My opinion regarding the existing and outdated Ranking System

Losses cost too much.

Remove lost ELO make it so the contest only counts wins, that would make it harder to win trade and it would remove a lot of the toxicity.

When dropping a match will almost guarantee a loss, this empowers the cheaters too much and makes it so common that you end up with lots of angry players who lose ELO for nothing they did themselves.

I believe the entire competition ought to be about wins counts, losses should play no part of ranked ELO. The other thing I’d do is make ELO legacy wide that way people could play any toon they wanted.

The other good thing would be people couldn’t have throw away toons where they drop to throw matches for their pals. They would have to devote an account to trying to cheat then, and how could they cheat if the contest only counted wins as a way to boost ELO.

So top three titles people love to sell I mean win by throwing matches and getting top ELO with minimum wins just enough wins to get top ELO thanks to 20-30 matches handed to them via cheating would have to turn into rewards given to the ones who top the number of wins not just who could be spoon fed losses to artificially boost a much undeserved ELO score.

I’d actually prefer to just remove ELO, personally I think it is not capable of working properly with so many cheaters, win traders, and all the massive Differences in power between the classes shows just how impossible it is for ELO to even begin to properly indicate who are truly the best in PVP which is what ELO is Supposed to indicate!

You should've seen his stream yesterday, when he got tank/healer games at 2am in the morning. Hilarious.

Funny how much rage and hatred I got from that streamer on his stream, and all his friends after sharing this thread. They all went apes at me like an immune system fighting an infection. Just because I undisclosed their shenanigan, without pointing my claims at anyone and not mentioning a single name. They broke cover by themselves.

The problem is obviously not the current system according to them, ofc not, because it allows them to do their activities in total peace and without any competitivity.
The problem are the players who fight against it and all kinds of behaviours like such. Fine then, we're the problem.
Only we all know what's going on, and that's what makes them lose their mind over it. And if God forbids, a poor soul reveals their activity on the forums...

I'm surprised no one shared that clever meme one of his friends made about me here yet... Anyone?

Exactly this. ^

I have created so many threads and posts on threads about the corruption and garbage that ranked is on this game and BW seems oblivious. I just stopped playing ranked, and the cheating kids that live in it can have it.

I mean they are like kids, too btw. Any interaction with the "ranked community" now is like trying to communicate with a bunch of 12 year olds I never seen so much toxic teen angst corralled in one channel.

Dudes need to get laid or something but that's besides the point.

The real point is, ranked is at the lowest point it has ever been, and that's saying a lot. I offer BW and some of their so-called PVPers that are on staff to go play ranked for 48 hours! I mean, BW just put a little time into investigating it yourself and you will see just how awful this niche of the game is. It's so obvious no one working at BW paritcipates in ranked for any extended period of time, in fact I bet not one of them queues ranked, EVER.

Not only does the scoring system only encourage cheating by how easy it is to cheat, but without any sort of ingame monitoring the little kiddies in ranked make it their playground to manipulate and ruin for everyone else.

Seems dumb as hell to allow a game mode to carry on like this, but that's just the case. A bunch of toxic nasty immature players that are running a secret cabal of cheating and wintrading to make money off pixels and/or to just collect pixels by cheating because, well, because they can.

Really awesome "competitive game mode" we got here! Totally sarcasm for anyone incapable of telling.

I'm surprised no one has done this yet, but this requires clarification. After your first 10 games, you gain/lose more elo for a certain number of games (not sure exactly, maybe the next dozen or so). But eventually that tails off, and virtually all games you gain/lose between 10 and 13 elo.

Winning three games and gaining 10 elo each (+30) and then losing three games and losing 15 elo each (-45) is the most extreme that could ever get, and that would only happen to a very high rated player. The disparity between winning and losing is not nearly that high. It's more like you gain 11-12 for winning and you lose 12-13 for losing. Overall, you do lose more than you gain if your winrate is .500, but it's not nearly as extreme as this post is presenting.

