In ow1 you gained more rank progress than in ow2. 25 sr on a win had you gaining 100 sr or one tier in 4 games. Now you gain 20 on a win, requiring 5 games for the same progress. Go back to 4 games please.
Then you get those games where you’re 3% away from ranking up and then your next game you get the feeding tank or the negative dps and there isn’t a thing you could do to win. Then you lose the next few games to the same crap. What if your SR just rounded up or down when you’re less than 10% away from ranking up or down? This one I’m not as sure of, but seeing 99% is so tilting and this is the only thing I can think of to prevent that.
As for the modifiers, your system is stupid.
Story time:
How is it that one moment I’m going 50/50 and then manage to get a small little win streak going, reach my peak, and then suddenly I’m losing? Sure it’s natural to drop when you reach your peak, but why am I dropping lower than I’ve been in like 10 seasons? During this loss streak I get slapped with the “losing trend” modifier, which basically means you’re going to give me matches that set me up to fail. Negative dps after negative dps later and I’m about to derank. Not derank a tier, but a rank. I ask my friend who is similar in rank to me but a bit higher if my gameplay is really that bad. He says there are a few minor things I could do better but overall it’s just average gameplay for my rank. This was during drives btw. I don’t end up deranking, but the season ends before I can climb back up. Then comes the stupid rank reset which decides to derank me 2 tiers and therefore demote me in rank as well. I have to deal with feeding tanks and negative dps before grinding my way back to my rank. Then I mysteriously get the winning trend modifier and rank up a tier. Gee, its almost like I BELONGED IN MY RANK.
Then on the flip side I’m playing dps and hard stuck a tier. My team mates are so bad I’m getting a headache from their stupidity but I try to just focus on my own gameplay because I know I have a lot to improve on dps. Then I finally rank up one tier. My friend jokes that I should speedrun to the next rank (it was the last day of the season) so I decide why not try. But it was like a switch was flipped after ranking up because I wasn’t encountering the team mates who were so bad it was giving me a headache anymore. Games were a lot easier actually. Suddenly I get the winning trend modifier. I can’t lose. 10 game winstreak, barely lose one, 4 game winstreak. Why is it that in the same night I go from hard stuck to unstoppable?
What was the point of telling these stories? I wanted to talk about how losing trend and winning trend are stupid and set you up to fail or succeed. Luck can trigger either modifier, causing you to traverse in rank very quickly, sometimes in the wrong direction. When I had the losing trend modifier, there wasn’t a thing I could do to win those games. When I had winning trend, there wasn’t a thing I could do to lose those games. In one day I shouldn’t go from hard stuck to winning every game. In order for that to happen, the match maker would have to be giving me games I’m unlikely to lose. In the case that I got losing trend, I wasn’t bad enough to derank, I just had an unlucky loss streak. Giving me the losing trend modifier only made things worse because now I was being set up to fail. This can make the system feel extremely grindy. Despite this, these modifiers can be helpful in moving players where they need to be. If you really do deserve a better or worse rank, you should move there quickly. To help prevent them from being triggered by luck, I suggest it takes stats into consideration. Frequently on support I had 1/3 of the deaths of anyone on my team and my other stats were good as well. But that did not stop the losing trend modifier from ruining my rank. If someone truly deserves to derank, it will show in their stats. Yet I don’t see any of these negative dps falling in rank. No, there are plenty of those in every other game. Lastly, if a player is playing consistently every season, they’re not suddenly going to get worse at the game and deserve to derank.
As for the consolation, expected, reversal, and uphill battle modifiers, they are often horribly off. Challenging games can get you expected while easy games can get you uphill battle. This always feels like a crappy experience. But if the modifiers were accurate every time, then they don’t even have big enough bonuses to feel impactful. If a standard win gave me 25% and uphill battle gave me 30%, then it would actually be impactful. Then reversal would give -30 as well. But like I said, these modifiers are far from accurate so implementing this buff to the amount gained/lost would be detrimental to the experience.
Lastly, there is the concern of rank resets. You messed up during launch and artificially lowered everyone’s ranks. You tried to undo this in season 3 by boosting everyone to where they actually belong, except you made it too easy to climb back and there was now a problem with boosted players. You wait 6 seasons before making the same mistake again and just artificially lowering everyone’s rank. Ranks distribution is out of wack, top500 ends in masters. You do another rank reset in hopes of fixing this. It does nothing but cause more frustration. Then you think it’s a good idea to do this AGAIN for some reason. Match quality is abysmal (all of my friends are complaining). So, we will have to wait and see if top500 ends in masters or champion this season. If it ends in masters then never do one of these “””rank resets””” again. If you’re going to do a rank reset, do a proper reset and make everyone play as if they’re on a fresh account. I don’t even want a proper rank reset (one set of unlucky games and you need to spend the next 300 games climbing back to your old rank), but it seems like you’ve made it your only option.