Talking about Ranked Mode

[kirinichiban42]

I have been playing a lot more ranked mode lately (mainly because of the triple ranked points) and it reminded me of why I took a break from this mode in the first place. I wanted to talk about some issues, in my opinion, are plaguing the game mode. I want to preface this by saying that I really want to play more ranked mode, but, as it is now, it can be an exhausting experience.

First off, I feel that people leaving the game prematurely is the biggest problem. If one person leaves, the team instantly has a disadvantage and, in most cases, loses the match. What doesn’t make sense to me is that the team with the abandoning player will collectively fall in rank in the case of a loss. Seeing as there is no way for a completely new player to join a ranked match in progress, it seems that this is adding insult to injury. I think a larger penalty should be given to people who abandon matches purposefully. Additionally, there should be some form of protection for teams that had a player abandon the match.

A smaller gripe I have with ranked is the amount of points the losing team gets (triple ranked points really highlights the problem). Whereas every win gets you 50 points (a good amount per win; no complaints), every loss gets you 10 points which I feel is too low. After doing some quick math (work shown in spoiler to substantiate claims), it would take about 33 matches to get 1000 points with a 50/50 win to loss ratio. I feel that the amount of points per loss should be bumped up to about 25 points, or half the amount of points for a win.

What you all think?

! Work shown for math (simple system of equations):
! x = amount of wins
! y = amount of losses
! z = total matches played
! 50x + 10y = 1000 (represents the amount of wins and losses to get 1000 points)
! x = y (represents the 50/50 win to loss ratio)
! x + y = z (represents the sum of losses and wins to get total matches played)
!
! Solving for the x and y:
! x = 16.67
! y = 16.67
!
! Plug everything together:
! z = x + y = 16.67 + 16.67 = 33.33

[kittz0r]

Why should you be rewarded for losing anyway?

[anon41468043]

I agree about punishing leavers more. Sort of became my shtick for a while, but I guess it’s not a popular opinion. I will always vote we punish the Hell out of the quitters.

[K1X455]

Players think that Ranked is CMM. They just don’t have enough self respect to be playing in ranked; probably because the attitude gap between CMM and Ranked is so wide, SD needs to re-think how they run the matches. These along with other complaints cause players to fall off the game quite rapidly.

[STARRYSOCK]

I’ve mentioned my issues with ranked many times, so I won’t go into as much detail here. But imo the best solution would be basing rank off personal performance instead of team performance, which would remove the impact of leavers, and also half the price of all ranked items so they aren’t as much of a grind to get.
You do make a good point with the loss ranked points though. 25 seems fair, as long as you also bump the rewards for a draw to 40 instead of 30. Although I suppose ranked points could be based on personal performance too.

@kittz0r said:
Why should you be rewarded for losing anyway?

Because this is just a game. You want people to enjoy themselves. Yeah, there are some hardcore players who would choose to have their entire game uninstalled when they lose or whatever, but most people are somewhere in between casual and fully competitive. Considering a lot of ranked losses are because of leavers or stacked premades, it can be frustrating as hell wasting almost half an hour for just 10 points. And that frustration turns people off of ranked.

@Wintergreen said:
I agree about punishing leavers more. Sort of became my shtick for a while, but I guess it’s not a popular opinion. I will always vote we punish the Hell out of the quitters.

It’s actually a pretty popular one, but it won’t really fix that much. People have lives, no matter how much you punish someone, they still might have a situation that requires them to leave a ranked match. I’ve had the power go out multiple times, and even a family member collapse outside my room during an overwatch match. Hell, once DB just randomly disconnected me from a ranked match and wouldn’t even let me rejoin. These aren’t things I could predict or prevent, and I don’t see how punishing me for it would help anything.

I do agree leaver punishments should be increased a bit, but you can never prevent all leavers, no matter what punishment you give them. Best thing you can do is just make it so the leaver’s teammates aren’t dragged down because of that.

[teflonlove]

@STARRYSOCK said:
These aren’t things I could predict or prevent, and I don’t see how punishing me for it would help anything.

If punishment means temporary banning a leaver from playing ranked, longer bans mean fewer opportunities for regular leavers to wreck other people’s matches.

Provided that the first and second offense keep a low punishment (few minutes), rare network outages or occasionally collapsing family members should be covered.

So it’s less a punishment to discourage people from leaving but more a protection of other players from regular leavers.

