoring win streaks):
- Player one +1/ Player two -1
- 0 net change
- Player one -1/ Player two +1
In other words, there will always be a net result of zero in terms of chevron count, if you ignore win streaks. There are no win streaks in diamond, so let’s start our analysis there.
The only way for chevrons to be created in diamond is for a person at rank 5 to lose.
Since 30 chevrons are needed to ascend to S-rank, we can conclude that it takes 30 losses from players at rank 5 with no chevrons for a single player to ascend. But that’s under the assumption that only same-rank players duel. What if a gold player duels a diamond and loses? A chevron is inexplicably ‘created’ in the diamond bracket.
An interesting phenomenon. What if a diamond player duels an S-rank player and loses (basically every game past rank 2 or 3). Well, obviously a chevron is lost and converted to MMR. Hmmm, perhaps that begs the question: is MMR really just chevrons in disguise?
But if there really is no (significant) difference between MMR and chevrons, could we assume they are one and the same? What if we were to combine the S-rank and diamond brackets?
In duelyst, the ladder is designed to put the best players on top and the less best ones below. Thus, we can use the assumption that higher ranked players have better win rates (win / total games). If we operate on this assumption, and examine the Di-S ranked bracket, we find that as the top players beat the living crap out of less top players, chevrons are inexplicably lost because top players inherently lose less than worse players.
Thus, we can conclude that MMR is drawn upwards in the Di-S bracket, starting from the event horizon located somewhere along ranks 2-3 where diamonds start fighting S-rankers. Under this new model, the losing rank 5 diamonds will only boost other diamonds to rank 2-3 with approximately 15 losses before the aspiring diamonds will have to beat up S-ranks and steal their lunch MMR to ascend.
To be precise, they will need to win 12-18 games more than they lose. But 12-18 is a rather large sample size. How does one get so lucky as to beat 12-18 people that are supposed to be better than you? I have 2 solutions.
- be unhealthily lucky.
- be better than the low ranked S-ranks.
Ignoring outliers (cuz ill never be that lucky), this means that as more and more people ascend, it will get harder and harder to ascend. Thus, we can with great probability, conclude that by Day 30 of the month, we will have reached peak difficulty to rank up to S. Interestingly and in complete contrast, by day 30, the lower ladders will have been thoroughly saturated and ranking up to diamond will be at the easiest point.
#Happy climbing 