Season 2 - Deranking of multiple Divisions was stupid.

[seatcupramk1]

I wanted to have an honest discussion about the deranking of the entire community in Season Two across multiple divisions, and I really cannot understand why they even did it. The problem, in my opinion, is that the current division queues make no sense. Personally, by skill, I am GM up to Celestial, and over the past three weeks of grinding, I’ve noticed that Silver and Gold are full of Platin players. The upper echelon division, One Above All, is currently not filled, meaning the highest players are either Eternity or Celestial I. I played last week Diamond I, II, and III, and basically only faced Celestial players. Now, in GM 2, I am literally always matched with Eternity and One Above All players (the ranks they had last season).

So, either the shock from deranking was too much for the matchmaking, or the matchmaking itself was altered. For me, it was literally hell losing 16 divisions while grinding out of high Silver and Gold with those kinds of teammates. I'd rather play against high GM players in Platinum or face Celestials in Diamond than deal with what you see in the lower ranks: absolute beginners being matched with players who were previously Gold or Platinum. But the most brutal indicator of bad matchmaking right now is that, after nearly 4 weeks, the Eternity and One Above All queues are almost empty, while Celestials are hardstuck in Diamond. In Season 0 and 1, the top division was typically filled within just a couple of days.

[Haydizzle91]

De-ranking needed to happen because the point-gaining system is flawed. Higher ranks were over-saturated with players that belonged ranks below, but were able to climb artificially due to an over-forgiving system that rewarded time invested rather than skill.

The problem you're experiencing, no players in certain ranks etc. Is the match-making system itself deliberately sharing the wins and losses around artificially and everyone's essentially caught in a never-ending cycle. It's creating a bottle-neck in lower tiers.. I'm not gonna go into how EOMM works, but it's the main culprit with alot of the dissatisfaction players experience trying to play ranked.

[Sebb]

Gotta keep that 50% win/loss ratio after all.

[zopf76 ☭]

Originally posted by seatcupramk1:

I really cannot understand why they even did it.

-> Engagement

It's always about Engagement, for the Binding and the Profit.


Screw e-sports, it doesn't bring much Profit outside of Tournaments anymore, so we're committed to attracting even the completely Zero-Skill Casuals = EOMM.

[Terotrous]

What happened was they drastically reworked the ranking system so it's much harder to climb. Previously you used to gain more points than you lose, especially in lower ranks, but you now lose way more points in low rank so the gains are more even unless you're MVP.

The problem is that this went slightly too far, and now the lower ranks are overpopulated and the top ranks are depleted. It's not ideal to distribute too much of the playerbase into the low ranks because it results in too much skill variation (and thus bad games) in those ranks. They probably need to basically put the changes about halfway between where they were in Season 1 and where they are now.

[Tracker]

There were too many boosted scrubs in higher ranks. New system isn't perfect, but it's better than the last one.

[Veenix]

Originally posted by Haydizzle91:

De-ranking needed to happen because the point-gaining system is flawed. Higher ranks were over-saturated with players that belonged ranks below, but were able to climb artificially due to an over-forgiving system that rewarded time invested rather than skill.

The problem you're experiencing, no players in certain ranks etc. Is the match-making system itself deliberately sharing the wins and losses around artificially and everyone's essentially caught in a never-ending cycle. It's creating a bottle-neck in lower tiers.. I'm not gonna go into how EOMM works, but it's the main culprit with alot of the dissatisfaction players experience trying to play ranked.

This is false. The current system is horrible and does not actually reward based on performance, it is purely stat based which is not a good way to determine how good someone is playing. Besides that the high ranks were NOT inflated. The devs have shared rank data which shows that the high ranks were anything but inflated.

We need placement matches and less deranks on new season, still have some deranking but not this many. Or straight up do placement matches for the first 5-10 games played every season.

[HughManatee]

If you don't understand why rank resets exist, then I have to wonder if this is your first 'competitive' game