Anyway, I’m not even sure how often people “leave” because the game crashes. There is something about ranked that makes it regularly crash although no such problem exists in the other modes.

[STARRYSOCK]

@teflonlove said:

@STARRYSOCK said:
These aren’t things I could predict or prevent, and I don’t see how punishing me for it would help anything.

If punishment means temporary banning a leaver from playing ranked, longer bans mean fewer opportunities for regular leavers to wreck other people’s matches.

Provided that the first and second offense keep a low punishment (few minutes), rare network outages or occasionally collapsing family members should be covered.

So it’s less a punishment to discourage people from leaving but more a protection of other players from regular leavers.

Anyway, I’m not even sure how often people “leave” because the game crashes. There is something about ranked that makes it regularly crash although no such problem exists in the other modes.

I’m not against punishing leavers or anything, and as I said, I think the penalties should be increased a bit. But after a certain point, I can’t see increased penalties doing anything beyond stopping people with legitimate reasons for leaving from playing ranked again.

Besides, the problem with short punishments for first time offenses are that an actual ragequitter could get 1 or 2 free quits. And of course their team is still punished for it.
With the way ranked works currently, there’s really no way to properly handle it. If you give people a massive penalty for a first offense, you just push away people who didn’t leave intentionally. But if you give them a few “warnings”, you also allow ragequitters to get off relatively free. All the while some poor team is a man down.

[teflonlove]

@STARRYSOCK said:
But after a certain point, I can’t see increased penalties doing anything beyond stopping people with legitimate reasons for leaving from playing ranked again.

Well, they also stop people without legitimate reasons for leaving from playing ranked again.

Whether this is worth the potential outcry from the “daddy, look!” and “sorry i have to take this call” quitters is hard to tell.

The rage quitters frankly I don’t mind most of the time because they only speed up losing an already lost match. And they ensure that you can leave the match soon even if the rest of the team cannot find the PgUp key for the surrender vote.

[anon41468043]

@STARRYSOCK, ^ @teflonlove has covered the gist of my thoughts for the most part so I won’t type it all again. I think it was me and Nail that had like 15+ paragraphs about it all sometime last year when threads kept popping up.

I think it could be as simple as a strike policy and increasing the punishments beyond a certain amount of quits/disconnects/runstothebathroombecauseIateTacoBellTonight/team kills, etc. Provide a clear-as-day prompt before a match that states any consecutive quits within the next 6hr/12hr/24hr or whatever time frame will result in ‘x’ penalty. A lot of games have things like this in place, and a lot of them don’t. Suppose my stance puts me on the arrogant tryhard elitist team, but I feel it would work. It is what it is. I see no reasons why it wouldn’t work if everyone understood the consequences. That said, I do NOT agree with lessening the loss of rank for the team that has been unfortunate enough to have a teammate quit/disconnect and not return. This could be abused too easily. Punishing the individual who quits, or providing more incentives for people not to quit (time/performance based ranked point system similar to what we have with Credits, anyone?) is the best way I think they should go about it.

[STARRYSOCK]

@Wintergreen said:
@STARRYSOCK, ^ @teflonlove has covered the gist of my thoughts for the most part so I won’t type it all again. I think it was me and Nail that had like 15+ paragraphs about it all sometime last year when threads kept popping up.

I think it could be as simple as a strike policy and increasing the punishments beyond a certain amount of quits/disconnects/runstothebathroombecauseIateTacoBellTonight/team kills, etc. Provide a clear-as-day prompt before a match that states any consecutive quits within the next 6hr/12hr/24hr or whatever time frame will result in ‘x’ penalty. A lot of games have things like this in place, and a lot of them don’t. Suppose my stance puts me on the arrogant tryhard elitist team, but I feel it would work. It is what it is. I see no reasons why it wouldn’t work if everyone understood the consequences. That said, I do NOT agree with lessening the loss of rank for the team that has been unfortunate enough to have a teammate quit/disconnect and not return. This could be abused too easily. Punishing the individual who quits, or providing more incentives for people not to quit (time/performance based ranked point system similar to what we have with Credits, anyone?) is the best way I think they should go about it.