SF is not like that. There are a lot of toxic ******es that vote kick people excessively, but that's a separate issue really.

This is not true. I'm currently in top 3 position on one of my toons (though I don't have the 200 wins yet, getting close), and I have never wintraded or engaged in any kind of coordination with others in solo ranked.

Historically, many top 3 titles were wintraded or gained through a dead team ranked system. Probably about half, which is still a disturbing amount. But to say it's ALL of them is simply absurd.

Do you not know about the win requirements? You need 200 wins to get top 3 now.

Just a reminder to people that Lhance here says that he played ranked for 1 week over a year ago. And that's it. Yet somehow he has this intimate knowledge about what happens in ranked today lol. He'll claim "everyone knows it!" when the reality is that it's just the forum echo chamber of people that don't play ranked hating on ranked. If people want to know the real problems in ranked, pay attention to the people that actually play it regularly. They're the only ones that have first hand knowledge of the situation.

It's also worth pointing out that SF and DM seem to have different problems going on at the moment, so people should be more careful to not make points about solos as a whole if it's something only happening on one server.

I've always been open about the fact that solo ranked has problems. And I'm even open to radical suggestions like removing elo (I've never been really convinced, but it's not crazy). But exaggerating and outright making stuff up about ranked is never going to help your case.

I probably was playing ranked before you ever even heard of ranked, or SWTOR for that matter rofl. I played ranked years ago, and played every year until last year, which admittedly was only for 1-2 weeks. That hardly equates to "only played ranked one week." You are deliberately twisting my words into a narrative you want it to be. That's why no one likes to engage you on the forums. You just want to argue and you only read and see what you want from the words other people write.

(We can't discuss anything when people lack basic comprehension skills or choose to be disingenuous when they respond to what others write!)

So, as I wrote a year ago and in past years before that, Solo ranked is (STILL) a cesspool, that's a fact. Call it whatever you want. If it's not a cesspool, how come so little of the pop play it? How come this game mode isn't touted as a successful part of SWTOR heavily supported and talked about by PVPers worldwide? That's because it's BAD.

Sure, Alex and a couple others on the forums will tell you solo ranked is alive and well, but that's apparently coming from a perspective of someone that lives in ranked, enjoys all the "lively" and "humorous good natured" banter they spew and who also somehow miraculously avoids all activities of dropped matches and wintrading.

As much as some of these guys play solo ranked, I find it hard to believe they never see this stuff, when all it takes is for me to queue for one day and find 3 out of 4 matches somehow someway get compromised by someone either dropping from the match before it begins to ensure one team has 3 versus 4, or they find another way to skew the numbers like group kicking/throwing the match purposefully. It's that bad.

Don't believe me, just try it yourself people. Come back and share your experience let's see if it more resembles my depiction or Alex's rose-tinted vision of solo ranked.

Another thing Alex has expressed is that ELO accurately represents how good a player is in PVP, ELO works on SWTOR according to him. Yes, he believes that.

Dead pop game = broken ELO. It doesn't work. For ELO to work, you need a healthy population. SWTOR does not have a healthy ranked population people need to stop pretending it does.

For ELO to work, you need a rigid structured system that isn't plagued with so many variables that contribute to ELO loss, often which has nothing to do with the player or their skills!

In a nutshell, it's just too easy to cause a loss in ranked which is why so many people cheat in the first place, because it's SO EASY to do. The second reason so many cheat in ranked is because the repercussions are light to nil, many cheaters get away with it.

If BW truly wants a ELO style system for scoring, they have to tighten up on all the ways people cheat including group kicks which has become the new favorite tactic by these wonderful elite skilled fellows that live in ranked 24/7.

I just think some of the these ranked players are fanatics, and extremely biased. They will do everything they can to defend it's present set-up regardless how dead or awful it is for the majority of other players who wish it was better. These guys don't care, as long as they can get their little shiny pixels, they don't care how bad the game mode is, apparently.

