The Intro:

Okay, so I'm firstly going to explain how I believe the ranking system works and secondly going to state my opinions on it. Now, without further ado, let's begin.



The Rank:

Your zombies rank seems to be comprised of two sections: The picture itself which represents your "skill", and the hash marks which represent your play frequency. Let's go down another level:

The Emblem:
The emblem it self appears to be a visual representation of your average global leaderboard standings and goes up and down as your standings do. It goes through a series of pictures, starting at one bone, progressing to two, then to a skull, then to a skull with a knife and finally to a skull with two shotguns. (I these are the only ones I've seen, I hear that there is a skull + two knives and a skull + one shotgun, but I wont take them as fact until I see them for myself.)

The Hash Marks:
The hash marks are quite easy to understand. They range from zero to five. Every day that you play, you gain one hash mark, every day that you don't, you lose one. One other point of importance is that if you have 5/5 hash marks and a rank of at least 3 (skull), your skull will have glowing blue eyes.

That's about it for the rank, it's not actually that complicated. Now, on to my review.



The Conclusion:

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the system. I feel that assessing your skill based on leaderboards is extremely unreliable, because leaderboards don't demonstrate skill, they demonstrate condensed amount of play. Take this example:

You have two players: Player A who is great, Player B who is not so much. Say player A plays one hour per day. B plays about five. Doing the math, player A would have to be five times more efficient than B to even equate to the same "skill" level as B. Yes, there are Downs and Deaths leaderboards (Which I will get into after), but that's only two leaderboards that are heavily out-weighed by the ~10 other kills/headshots/etc stat-grinding ones and would be almost irrelevant after the average is calculated.

Secondly, the downs/deaths leaderboards. I'm not sure who designed these, but they make less than no sense. The concept of a leaderboard is to see where you rank among all the other players and see how much you need to improve to get a higher rank. With these two leaderboards, since they are inverted (sorted from lowest to highest instead of vice-versa like normal), you literally can only work your way down to a lower rank. There is nothing you can do aside from not playing the game to increase your rank. Also, it doesn't take into account how much time you've played, so the people at the top of the board are people who have only played one match. My solution would be to replace the offending leaderboards with "Downs per minute" and "Deaths per minute" and sort them in ascending order as per standard. However, this doesn't solve the big problem...

I think that the way the skill portion of ones rank shouldn't be based or leaderboards or stats at all for that matter, rather, your skill relative to other players. I'd suggest the model of having players balance themselves out. When you finish a game, the game assesses your performance and increases/decreases your rank accordingly; of course, it would also take into consideration the ranks of you and each of the other players when it calculates that. Something like this:

Skill rating = [kills + (headshots/2)] * (revives/downs)

Rank adjustment = (Other player's rank - Your rank) * Your skill rating

Now, you'd probably want to throw/tweak some multipliers in there, but you get the point.

Anyways, that's about it. Feel free to leave feedback/suggestions! Also, if anyone has any pictures of the emblems they'd let me use, give me a shout. I don't want to steal any for the purpose of this post. If I think of anything else to add, I will do so.