I agree, none of the current rankings appeal to me, and none of them seem to have any relevance to the site other then "well, they're ranks too" and the fact that the icons are pixel art.

I think adding more different themes could be nice but there are a lot already, so to keep things neat they'd have to replace some, and that's a sure-fire way to annoy people.

Personally I'd like to see a "plain" theme which just lists your level without a cutesy rank title or icon. If rank icons are required, then simple numbers would do (perhaps colour-coded from cool colours to warm ones, but no other "theme").

Another interesting solution would be to let particularly-formatted (correct image dimensions to serve as a CSS spritesheet, within a certain file size) images in the gallery be usable as themes for people to elect to use with a system very similar to the "use as icon" system that's in place already. That way, people can make (and optionally share) their own rank themes without the ranking page needing to expand significantly. It would only need to accommodate a possible extra column for the user's current custom theme if they have one. The downside to this is there's no easy way to encode rank titles into it, but are they needed anyway? There's the level already, the rank titles don't convey useful information, and a well-designed icon set shouldn't need labels.


Edited by eishiya - 13 January 2015 at 8:25am