I played in beta, and from launch through the end of season 1 of ranked on POT5. I've said that many times on these forums. I also didn't twist anything. What I said did not preclude any ranked experience prior to the last two years. In this context, it's irrelevant because playing ranked years ago has no bearing on how ranked is today, which is what we're discussing.

You have no first hand knowledge whatsoever of how ranked is. Yet you call it a "fact." It's laughable.

Such things happen sometimes. But it's the minority. This is what you can't seem to get into your head. Last night when I was playing, I was on the wrong side of a few 3v4s (which is more than I've experienced in months). One of them the person timed out, another random rage quit, another person got globaled instantly and quit. These kind of things happen in every online game every once in a while. The night before last I had normal games where no one left.

Two days ago I was playing a CS:GO comp match with two friends. Halfway through the match, one of our random teammates left the game. Does that mean CS:GO is a dead game filled with cheaters and wintraders? Obviously not.

Yes, please do. Lhance has played a literal handful of games in the last two years. I've played thousands. He has absolutely no basis to assert the things that he's asserting.

Given enough games played, you will get a range of elo that is relatively accurate, yes. Which is true. You just saying "it doesn't work" means **** all.

That's not true, you just made it up. Those factors even out over time when you play enough games. It's not a hard concept to grasp.

This is kind of hilarious to be honest. So you get a crumb of info from people like me that actually play the game, and you try to fit it into your narrative. The people kicking on SF do not do it to wintrade or cheat. They do it to discourage people they think are bad or simply don't like from queueing. It's just a troll tactic, not one used to cheat. That doesn't make it right, but this once again proves you have no clue what you're talking about.

You don't know how good or bad the game mode is because you don't play it or know anything about it. Not to mention, I've repeatedly pointed out all of the legitimate problems in solo ranked and what could be done to fix them. And in my previous post I literally said I'd be open to radical changes. Arguing in bad faith and ignoring facts doesn't help you I'm afraid.

Whatever changes are made to ranked should be grounded in what's actually happening in ranked. You can make all the suggestions you want, but as soon as you start making **** up about ranked, it's important that someone inform people so that they don't get misled.

I think you two are comparing apples to oranges here. Two very different arguments. However, I agree with both of your points of view here.

I dabble with it, from time to time, but am by no means "hard core" about solo ranked anymore. In a sense, I think the older players have been kicked to the curb. Meaning, the new fanatics will do just about anything to keep them out. I could be 100% out in left field by saying that but it is how it feels. So I get what Lhance is saying about the toxicity. I certainly don't lose any sleep over it though because the dps guardians/juggs, the class I enjoy playing in ranked, is not even middle of the pack this season.

At the same time, because I have only played......maybe....30 matches this season....I have stayed out of ranked topics. Why? To Alex's point, I really have not played enough to have an opinion.

You are right! I whole heartingly agree with your backwards 2+3=100 logic and find real reasoning in it. Your conspiracy theories are right on the mark of reality and truth.

Coincidence?

i dO nOt tHiNk sO!!!!!!!!!!! O_o !!!!!!

Someone call the ranked police. Someone call the FBI. Someone call the.... i don't know what the FBI equivalent for the EU or European countries is. We need to get to the bottom of this.

Yeah, it's a tough time for dps juggs, no doubt. And there is definitely a certain segment of the ranked community on SF that is far too toxic. It's worse this season than the last two, I think because a bunch of people came over form SS. Most of it is just typing nonsense, which doesn't matter that much. The excessive kicking is a real problem though. Bioware should probably just remove that feature from ranked at this point. It can be occasionally useful for actual trolls or throwers, but probably 90% of the time I've seen it used this season, it's unjustified.

All of that is different from claiming that it's filled with cheaters and wintraders though. I have not seen that this season on SF. DM might be a different story. I don't play on DM, and I only rarely watch DM streams, so I have no comment on it.

As long as people frame their opinions appropriately, like you have, there's no issue.

Or in other words, agree with him or don't contradict what he says. ^