I played over 120 Ranked games, Here is what I think about the current state of Ranked.

[Absinth]

Hello, since it seems that ranked queue is now dead and nonexistant I decided to put up this little post about my experiences with ranked as feedback and maybe provide a little suggestion how to improve it. It was my first ranked season to play and first experience of playing solo ranked, before i just had took part in few ranked group matches made by community.

First I gotta address the thing that everyone told me "Solo ranked is toxic" Soo far I have seen more people be toxic in normal scenarios (especially when it was pug vs premade situation) or in oRVR (y'know all of this blobbing accusations and other stuff) in 127 games I played I have witnessed only 2 times where there was some sort of toxicity going on (one person refusing to play because someone does not want to join VC, and another one where another person rejected to play because they had low gear player in team), granted this is only from like week of playing the ranked and then there were no games ongoing and I could miss some games where it was more toxic. Overall I think with how over the top people take the ranked its still way less toxic than everyone makes it be. However that does not mean that protective manners cannot be implemented like some sort of incognito mode that would not allow people to DM you after the game for certain amount of time and disable the chat in the game, ofc assuming it as a safe space it would be an opt-out option rather than opt-in.

Second is the issues I find with the system itself, the way mmr is given out really encourages people to play 20 games, hope they get good players and sit on the top spots while doing nothing (and by looking at past seasons leaderboards it seems like something that exists since the very start), MMR decay system would be nice and it could look akin to the other decay systems, for example if you are above X MMR (Ill assume number 700 for that since its the current mmr number for crest gain soo ill assume it is a nice stepping stone point as example in my proposition) you start getting decay and it would work like this:

Upon your first time of reaching mmr 700 you get 7 days of grace period, during that you cannot loose MMR from decay.
After the grace period ends you will gain 1 day of exemption from MMR decay per game played.
You can farm up to 7 days of exemption, at the end of each day you will loose 1 day of exemption.
In case when someone does not have the "immunity" instead will loose around 75-175 mmr (based on how high you are in the leaderboards) until their MMR reaches 700

What that would achieve?
Season takes around 56 days (using current season as example), assuming one would reach 700mmr in the first day and waited till their 7 day grace period ended, one would have to play 48 games to not be affected by decay. That would cause players that are interested in top spots to actually play the game and not snipe themselves into period where they can get their free wins and afk in the leaderboard for the free rewards. Because of that the queue would be more alive and people seeing that the ranked gamemode is actually alive might be compelled enough to also queue for the game. And in case of people sniping their way to the top of the leaderboard at the end of the season trying to bypass the decay they would be forced into a time run against people who are playing from the start of the season, thus being at big disadvantage.

Now that I have finished talking about the biggest issue of keeping ranked alive (because it is really draining your motivation when you have to chase a 20 games top 1 spot holder that does not even play ranked anymore) I shall talk a little bit about the problem of the rewards side of things but first one has to understand that while ranked is more competetive part of the game and it understandable that it should focus on the competitiveness but in current state its just a glorified scenario with slightly higher crest gain and everyone who might be compelled to play ranked for its rewards or even shorten their farm for ranked jewel will get highly dissapointed after playing few games and not getting even 1 ranked insignia, the mmr for gaining insignias should be way lower than it is now if not removed all together, if we set it at 250mmr it would still mean that one has to play few games to start gaining them on the win afterall its not like you get 100 of them from single win, It's 1 win, 1 insignia and that still means playing like 100 games (assuming 50% wr) after getting to the mmr threshold to gain enough for jewel, it's 20 games for a mount, 40 games for a stack of liniments, 20 games for a trophy, not to talk that next to those games you also have to farm the war crests for the jewel, mount and trophy. The current pricing of items for the amount of time it takes for usual player to reach 700mmr is just unrealistic, either the amount of insignias has to be lowered or the gain has to start faster.

The third thing I want to talk about is more of annoyance than an issue but it might be really annoying to some people, including me. It's the queuer and the things it lacks, first is to always force a ranged class like bw/sorc to be matched against a team with another sorc/bw because otherwise the team that has sorc/bw is in bigger trouble as they have a very squishy target that is going to be focused by enemies all the time, second is to not stack classes if possible for example you can run into situations where you have 3 doks in queue, all of them are differently specc'd, one is dual wield dps, second one is shield and third one is chalice, for some reason current system will always put all 3 of them into the single team making it very annoying and most of the time making it a lost game.

[Templa]

You need to differentiate between elo and mmr. elo should decay MMR should not

MMR (Matchmaking Rating): is a hidden numerical value used by games to match players of similar skill levels
ELO: is the rating system that determains your rank.

[Absinth]

You need to differentiate between elo and mmr. elo should decay MMR should not

MMR (Matchmaking Rating): is a hidden numerical value used by games to match players of similar skill levels
ELO: is the rating system that determains your rank.

