Title for the Legend league

the grind to legend will be difficult:

why are you faulting me for being smart & only playing just as much as necessary?  i've been preoccupied with unlocking chatterbox & puzzle addict, which doesn't leave a lot of time for games.

i actually got into stone & bronze leagues accidentally when i was unlocking team pillar.

you're missing the main point of my post entirely anyways, although i've been very clear about it:

i'm a bit miffed that i'm so close to collecting all achievements, only to see some additional and extremely difficult ones looming in the near future.

it's horrible timing for me & that is all, but thanks for your detective work & expert analysis, holmes.

EXACTLY

you realize that the grind to legend i was discussing with martin was from my current position in leagues, right?

perhaps you should work on your reading comprehension skills before launching any more personal attacks in public.

How about I sashay them in private then?

You're taking me a little too seriously. Obviously legend will be harder than bronze, and obviously I know that.

I mean... If you need to start an argument there are countless forums with it... No need to start one anew...

I'm not sure how you figure it was rigged in favor of titled players.  Most of the players I've seen leading divisions over the last few months are in the sub-1000 rating category playing a ton of blitz games.  In fact, looking at the Legend leaderboard, I only see 3 titled players in the top 500+.  If anything, it seems to be favoring extremely low rated players who play a lot of quick games.

Yeah, you wouldn't know
I see the person who won your champion division didn't even use arenas.

When leagues were competitive you had to use arenas since they give bonus trophies, and because high rated players could win 90-100% of the games they were able to win more trophies per hour.

Trophies per hour was the meaningful metric since people were going all out. Some had over 20,000 trophies for a single week. The user who won your champion league had 1000... top players can get that many in less than 8 hours.

I understand your point, in theory, but that isn't how it is working out in practice.  In every division I've been in, the players in the 1800+ rating ranges struggle because they are facing tougher competition which tends to lead to longer games.  For example, several weeks ago, the guy who won my division was rated 800 in blitz and played about 1000 games in that week with most of the games being 3+0 and lasting less than 15 moves.  The person currently leading my Champion league is rated ~800 in blitz and has close to 1500 trophies from blitz this week.

So yes, in theory a titled player could join an arena and rack up trophies, but you are just not seeing that happening.  If you were, you would see a lot more titled players in the Legend league.  Instead, you are seeing a lot of sub-1200 players in the Legend league and almost no titled players.

Sure, I can imagine you're right, that in the current state it's low rated players who have an advantage because their 15 minute games finish as fast as a blitz game, and so they basically get x1.7 as many trophies.

Mostly this is because many people don't even realize they're in a league, they're just playing on chess.com. Like @technical_knockout said, they were promoted multiple times without even knowing they were in a league.

But when people are going all out, bullet arenas give the highest number of trophies per hour (2-3x more than non-arena rapid games if you win a high %), and that favors high ratings.

Pretty sure a lot of the first 200 weren't titled.

edit: forgot I had the divisions. 23 of 200 were titled players.

Much lower than I expected.

I wonder how many had not one peak rating above 2200

I do agree that the distribution of trophies between bullet/blitz/and rapid could use a little tweaking, but I'm not sure how exactly.  Specifically, the problem I'm seeing is how do I compete with a 800-rated player playing 3+0 blitz games that end in less than a minute when I'm playing 10+0 rapid games?  Even if he loses half his games, when my 10+0 game goes for 20 minutes, he has 10 blitz wins in the span of my 1 game.  So I get 15 points while he gets 90 in the same time period?

The only way I can see making it more feasible is to separate the leagues by time control (e.g. a daily league, rapid league, blitz league, and bullet league).  Otherwise, it just gets too complicated trying to balance the figures.

That said, I don't take it too seriously either.  When I win my division, cool.  When I don't, no sweat.  It is a neat little side-benefit of playing.  However, in terms of encouraging improvement, I think it is a bit counter-productive.  It encourages players to play a lot of games quickly, which is not good for those 800-rated players looking to improve.  Something that might be better there is to add trophies for completing lessons and/or reviewing your games.

In the first couple of divisions, there were a lot of higher rated players. It would take a bit of work to get an accurate answer but I'm guessing over 50% never had a rating over 2200.

Yeah, I wont ask you to open 100s of profiles and dig around.

Being one of the first into champion as a career 1XXX player would be very impressive to me.

I don't know the decision making process but my guess is one of the goals was to get more members playing more games. It also had a more Arena philosophy, where rating matters less than playing games.

Also, regarding your comment about time controls, the sweet spot for lower rated players was likely blitz time controls and playing in Arenas, though some people played rapid and acted like it was blitz and so more games were played in a shorter amount of time; though it's hard to do something like that and maintain your rating

I never cared much about these arguments. If someone wants to improve they'll improve. If someone wants to grind for hours they'll understand that's not how improvement works... maybe these arguments stem from most games basing promotions on skill level, so people are annoyed that on chess.com it's just a measure of activity and not skill. I don't know.

If the mini-profile popups were reliable, it wouldn't be too hard but in spot checking, I'm estimating 25% of the very first division never had been above 2200 in any time control. There were a number of ones that their current ratings are well below that benchmark but can't say all never did without going into the profiles, so it could be 30-40% that would meet it.

Each successive division likely skewed towards more lower rated players, since those that knew about the contest were most invested in the top-prize fund and first division.

It isn't so much that I care; it is the mixed-messages of their marketing.  Promoting chess improvement and creating features that encourage activities counter to improvement is a bit odd.

Oh, I see.