Make Ranked competitive!

(NowUcMe) #1

Well there we go, season 2 of Ranked and boy what did I have high expectations. I have come to realise that those expectations were not realistic, but I blame Splash Damage for the hype.

Splash Damage says that Dirty Bomb is all about the competitive. So Ranked is an important factor in this game. I came back after a back to Dirty Bomb after a break, because of Ranked season 2. I hope that the matches would be balanced or that the Ranked matches are atleast competitive… well spoiler alert, they were not.

Take for example my very first ranked match a couple days ago: everyone joined the lobby and litteraly the first thing that pops into the team chat: ‘‘what is ranked?’’. Well their goes the competitiveness of the match and my win (he and another guys left in the first round).

And just now I played a match with also very low ranked players…no let me phrase that better…very unexperienced players, since they probably started playing this week or something. They way they play is so terrible and noobish, I wont go in the details, but you just smell that they do not know the game AT ALL.

And no, the players are not the problem, I can not blame them, since they are allowed to play Ranked. Of course you can give them respondsibily to make the disicion if they are good enough to play ranked, but this is unrealistic to expect from players, because for obvious reasons. The problem is the system.

The way I see it is that Ranked does not equel competitive in this game. Maybe you can better call it ''the gamemode in which you receive cool new skins!", because it seems that many players think that. So my message to SD is: Make Ranked Competitive! A quick thought of mine was to raise the level needed to play Ranked. Seems solid to me; let me know what you think about it. But I won’t do the thinking, I excpect SD to think and I am sure that if they wanted, they can change the Ranked System in a better way.

(BioSnark) #2

I agree that Ranked isn’t Competitive and nor should it be a substitute for organized clan matches. The point of a ranked system is generally to sort people into skill groups to have an automated system balance them out.

(shibbyuk) #3

Agreed - you need to stick at it until your rank sorts itself out. Then you should find the games become more competitive.

It’s not good for new players to play against better or more experienced players either. This initial period could be improved by taking skill rating into consideration. It does rely on a healthy player-base, though.

(AssortedStuff) #4

I’m surprised that player performance isn’t automatically analysed and recorded constantly (I mean, also during Stopwatch, Objective and Execution) and that the data is not being used to sort the teams (in any game mode they chose to play in) - at least it doesn’t seem so.
The sorting into ‘ranks’ should be happening at all times, even if it was in the background (meaning: not showing the user their ‘rank’, if they play in modes other than Ranked).

You might say that Objective doesn’t have 2 halves to compare the performance of the 2 teams BUT I would consider personal performance; such as aim, KDr and XP earned per match very important factors in sorting players (these are the obvious examples, you could also think of how often they get headshots, if they do the objective, etc).

90% (or more) of the times I play solo (in different modes) and experiencing unbalanced matches annoyingly frequent makes me think teams are just sorted using a ‘random number generator’ and a prayer to your Saint of preference.
I’ve read some people swearing on their Mothers and their children that it isn’t so, but it seems to be easier to believe in Santa Claus in August than that SD has an algorithm for that.

No disrespect meant to the programmers, obviously, maybe the right parameters aren’t being fed to the machine. Or the importance amount given to each isn’t the right one.

(shibbyuk) #5

I think we do all have a “skill level” that’s taken into account during the casual, pre-game shuffles. Not sure this is used at the start of a ranked season, though…