As I said, giving players a minimal punishment for first time leavers could still be an issue. I’ve known people who know the punishments very well and still decide to leave, it’s not a matter of ignorance. Some people just view it as a “free leave every time the strike wears off” or whatever. And of course while that’s happening, their team is still being punished. Considering leavers are the most frequent criticisms of ranked that I see among both new and old players, it’s a pretty big issue, not something that I believe could be solved by listing out the penalties.
Besides, it’s not just an annoyance to lose out on a potential 50 ranked points, it messes up DB’s ability to balance matches in general. When someone loses a match because of a leaver that they should have won otherwise, it skews the skill ratings of someone who should have ranked up. No, it doesn’t mean someone in cobalt is going to get stuck in bronze, but that’s still a pretty major issue considering DB balances players based on wins and losses.

I’m not just saying discount the entire match if someone leaves, it’s a tie-in to my personal-performance based rank argument. At least when your rank is in your own hands, any leaver is only hurting themselves, and it’s really not open to any abuse. At least no more than the current system is, where a player can leave or even start teamkilling a team they dislike.

[Mc1412013]

@kittz0r said:
Why should you be rewarded for losing anyway?

Because the rise of the snowflakes said so.

[bgyoshi]

@kittz0r said:

Why should you be rewarded for losing anyway?

@Mc1412013 said:

Because the rise of the snowflakes said so.

Because it should be a reward for playing Ranked, not a reward for winning Ranked. Literally, participation points.

You can talk about rewards for winning after you have a mode that people actually play.

@kirinichiban42 said:

First off, I feel that people leaving the game prematurely is the biggest problem.

And I’ve been saying it forever; Stopwatch is too slow of a mode and encourages people to leave. On top of that, 5v5 is devoid of any real tactics, it’s slow paced, boring, and has too few players to allow for any kind of interesting merc compositions.

Nobody wants to suffer through 30 minutes of losing DB, especially when you only get 10 ranked points for it instead of 50. So it’s better to just leave.

Until you at least make Stopwatch faster (like making it two rounds of objective) and give everyone the same amount of points for playing a full game of Ranked, then people will always leave early. And the more you punish people for leaving early without addressing the problem of why they leave, then you’ll just have less people playing Ranked at all. You can even keep it 5v5, just making it faster will be enough.

You think Ranked participation is low now? Wait until you implement harsher punishments on leavers.

[Darkwolf3802]

The sad truth is that there will always be rage quitters, those ppl who will abandon the match to avoid taking a loss and looking bad. These ppl dont care if it messes things up or not they just think of themselves and as such should receive a punishment and a stricter one then that. If its such an issue a stricter punishment would make it so its not worth quitting and if ranked is fixed so rewards are worth the it then u would find better matches in both the sense that more ppl r playing ranked as well as rage quitters r less common due to not being able to play if they quit and deterring some ppl from quitting.

[JShug07]

Just increase the minimum level required for ranked, Minimum level should be like level 20 imo.

[Darkwolf3802]

@JShug07 said:
Just increase the minimum level required for ranked, Minimum level should be like level 20 imo.

Thats not guna do anything. Rage quitters are of all lvls and restricting it to such a high lvl will only kill off the ranked pop further as it stands

[JShug07]

@Darkwolf3802 said:

@JShug07 said:
Just increase the minimum level required for ranked, Minimum level should be like level 20 imo.

Thats not guna do anything. Rage quitters are of all lvls and restricting it to such a high lvl will only kill off the ranked pop further as it stands

What I have seen from my experience is that almost everytime a low level player disconnects,It’s hard to see any high level player disconnection

[Darkwolf3802]

@JShug07 said:

@Darkwolf3802 said:

@JShug07 said:
Just increase the minimum level required for ranked, Minimum level should be like level 20 imo.

Thats not guna do anything. Rage quitters are of all lvls and restricting it to such a high lvl will only kill off the ranked pop further as it stands

What I have seen from my experience is that almost everytime a low level player disconnects,It’s hard to see any high level player disconnection

and guess wut, those low lvls become high lvls. Nothing is resolved with bringing it to lvl 20. u can raise it to 50 the same ppl will rage quit either way. Stiffer penalties will make ppl think twice about rage quitting and yes some ppl will still rage quit regardless but this will help the issue. There r other issues with ranked but that would help this one in particular.

[Szakalot]

every match dropped = *0.99 multiplier to ranked point earn rates. Drop ten games, lose 10% of ranked points.

The idea is to discourage the people who drop games from playing in the first place, we don’t need none of those people in ranked.