People get lucky. They end up higher than they should be and it affects others. And in a massive pool, it’s intense. There should be some standards. At least for the lower levels. Just to negate the “Twin blade Varian w/ 20k total dmg” or the “dying to boss because it’s hard to avoid a big red circle” kind of scenarios. It would also take advantage of existing resources like the map customization/custom objective pool.
This is a concept. I think it would be a good idea though. At least until PBMM…
Bronze -> Silver (Beat 1 game of AI (hard mode)
Silver -> Gold (Custom obj/minigame-ish. A minimap with a bunch of bosses using slam you have to pass through. Rush style + maybe two more mini-game skill based types that encourage landing skill shots or similar in a row)
Gold -> Plat (Brutal AI + Minigame)
And then on you’re in the clear moving up/no more challenges.
I come up with this because I believe this would put more people in pools in the lower end, but it would also set a standard of skill and keep those with a more similar skill level consolidated.
Wouldn’t solve a thing. Because AI and human players have wildly different skillshot dodging paterns. Learning to hit AI targets with skillshots would NOT directly transfer to players.
Again these are just specific ideas for the general concepts.
AI improvements of course too (would be nice to maybe to something like a Machine Learning AI like the one made for DoTa)
Think of it a bit more broadly. Like the same concept as being a tank/dps/healer in Mists of Pandaria and going through a side quest in order to “test your skill”. You were in a cloud room and in my case (as a tank) I was paired up with an AI healer and a bunch of random mobs that started easy but got hard. I had to doge skill shots and all. I got good gear but it also helped me tank a bit better better in real dungeons.
For this specific example, maybe just a moving target dummy that is going in a pattern. Not an AI. Like a “Break the Targets” from super smash melee kinda thing.
Goes from Rank 5-1 → New rank 5-1. Example: Bronze 1 turns to Silver 5.
Nobody has 100% hit rate with skill shots. This is why they are skill shots and their balance assumes they do not hit 100%.
There problem isn’t hitting the skill shot. It is how you maximize your chance to hit it (position, timings with other abilities, etc). This is where true game knowledge comes in.
Imo they should improve the AI and make it much more ruthless. ais are capable of beating pros nowadays, but we don’t need them that good. But the elite ai dhould give gold players a run for their money.
Part of the beauty of ranks is that you don’t really have any idea how skill is going to be differentiated in the beginning, and you start to see how people with different knowledge start to stack up against each other and what the skill hierarchy mostly breaks down to.
So breaking it up into arbitrary chunks of “silver–> gold has to do laps around the track, gold–>plat has to shoot at moving targets” etc. doesn’t really capture the nature of the competitive mode. Ranked games by themselves I think are a sufficient test of one’s ability to climb the ladder. People don’t always play perfectly. It’s not a big deal if your team isn’t up to snuff for you for a silver team, they’re only there because of winning games for who knows what reason. They might even know things you don’t recognize yet. Just co-operate to the best of your ability and enjoy.
Okay, I guess I have to be more direct with my statement.
My point was that there USED to be the requirement that you pass a promotion match in order to actually move from a lower rank to a higher one. If you played and WON the match, you’d get promoted. If not, you stayed at your present rank.
This is close to what you are asking for, something beyond just winning games in order to climb in rank to show that you in effect EARNED the rank you now have. Where you were arguing for very specific objectives (like hitting with skillshots as an example), the devs just gave it the very broad requirement of ‘just beat this game and you get it’… The reason for the broad requirement being that they wanted players to advance THEIR way. Maybe they were good at map awareness and map strategy, contributing to the team less through their individual plays than making the right calls when they needed to be made. Maybe they were awesome assassins, rotating through the lanes to pick off targets of opportunity to keep the enemy team on the back foot. Maybe they were great at keeping damage off the tank so the team had a solid frontline to rally behind. Rather than forcing players to learn very specific skills to climb from rank to rank, they just made the general requirement of ‘just get through this.’
And now, through problems created through the promotion system (namely you get a bad team and can’t carry them) they simply removed the requirement entirely. So already the idea of having a unique requirement keeping you out of levels was implemented in a much more generic sense… and it was removed.
