Athena Ranking, what is it?

Oké guys, I now totally don't understand Athena ranking anymore, care to explain some things to me?

Today I had a hotjoin, round 2 on sub-pen with just 12 seconds on the clock, after picking my gear and actually spawning, I didn't even have time left to get to the cap and, since the enemy won round one and also this round, the game ended before I could even pull the trigger. BAM! -1200 Athena rank without ever having had the possibility of playing.

Apparently your Athena rank is based on your team performance and not your individual performance, which is odd since teams tend to change quite a bit, even during a round with the number of quitters we have nowadays.

Introduction told us that the rank was based on YOUR performance during gaming, your gear and something I can't remember ... Then how come if I am MVP, we got C, my KD is 12-1 and I even had the cap, my score is negative? Or when I am the worst guy in the team, I still get +75?

Nast, as a mathematician, explain this to me please.

Well. Apart from the fact that this has to do with numbers, and mathematicians don't do numbers, what I can say is

I don't understand the bloody thing either.

From the forums:

Silvanoshi wrote:

The ATHENA Rating is a means to show other players and yourself where you stand in GRO. Often referred to as a “Threat Rating” this indicates just how dangerous you can be, based on your: Match performance, tiers of gear unlocked and your experience in-game. [in this order, note by Nast. Written somewhere else.]
[...]
Please note that the new leaderboard system only updates itself every 10-20 minutes.
[...]
Although not currently used to determine match making, once we’re satisfied with its calibration, the ATHENA Rating system can be used to determine match making.

This is the gist, I think.

What I think is that your rating (by means of points lost, or gained) is determined mainly by your performance in the last 10-20 minutes, and apparently* the system doesn't factor in either K/D, nor time spent in-game. Match result seem to have some effects on the Athena score, but single round wins seem to pass unregistered.

*  (I say "apparently" because reports like yours are just massively being spammed over the official forum - though with much worse spelling and grammar.)

For all I know, the flucutations of one's Athena rating and score could be completely and utterly random - although I would argue against such an accusation, because (a) that does make even less sense than Ubi's usual decisions, and (b) I have only ever been "demoted" (i.e. Colonel V to IV or something like that) after playing recon "a lot". On a side not though, for me, playing recon "a lot" means about an hour, because I suck horribly at it, even when camping with that OP P2W rifle I got.

Apart from that, I do not see why we should care about this system a great deal, because as the EU CM clearly stated, it is currently not used for matchmaking, and hence has no use whatsoever, except for a shiny icon that is presented next to your name. Anyone who knows this game, however, also knows that this icon is worth precisely jackshit to represent a player's skill, abilities, or "threat" to anyone. Because obviously, there is only one icon per player, but three classes which differ greatly in playstyle, effectiveness, and thus, threat.
Just as Mortem isn't much of a danger to the other team when playing spec with shotgun (sorry for taking you as an example), you very much are our best sniper, I feel, and in that role, pretty lethal to anyone who is dumb enough to try and pop his head out faaaar beyond the point. So which icon should you get? The General for the Sniper? Or the PFC on the AR? Though decision, isn't it?

You have some good points, some people are good on one map and with one class (me on markov/korolyov on SR) and suck at other maps (me with lmg on Chertanova LZ) so how to show that?
As I said in my previous post, the system doesn't even take solely your score into account but assigns the team a score with deviations from this score based on your rank in the team. So even if you get MVP for a losing team, you will lose ranking but a bit less than the rest of the team.
The scores get updated directly, but the resulting rank in the total GRO community only gets updated every 10-20 minutes. Hence the difference between the picture you can see on top of the following picture compared to at the bottom.

The top 50 players also moan about the system a lot on the official forums, quite glad that I wasn't the only one who thought the system was fucked up. And as to you only having been demoted once, I've been demoted quite a lot and quite heavily. After that -1200 game I had an other game quite like it, though this time I could play for 2 minutes but we lost E ... -2200 so in the end I went from a rank 5 to a rank 2 in half an hour time.

Mortem wrote:

And as to you only having been demoted once,

My bad. Not "once", but rather frequently. It gets back up when I play assault though (with some luck)

I just hotjoined a game in round 2, was 50 points from becoming MVP and we captured and held C. However since they lost round 1 before I even joined the game, I still got Athena points deducted.

Despite not playing the game anymore, I still check the GRO forums every now and then. Based on the posts there, it seems to be Ubi's regular response:
"We're working on it."
...And, of course, Ubi isn't working hard enough on it. Also Ubi's regular response.

I think I said at some point that I'll try at playing this again. I do still plan to do that... but I'm seriously behind on homework, Planetside continues to be really fun and there just seem to be more and more problems in the world of GRO :/

I havent seen you for ages freedom....  




and i only use the ranking for competision against nas, from what i can tell the only way to gain score is to kill everyone, their children and including their children. i have won and had good kd and still got reduced score so who knows what on earth they are using as the system.

kinda like playing cards against god with out seeing what cards you have. you dont know the rules and he is ALWAYS smiling!

pjodron wrote:

kinda like playing cards against god with out seeing what cards you have. you dont know the rules and he is ALWAYS smiling!

I take that as a compliment

pjodron wrote:

I havent seen you for ages freedom....  

I'm still here.
Hiding in the shadows.
WAITING FOR THE PERFECT MOMENT TO STRIKE.

FreedomTaker wrote:

pjodron wrote:

I havent seen you for ages freedom....  

I'm still here.
Hiding in the shadows.
WAITING FOR THE PERFECT MOMENT TO STRIKE.

You sound like a cloaksniper. (On the subject of cloak, it is now (almost) fully invisible, a few months ago I could still spot a cloaksniper at 80+ meters away and take him out, nowadays the glare is negligible, I hope they will revert to the old cloak ...)

I've heard of the super cloak issue, but most of the times I've played since I've been able to get them. Granted, I always manage to hear them cloak and I have my super spammy LMG...

FreedomTaker wrote:

I've heard of the super cloak issue, but most of the times I've played since I've been able to get them. Granted, I always manage to hear them cloak and I have my super spammy LMG...

Try spotting them at 50+ meter. Even with 6x scope I cannot see them clearly enough, heck, most of the time I can't see them at all, it's just that I know they haven't poked their heads out for a certain time so I pull the trigger just to see if I'm lucky XD