I played over 120 Ranked games, Here is what I think about the current state of Ranked.
Posted: Mon May 27, 2024 1:45 pm
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.
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.
