TL;DR ranked needs to factor in personal performance as well as wins and losses, rank should reflect actual personal skill and not that of your team, RNG needs alternatives, you should make players want to play, not bribe them to play, and SD needs to listen more closely to their players
This is my personal opinion, and maybe a bit of a vent. I’d like to see what others think, and I know some people love ranked, but there are plenty of ways it could be improved.
So, why is ranked bad, what can be done about it, and why does SD seem to not care or notice?
A lot of ranked’s problems are contributed to by DB’s small playerbase. But while you can use that as an excuse and call the system perfect, this isn’t the way things should be done. If you want to make an enjoyable game, you have to do so with your playerbase in mind, including how many of them there are. The game needs to be built around the idea of a low playerbase, not what it would be like with a much higher one.
In such a small game with unfixed teams, having rank based on wins or losses really makes no sense. I even heard one of the devs jokingly mention how their loss was “their team’s fault”. And while it’s easy to pawn off your failure on others, a lot of times it’s actually true. Yes, ranked is all about communication and teamwork, the whole idea is to work together to secure victory. But this doesn’t work at all in a game with such few players that they’re grouped together anyways regardless of skill level. And because your rank is based on these wins or losses, it’s easy to drag a good player down into lower ranks. And what happens when too many of these players are put together? Even more unbalanced matches. These issues grow exponentially over time. Sure at first it’s stable, but just look at the average match at the end of last season. The average ranked match was less balanced than a PUB match. A PUB match, one with literally no matchmaking whatsoever. As it is, whether you win or lose is based more on luck than it is your own skill, because no amount of communication or teamwork can fix a clueless level 7 team.
The other issue I have with ranked, and really DB in general, is the massive amount of RNG involved in nearly everything. I know the devs need to make money, I don’t mind terrible droprates in normal cases, as there are paid alternatives with better droprates. The issue is when there are no alternatives.
A lot of the prices in DB are massively overinflated for what they are. Weapon kits, that are so rare and low value that I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if no one has ever used them on a cobalt, can’t be bought in the store. Ranked cards, that you have to grind through hours and hours of unbalanced matches only to get a loadout that you hate, can’t be bought in the store.
The issue isn’t RNG itself, it’s the fact that there are no alternatives to it. Nothing to spend credits on, nothing to spend money on.
Now, that’s a lot of complaining, but what can actually be done about this?
Rank NEEDS to be influenced by personal performance, not just wins or losses. Weighing the outcome based on the enemy’s rank isn’t enough, because rank is more or less meaningless as it is. I do believe your overall performance as a team should matter. It is all that ranked is about after all. But taking personal performance into consideration, perhaps based on the percentage of XP you earned compared to the total of your teammates, would help remove boosting and “negative boosting” altogether.
Parties should not have an artificial skill boost applied. Yes, grouping together with a party of MLG players can be extremely powerful. But that’s not what happens most of the time. Artificially changing how the game sees the player’s skill levels just ruins the entire idea behind personal performance.
Paid alternatives need to be added to avoid RNG, or a general lowering of prices. A lot of things in this game are massively overvalued and couldn’t hurt to be a bit cheaper. Hell, the cheaper things are, the more likely people are to buy them anyways.
Ranked cases need to allow for some degree of customization. Select the merc, weapon, class, or even the card, would make it so much more worth while, even if you could only do so by paying. It’s not fun wasting hours only to get a duplicate card on a merc you hate. And with the Aura obsidian, why not just allow people to choose the Aura card they want? Why limit it to only two? It makes no sense to annoy everyone who wants shotguns.
Might as well include this too, but remove team collisions. On a tight map where everyone is trying to trickjump into the same spot, it just doesn’t work. It’s far too buggy. If it was smoother and didn’t cause you to explode every time you touched a merc, I wouldn’t mind it, but it really doesn’t add anything positive imo.
Why hasn’t anything major been done about this yet?
Whether or not you agree with my points, ranked isn’t what SD wants it to be. Most players dislike ranked. And of course you can try to pay people to do something they don’t like, or punish them when they quit, but what needs to be realized is that this is a game, not a job. It’s supposed to be enjoyable, not a frustrating grind. I know a lot of people who only ever play ranked for its rewards, not because they enjoy it. And rather than bribe players to play, it should be something people actually want to play.
Rather than make ranked enjoyable for more players, SD seems to have decided that it’s better to just pay them to play. What I don’t understand is why SD seems so set on not making any major changes to ranked. For a dev team that supposedly “lives and breathes ranked”, you’d expect more than the highest score to be Gold 1. This is likely because SD is too busy actually developing the game. And that’s great, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to play your “work” in your free time either, but it’s a problem when you seem to be oblivious to how everything actually plays out.
SD really doesn’t seem to listen to the community either. Sure they’re improving on it, but it’s clearly not enough. When you not only have time to see how the game actually plays, but also usually don’t listen to how the community thinks it could be improved, you run into a lot of issues.
For whatever reason SD has opted to hide everything behind private test servers and avoid major changes, when the best thing they could do is change things up. It is beta after all, ranked doesn’t have to stay the same.