The game uses the word MMR as the points that you get and those points work as both traditional MMR and ELO

[kirraha]

I think giving more unique items that are perma will certainly interest people a bit more than some mounts that will decay in couple of weeks. This does not include dyes. We have enough of dyes who all have similar color, and no worth at all selling in AH, or even capable to sell to a Vendor. Can we PLEASE have enough of green, pink, skincolored dyes?

When the Tri ring was only achievable through ranked the games were going on. It was a huge reason to farm rank on multiple characters. Now it's just long crest-farm and you can legit just pug the item in any pvp way you like. Therefor, another reason to NOT do ranked.

A decay-system might work aswell, but tbh carrots are often tastier than whips. Atleast I would think the majority would think so

[Absinth]

I think giving more unique items that are perma will certainly interest people a bit more than some mounts that will decay in couple of weeks. This does not include dyes. We have enough of dyes who all have similar color, and no worth at all selling in AH, or even capable to sell to a Vendor. Can we PLEASE have enough of green, pink, skincolored dyes?

When the Tri ring was only achievable through ranked the games were going on. It was a huge reason to farm rank on multiple characters. Now it's just long crest-farm and you can legit just pug the item in any pvp way you like. Therefor, another reason to NOT do ranked.

A decay-system might work aswell, but tbh carrots are often tastier than whips. Atleast I would think the majority would think so

The reason why i have not suggested any more unique looks is simply because i believe that the team currently does not have capabilty to care enough for ranked to use the creative team on the rankeds, but i might be in wrong and ranked could be a nice venue for those artists to just pour random stuff that they made but was not added due to reasons soo that players can buy it with ranked currency. About dyes i would say it would be nice if they put some of the old dyes from events that will not be repeated (K8P/KAK launch, LoTD launch etc.) as some of them are pretty nice looking but nonexistant in the market. Titles are nice but most of people already have whole mountain of them, trophies are also nice but it still comes to question how much of work it would be for artists team to help the smaller part of the game when they could have been working on the Live events and other stuff that majority of the playerbase does.

I guess using the removed crossclass/npc appearances (in the spirit of ranked not having boundaries between classes) and/or introduction of invisible armor pieces could be a cheap and nice way of adding unique appearances for people to search.

Assuming my suggestions about the rewards and the decay both get implemented then mmr decay is not a whip, its a carrot for the competetive ones and whip for the ones wanting to just leech the rewards because they lucked out, and others could farm their jewels and stuff because it would not take you 2 weeks to get to the point where you get insignias and when you are just ready to farm them the ranked dies. Reducing the mmr to 250 for insignias is just few games into the season and then you can gain the insignias, the approach of giving them for win outright also sounds good but I did not want to make my suggestions into extremes (although the group ranked gives you one for win no matter the mmr)

Also as far as the mounts go, with removed or significantly lowered mmr requirement for insignias per win one could farm enough of them to ride them pretty much till the world dies, just going to buy another one every 90 days.

[BluIzLucky]

...

1. Glad to see you avoided the toxic ones if they are still around.
And while I also not see a lot of toxicity when I played ranked long time ago, it did feel worse than any other game mode.
As RvR / non-ranked tox is against the situation, but ranked is against a specific player that is bad or under-prepared.

2. Now with your decay you lock everyone to 1-2 alts even more than it already is. If we did not have frequent seasons it would be fine, but we do with full MMR reset.

2.5. Completely agree, it's harder for most to get enough Insignias than it is to get 10k crests.

[Absinth]

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2. Now with your decay you lock everyone to 1-2 alts even more than it already is. If we did not have frequent seasons it would be fine, but we do with full MMR reset.

[...]

"My" decay is a 1:1 copy of a system that already exists in other MOBA games that got tuned to the length of the season (granted it could let you bunk more days or something but also 1 ranked on ror is 10mins compared to usual 25-45+mins in that moba), reaching top spots on multiple of alts should be a challenge and not a matter of spamming games while the ranked is alive (even then example of the moba i gave shows that if there is a will there is a way since there are people who reach the highest rank on multiple servers while withstanding the decay etc.), notice how i mentioned decay not applying on the whole MMR spectrum but only at the people above certain point meaning that you can have somewhat high mmr level but not high enough to be the one in top spots of leaderboard, it can be tweaked it was just a loose idea but the point still stands there is a need for some sort of mmr decay.

[Roids]

You need to differentiate between elo and mmr. elo should decay MMR should not

MMR (Matchmaking Rating): is a hidden numerical value used by games to match players of similar skill levels
ELO: is the rating system that determains your rank.

So I still cant play Ranked, no negative numbers to match my Skill level

[Akalukz]

an interesting stat they could provide. How many people hit 700 MMR during this season? Either Unique accounts or total characters would work.

[Zxul]

an interesting stat they could provide. How many people hit 700 MMR during this season? Either Unique accounts or total characters would work.

It is a lot more interesting stat how many unique accounts actually joined ranked scs, considering most players avoid it like a plague. Just to know how small is the group of people that the dev time is asked to be invested around.