What's Wrong With The Ranking System. (And How To Fix It)

Competitive Discussion
1

So I’ve given this some thought and in my opinion, one of the biggest flaws of the system is how you climb the ladder, and what is required of you to ‘get gud’.
As I see it, the system is currently designed not to train up potential but rather to cut the chaff away from the elitist country clubs at the top. Losing is punished more than winning will reward, and hard work is drowned out by apathy and toxicity. I am talking about the concept of Rank-Dropping.

This is a concept that never sat well with me ever since the start of Competitive. Why? Because nothing else acts this way. If you fail the 12th grade, you repeat the 12th grade, you aren’t forced down into 11th. All professional teams in all sports lose all the time. But none of them are sent back to the little leagues cuz of a bad streak, or even just cause they didn’t win enough against fair opponents. So how does training with people beneath your skill level help you increase it? Answer: it doesn’t. They drag you down and keep you down. This is, after all, a team game. Individual scores suffer for the fact that 5 randos can drag you down far easier than they might help you. No matter how talented, no one character should be able to stomp a whole team solo; that is after all what balanced means.

So what’s my solution? Simple really. Invert the drop mechanic into a promotion engine. Instead of dropping cuz of 5 losses at the bottom of your tier, you have to win 5 games at the top of you tier, in a row, and after the 5th win a prompt will ask you if you want to move to the next tier. Selecting Yes would put you at the bottom of the next tier, and selecting No would keep you at the top of your current tier, capping your SR at the tier’s maximum. And no matter how much you lost you would never drop out of that tier.
This allows players to stay on the edge of their abilities and sharpen them with consistent teammates, or play comfortably in their current level.

This would be helpful twofold. One, players who end up with a disconnected teammate or thrower will be protected by having this ‘checkpoint’ of their current measured skill, letting them practice with equal players until they prove to be good enough for the next step.

And Two, it’s the best actionable solution for smurfs I’ve managed to come up with. No more throwing games just to drop down to bronze just to climb back up and brag how awesome they are (not). Once they get into a tier, they stay there until they get better for FIVE GAMES STRAIGHT, or they stay at the bottom of the tier and hopefully get matched with 5 other players doing the same damn thing. Hopefully this would discourage deliberate gameplay sabotage in order to drop out of rank quickly.

And one other small change, really a suggestion for all modes: Can we have 2 different message prompts? One for “A player left the game” cuz he pressed ‘Leave Game’ and a second one for “This player lost connection” so we know what happened to our 6th member?

And please let players apply to backfill into comp games, or at least stress-test their connections before letting them play competitive, cuz it just sucks for the rest of us when this happens.

Um, EXACTLY dude!! Why are good players TRYING TO LOSE IN A COMPETITIVE MODE?!! It’s bad enough when you lose on the other side of a smurf/hacker/whatever. But there is NO REASON why the Smurf-Pro on your side should be encouraged to take a dive and drop the SR of 5 other players who did nothing but get a bad teammate.
And don’t give me “you should just carry harder”. That’s bull.
If anyone here considers a 5v6 absolute suicide if you don’t stop to regroup, how can any one hero 1v6 and make up for 1-5 deadweights feeding the enemy? IF that were possible, then neither the hero nor the game is balanced. (and we can all expect a patch to soon follow).

10 Likes
2

Installing an elevator ruins the ladder. Specifically the higher you go.

Keep in mind comp is called that for a reason. It’s competition. Difficulty is supposed to be present in that dynamic. Participation trophies & ‘reward the loser’ systems just don’t fit in this ecosystem, it’s not what it’s built on. Comp isn’t equatable to schooling, where everybody with few exceptions are supposed to move on to the next level.

Failing in school means you have to redo the year you failed. Failing in a skill level quite literally means you are not ready or no longer fit for that skill level, it makes sense if you underperform too often that you should drop.

A system where you get to choose an option that literally caps your sr & keeps matchmaking you in a certain tier would make smurfing easier.

Blizz can’t reasonably tell the difference in certain cases, but they can certainly tell if a player pressed the leave game button. I’d like to know the numbers behind how often a ‘leave game’ leaver comes back vs a dc/crash/power outage leaver before anything like that were implemented. It could potentially skew the remaining players’ view of whether they themselves should stay or not.

Backfilling no, there are just too many moving pieces for that to work. Stress-testing I wouldn’t be the most opposed to, but you get kinda shaky with deciding where the threshold to disallow comp is, & full outages (of any type, not just internet) are more of an issue than high ping which stress testing may not be the most effective at spotting in many cases.

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3

ok tldr. i just came to say that i kinda hate that im getting spoons in comp like this season i get it i did terable in placements. BUT LAST SEASON i was in gold and went all the way down to bronze cuz 1 my team didnt listen to group up or press the attack 2…idk

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But the problem isn’t your own skill level, is it? Again the point I’m making is your skill can be drowned out by bad teammates, disconnects, and players not-giving-a-damn. And these factors also drag back players from improving who could improve. You’re defending an elitist-club and telling people they deserve their rank cuz of their perfomance, but there are more relevant factors. If you and I grouped up, I could tank your ranking just cuz we play together; I doubt you would say “oh I guess I suck now and deserve this lower tier til I get back in shape.”
THAT’S the problem of individual scores in a team game. You got into masters, so I don’t expect you to know the difficulty of working your way up from the lower tiers with all the crap that comes with training in them.