Another aspect that is overlooked is the fact that it can really mess up the overall game when players are hunting a specific objective, there is the high likelihood that they chase those meta objectives to the detriment of the overall game… Which good players will tell you that being the better player means getting the kill on the right target at the right time, rather than hunting down a target for an objective in order to rank up.
There is also the fact that the daily challenges are there in the game, yes, but there’s a small detail that people, especially newcomers, overlook frequently. While you are playing in modes like Play VS. AI and Quick Match, yes, you do actually have to go through the specific requirements of playing with certain classes or IPs… but you can also go into ranked mode and simply play games to get through those dailies… The reason that you get the ‘free pass’ is that the devs did NOT want players to be chasing the daily challenges to play specific IP’s and classes when you were trying to collaborate with your team on a draft, that way you do not have to work around a two-support composition when you really needed a specific character/class to really do some damage on the enemy comp.
TL;DR… The devs have every indication of backing away from making overly demanding objectives in every sense when it comes to the ranked modes, they want you to play to the game you’re in, not to some meta-objective just to rank up.
I would give you a 9/10 effort but 5/10 for exectution. I like the idea of having something extra to go between ranks but I don’t know if it would work.
I not 100% sure what they should do but I don’t like the ranked system the way it is. Essentially you have to get lucky and win 6 matches in a row to go up a rank. I just found out this season that the first 2 matches of placement pretty much determine if you will go up or down entire ranks. Which means your entire season can come down to 2 matches every 4 months.
And there is a major issue with this system:
How would you make this promotion match fair?
Since its very likely you are the one about to rise/drop. The enemy should have a similar player (ie, you are about to rise to gold 2, and on the enemy side someone is about to drop to gold 3). But even that isnt reliable since the one dropping might already have been dropping from plat and is eventualy going to end up at silver.
As such promotion system act slow, its going to keep people into incorrect ranks for a far too long time. You generaly want the system to act faster. If someone has a 60% win rate, he eventualy is going to rise, there is no need for a promotion system.
And this doesnt help considering a good player doesnt always have to be the carrying force. You can have someone who is an excelent tank and healer, but at silver that is simply not as effective compared to plat.
He might get stuk near gold for a very long time simply because he cant carry and is stuck at a 50% win rate.
People are not required to be a jack of all trades to reach a higher rank. As long as they have enough skills to handle multiple roles they generaly are going to perform well. And even in master you still face 1 trick pony players.
The problem that actualy is happening is the way the MMR grants/takes away points for wins and losses, especialy for players with a low playcounts. They simply are not going to get a very accurate MMR value. And it takes time to settle this.
In think the only proper way to sovle this is by artificialy making the displayed rank lower than their actual rank in order to make them more likely to play more games. Basicly always rewarding the player to play more, and by that making his MMR more accurate.
(for example, your visible rank is 3 lower than what it detects, and each 20 games its going to add a rank to that in order to show an artificial rise - which makes the player happy, even though he effectively already is playing higher. after 60 games you reach the rank you actualy have)
2 example situations in this system:
1.
Someone plays 10 games (placement), MMR thinks he is gold 2. But his visible rank becomes gold 5 with a notice that its lower because of this balancing system. (he is placed in gold 3 to check if he is going to lose more matches or win some)
He now plays 40 additional games. His actual mmr brough him to gold 3 (53% win rate), but his visible mmr is still only gold 4.
And 20 more games his mmr is simply set because he reached gold 3
Someone plays 10 games, MMR thinks he is gold 2. Visible rank is gold 5.
He now plays 40 additional games. His actual mmr brough him to gold 5 already, his visible mmr remains at gold 5. But as he is dropping, from this point on its going to be the accurate rank for him.
In this case players who are estimated in a too high rank are simply not being displayed that they are this high, they see the people around them being higher though. This motivates them to continue, but if they underperform, they are just going to drop and might stop caring. Or they actualy see themselve rise/remain stable and they just continue to get the proper rank awarded to them.