Online Ranking System Being Adjusted in NCAA Football 13

One issue since the launch of NCAA Football 13 has been with the online rankings and how points from games have applied to leaderboards. For all intents and purposes the rankings were broken. Today EA Sports announced that a server side update has been delivered affecting the online game ranking system. 

First, we are updating the skill level thresholds. They will be more granular at the lower levels than they are now. Many players will see a significant jump in their level after playing their next online game. The second change is adding a slight point bonus for playing and completing a game. This means players will get slightly more points for a win slightly fewer points for a loss than they received previously. With these changes, lower ranked users might see themselves go up or down three, four, or even five levels after winning a head-to-head online game. This is normal for many of the lower levels and will stabilize over time as more games are played and they level up. The final change we did was to institute a point floor of 300. With the point floor, a user will not fall below 300 points if they lose a game. For any user that had less than 300 points now, it means you will not lose any points for a loss and still gain normal points for a win until you get above the 300 point floor.

While explaining the changes EA avoided addressing what had been wrong with rankings prior to the switch. Regardless the hope now would be for this new system to retroactively affect all games played thus far and produce a better representation of player accomplishments and skills through the distribution of rank points. Check out the full developer blog on the subject here for further details.