I've noticed since I came back that duel challenges are far less frequent, non-existant even, and I think that has in part to do with the fact that reaching the top, let alone the first page, seems impossible for newer players, or even semi-decent players. My idea is this:

Keep the overall duel points stat and record, but also have a monthly duel ladder. This would keep an incentive to duel regularly, maybe add some sort of chat title or something for whoever holds the previous month's 1st place. That way the overall duel ladder will still be there for overall bragging rights, but new players still have an incentive to duel.

So basically just take the race track system and revamp it for duel usage. Maybe even a shiny badge.

Something like that, could easily be abused, but just like the overall rating, it's easy to spot the padded wins.

montly ladder seems like a good idea. it would (hopefully) foster more competitive pvp.

It already omits people who haven't dueled in the last month. Notice that I'm not in the list, even though my rating is 1513, which is rather a bit higher than the guy with 952 at the bottom of the first page. This means that getting on the first page is easy, because you don't need to beat the people with over 1800, just the people with below 1000.

I don't disagree with having a separate per-month rating, though. I do think that might foster more dueling.

+1

or you know, give the current rank some value like new weapons, livery, ships, and so forth tied to the rank or duel badges.

This is something like the Duel Wars event that TRI hosted about an year ago, which was nice I hear but lacked participation. There wouldn’t be a need for this if a few of us decide to host it monthly or bi-monthly. Removes any possibility of cheating and brings back player run events.

Active player events assumes there is an active community and not full of players who will crash the event.

All we would need is a secret location to do that, but ya participation might not be great because people are pansies. I also always agree with more content, especially reward content/achievements. I also think there should be some sort of duel rank degradation over time, if you haven't played in 6 years you shouldn't be top of the duel ladder even if you're not feutured on the page the rank is still higher. Definitely would appreciate updates that catered towards the competitive side of VO.

Now that's a guide run event, and not a player run event.

Really, getting participants isnt the hard part. You mention the event often over a period of two weeks or so, you should be good. The issue i ran into was dealing with passive-aggressive fucks who dislike me hosting events - unsurprisingly the same people who had once complained not enough events were being hosted, once upon a time. I wasn't able to deal with that, so i've stopped hosting now.

Finding someone who can deal with that sort of stuff, and is reliable enough for hosting, and who has free time for hosting it, thats the real difficulty.

Well it's awful easy to see who cheats in duels anyways lol.

The thing about Duel Wars was that it didn't need the host to be present all the time, nor did it need a secret location. It ran over a week or two, and participants were to duel each other whenever and wherever they wanted to. The duels would be tallied at the end, and there were a bunch of prizes for different categories.

I'm going to run one again soon. I had lost the code I needed to take the counts, but I've recoded it. I'll start advertising soon.

I would love something like this though. Actual content added around competitive pvp is my VO life dream.