And how exactly would it make it easier? The way I see it, smurfs go down so they can climb up. There’s no way you can stop them rising, but you could stop them from dropping. They’re stuck where they place and can’t screw up as many games on the way down.

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You know, you’re like the 3rd or so person who has falsely assumed this in the past few days specifically. Yes I do know what the lower tiers are like. I have played in them, I do play in them, I even watch matches in them where I don’t skew the skill gap. I understand the ecosystem of the lower ranks.

Then the way you see it is wrong. Smurfs play in lower tiers so they can stomp people. The reason smurfs intentionally lose isn’t so they can win/climb, it’s so they can stomp. Your proposed system allows them to stomp with much more freedom. They’d still be ruining games, and they’d be more free to tryhard every match instead of tryhard half & throw the other. Players should never have any decision over their skill rating other than the effort they put in.

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6

If you had skill you would have climb thé rank you are stuck at.

No amount of disconnect or troller can keep you at a rank forever…

Smurf will place bronze and stay there forever…Smart system lol

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7

Went from bronze to master. Some of my friend were hardstuck <500 and got to 4.2k. I’ve seen everything that people complaind about. But its extremely possible to get to diamond. Everyone with some time and right place effort can get to diamond. The only way to eliminate smurfing without them doing anything is for everyone to be in gm.

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no its not my skill level its the team just rushing in while im tryin to group upthey just wont listen and im not masters im bronze ive wanted masters but couldnt get it

9

and its not of skill rateing its the ledege your in so you get with level 3000 and are in bronze wether you like it or not, its kinda annoying tho
smurfs are just hard to defeat but im level 79 brone no stars and i alredy know how to contur with the right character and simple probloms solving skills, its just the team that dosent

10

This is just asking to be exploited and shows you dont seem to understnad how the ranking system works.

If you are losing more SR when you lose than you gain when you win, it mean that you are ranked too high. i.e. You are underperforming for you rank in both the games you win and the games you lose.

The ‘fix’ you suggested is just asking for players to get boosted into higher ranks and then just sit there. Unable to drop. No matter how poorly they play. For smurfs and throwers? It encourages them more. No need to worry about throwing games to say down, now there’s a handy dandy button you can press to stay in the rank below and abuse lower skilled players to the best of your ability. No reason to ever hold back.

Just because you hit a rank does not mean you deserve to stay at that rank forever. You have to be able to maintain your abilities to play at that level, or you deserve to drop. To compare it to a very simple military ladder:

Memebers of the military need to maintain their fitness and ability standards throughout their career. They dont get to just sign up, finish training, and then laze about for the rest of it. If they dont pull their weight, they’re punnished, relegated, and potentially, get thrown out if they dont keep up. If they maintain bare minimum, they’ll stay where they are. If they excel, they get promoted.

Players in a rank must maintain fitness and ability to be in that rank. If they hit the rank and then get lazy about their gameplay, they get punished, relegated, and potentially, get thrown out of the rank if they dont keep up. If you do bare minimum for the rank, you stay where you are. If you excel, you get promoted.

This is how the system works. And it works just fine.

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11

Apex implements the rank protection and its…its nice…until youre trying to climb and you get rank protected scr00by d00bie dopes messing around cause they cant drop any further…

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12

This is actually NOT A BAD IDEA. H*ll I would go even further: no need for 5 victories. If you make it to next rank you stay there until you progress. Add option to go down to any rank chosen if wanted (this I am a bit hesitating).

13

True the military comparison but try to progress there when the progress is tied to group outcome of 6 randomly chosen individuals from large group for everything you do in 30 min intervals. If that is how my daily work would be built I couldn’t do jackshtake and would be mentally destroyed in 2h.

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14

It’s not really though. At the end of the day, what determines how much SR you gain/lose, is your own performance. If you are preforming well, not only should you win more games, but even in losses, you’ll lose less SR. Which will lead to a climb in spite of whatever everyone else is doing.

2 Likes
15

It largely depends on who your opponents are. If you do well against a team you are supposed to beat, you gain less SR. The problem is the outliers with reference to team averages. If even one player is not playing up (or down) to the standard of the match, then the whole thing gets screwed up and everyone else’s SR is wrongly adjusted.

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16

Nope, not how it works. Your PBSR is largely calculated based off of your performance with whatever heros you play against the performance of all others players of that hero at that rank. The players on your team, and players on the enemy team, are not accounted for, and no team is ‘supposed’ to beat the other. The matchmaking system attempts to build even matches where each team has an equal chance of winning.

17

Not viable.

Placements are piss poor. Utter noobs get placed 2200 and drop to 700 sr, or lower, in some cases.

Those people need to drop ASAP.

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But this is determined mostly by other factors. Like losing 2 games with nice performance by yourself and winning 1 game with same performance results in drop in SR that you cannot influence enough. Majority of match outcome comes from somewhere else than your own performance and same works long term.

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I would guess that system somehow is calculating results not only based on your performance as raw stats, but how well you played against certain players.

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I dont think so, because you as individual can influence outcome in majority of games.