MTG

A lot of what he's saying here matches my own experience playing ranked games on Arena. I made it to Mythic (playing Standard) a few days before the end of December. When I finally broke in, my rank was 92%. That's a pretty high number, and it's actually even better than it sounds: I'm not just in the 92nd percentile of all Magic players worldwide, I'm in the 92nd percentile among people who take Magic seriously enough to play ranked matches on Arena.

Surely an accomplishment one could be proud of, right? But the whole time I was getting there, I felt mediocre, because I kept losing about as much as I was winning. I also wasn't experimenting. I wanted to get to Mythic, so I stuck to decks that I knew were good and that I was experienced with.

As soon as I reached my competitive goal, I switched to playing more offbeat or experimental decks. And honestly, I started having more fun, if only from the change of pace, even though my rating dropped into the 80s. And then something interesting happened: I got more comfortable with those decks, and/or started facing lower-ranked opponents, and my rating climbed back into the 90s.

So I think Richard is right about ladders' capacity to suppress one's enjoyment of the game. However -- I'm still not sure I would want to play without one. From time to time I play unranked games with decks that I think are fun, but pretty far (even intentionally far) from Tier 1. But I can never put up with it for very long: the caliber of the decks that I face varies too widely. I'll stomp someone's precon in one game and then get stomped in turn by a tournament deck in the next. I keep coming back to the ladder because, as unfair as the cards and decks I see there may be, at least both players agree at the start on what power level we're aiming for. (Having separate lobbies for "unranked play with tournament decks" and "unranked play with casual decks" might sound like a solution, but some players would still join the wrong ones.)

As for tournaments: I've been on Arena for two or three years now and I've never joined a constructed tournament. The prize structure makes them effectively single-elimination, and I'm not sure I've ever won five matches in a row on the ladder, so what would make me think I could do it when there was even more on the line? My gold and gems are much more wisely spent doing drafts so I can build my collection.

But that may not be a refutation of Richard's point so much as a criticism of Arena's tournament structure. If Arena had Swiss-style tournaments, with flatter prize structures, I would be more likely to join them.