The sad thing is that you have to pick your opponent after the new leaderboard was released. Because the auotmatch +/- level option no longer works in a meaningful way.
Furthermore why should I play say a level 13 shark_bait or level 27 theory??? It would be completely dumb for me to do it. I can only lose points in a long run...Not really encouraging. So, I am still waiting for the good old leaderboard, please set it back, dougz :-)
Exactly! Think of this from a game theory perspective:
No reasonable person of high skill and high knowledge will play against shark_bait while he's level 13, if they're interested in a maintaining a position on the leaderboard--that is, if the board has any interest to them as a little bit of competition. So a few different types of people will play him:
People with no interest in using the board for competition (who wouldn't anyway)
People who don't know his old ranking
People with very low rankings
The first and third will be essentially unaffected. Two groups are affected: those who won't play him but would have been fine playing him at level 40+, and those who don't know that old ranking. The former lose out on an interesting opponent; the latter group have their scores disproportionately deflated. Meanwhile, because higher-ranked people won't play him, his rating won't rise as fast as it ought to, perpetuating the problem.
I think fellowmartian has it right above. It serves none of the likely purposes of a leaderboard, and most definitely kills what I think is the main purpose--to be able to play against those nearest in skill to you. There's even a menu option to force auto-match to do that for you! But that menu option is now... much less useful.
I basically have two options: ignore the leaderboard (all right, I can do that). Or--and this is worse--not play for a week or so and
strategically deflate my rating in an attempt to inflate it by playing games against people who ought to be much lower than I am. I'm not nearly as well-known as shark_bait or theory (except, perhaps, among members of this board). It's not my style, I won't do it... which means basically ignoring the leaderboard for mow, which saddens me a bit.
Doug? You there man? Tons of top players begging for this change to be reverted, not for the sake of their ratings but for the sake of the system.