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Systemic problems of Solo Ranked


Sertar

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A comprehensive list of issues that need to be fixed before Season 12.

 

Disclaimer: This is not a whiny whiny thread about wintraders or toxicity. This is only about player-neutral basic flaws of the queue and elo system, that affect all players at all times and makes their Ranked experience worse. Also some of these issues come from simple errors in the queue algorithm that can be fixed easily.

 

So lets get started fast:

 

1. "Tank stuck bug"

- In the game since Aug 7, 2018 / patch 5.9.2 (season 9 end / season 10 start)

- How it works: One tank in Solo Ranked queue will cause the system to wait for a 2nd tank to match that one tank against. If no 2nd tank appears, no Solo Ranked match will pop.

- Why is that a problem: There can be 20, 30 or even 50 dps players and multiple healers in queue, but they won't get a pop, when mulitple 4 dps vs. 4 dps or 3 dps 1 heal matches should pop. This bug has caused waiting times of up to 1 hour during prime time often enough. A healthy population is the most important thing for Solo Ranked. But when players have to wait up to 1 hour for a pop during prime time, they stop playing, so the population starts to dwindle, which causes this bug to happen even more regularly. It's a vicious circle.

- So please fix!

 

2. Cross-role backfills

- How it works: One person declines a pop or leaves before the 30 sec cooldown timer for round 1 starts. Very often a player with a different role (Tank/Heal/DPS) gets the backfill (even though there was a player with the appropriate role in queue at the time), resulting in Team A having a different composition than Team B.

- Why is that a problem: Obviously this shouldn't happen anyway, as it is a requirement for Solo Ranked matches that teams have equal compositions. But it is most crucial when one team ends up with the full trinity comp (1T, 1H, 2Dps) and the other team is missing the Tank or the Healer. Unless there is a huge skill difference between the teams, these games are not winnable for the team with 3 Dps.

- So please fix!

 

3. Different match evaluation for 3v4 (or when people leave during round 1)

- How it works: One person declines a pop and the person getting the backfill declines too or a person leaves before the end of round 1, resulting in a 3v4 match. The (most likely) winning 4 man team will get less Elo points than they would've gotten in a 4v4. The losing 3 man team will lose less Elo aswell.

- Why is that a problem: First of all, leaving and declining should get punished and matches that start as a 3v4 should not get any Elo evaluation anyway. But as it is, although not as severe as wintrading, this is a form of Elo manipulation. Usually used by high rated players, as they "only lose -11-13" by leaving early, when they would've lost -13-15 if they stayed until the end, and at the same time lowering the Elo gain of the other team, in which one of their top spot competitors is a lot of the time. That way they lower the value of that particular match for their competitor, however they were facing each other one the same level. Also in Team Ranked this has seen heavy abuse by players going 2v4 or even 1v4 to get a heavy Elo boost, which is obviously wintrading.

- This happens in conjunction with other issues, so a universal solution has to be found.

 

4. Placement matches are out of date

- How it works: Since Season 10 we are living in a world, where Gold tier is achieved with only 1500 rating (used to be Silver in S8 and S9, Gold was 1750). That means it is generally obtained by playing 10:0 with a new character.

- Why is that a problem: Gold tier is a goal for many players and in the eyes of many these placement matches have very high value to achieve that goal. Some will just create one character after another to finally get that infamous 8:2 or better start, others will transfer their character to reset the Elo and have fresh placement matches again. Not all players do that but it is general consensus that "you should" hope for good placements or you end up in "Elo hell" forever, not even trying to make 1500 from a 1200 or 1300 start. This however contradicts the idea of Gold tier rewarding active players with a consistent high winrate over many games played. In fact it highly encourages wintrading.

- So please get rid of placement matches, everyone should start at 1200 with a normal Elo game from the first game on. This would also make a possibly added "minimum games played requirement" irrelevant.

 

5. Top 3 players camping

- How it works: Since the matchmaking change in Season 10 people at the top spots tend to camp their highest Elo, because they are afraid of losing it and never getting back up again.

- Why is that a problem: Instead of continueing to play their main character at high Elo, players play alt characters until their Top 3 spot is "in danger". This once again contradicts the idea of rewarding active and consistent play and heavily encourages wintrading. But you can not only see this behavior on Top 3 spots, many players that achieved 1500 (Gold) stop there and don't touch the character ever again. While this doesn't make sense in the way of rewards, it shows that players are very scared of losing what they achieved.

- Possible solutions: Create "safety spots" where you can't drop. Maybe every 100, maybe every 200. And for Top 3: make the "highest earned" count for Top 3 as well. To keep players informed where the competition stands, the "highest earned" could be added to the public leaderboards on the SWTOR website.

 

Addition: Going together with issues no 3, 4 and 5, I wouldn't hate the idea of making wins and losses strictly +10 and -10 no matter the Elo distribution of players in the specific match.

 

(6. Team Ranked is dead)

- Don't give out the same rewards for a dead mode that is heavily manipulated, especially with mentioned issues no 3 and 4.

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zzzzzz

 

point 3: in reality leaving early or not taking queue results in higher elo loss. for ex: I left 2 matchs while in elo hell, one was -15 the other was -14.. odd, since it was blue elo... but when I lost matchs to the end I frequently lost -11 to -13.

 

and point 4: gold was set to 1500 in season s10 because realisticaly that was all people were pulling in solos. last season the top 3 of solos was 18XX, meanwhile during your s8 the top 3 had 3k+ elo. also 10:0 is approx 1350. with a crap ton of luck you can pull 1400 but last season an above average sniper stopped queueing after 1500, called "testingthequeue" he had to win 20 times.

 

edit: point 5: this has existed since top 3 existed. people get their top 3, they camp it till someone passes them, they play a match or two, and resume camping. Elo decay will fix this..... but making set by hundreds is simply twisting elo decay concept to fit what you want. In reality elo decay will decay you down to nothing if you don't play long enough. Because "in theory" you are good enough and population is healthy enough that you will find your self right back where you belong in 1700 or whatever.

Edited by Seterade
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I came to this thread fully expecting to disagree with at least some aspect of it, but alas I cannot. Good post. I hope that the devs are already aware of all of these, but it's always nice to remind them like this.

 

Good luck...

 

There have been posts like this for like 6 years now without anything significant happening. ;)

 

Sorry bro, but you are out of luck. Even the rating system is broken. It's designed for 1v1 chess games. For SR it's a total fail. When that is gone and replaced with something else, we can talk. Otherwise it's just a joke fest.

 

I also see people who prefer the old matchmaking ? Yeah , no wonder... Putting trash rated players vs high rated ones was very good for some.... very fair and exciting, yes ?

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Nevermind. Not even a miserable Solo Ranked improvement in 6.0 as it is?

 

F*** you BioWare. What now, ''we cannot promise changes for s12 but we will work on it, maybe, perhaps by s13''?

 

To be fair, Mike B mentioned months ago that there would be no ranked changes for 6.0, but that there would be some significant improvements in the months following 6.0.

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The last days of the season were pretty competitive, so I have to disagree with the 5th point. This was the case in the middle of the season but as you can see a lot of people played and also lost their ''safed spots''.

 

Yep, it was awesome trying to play with tanks who would /stuck to die after the first win against guild mates. I loved getting on teams who had guild mates in discord on the opposing team. It was interesting to see how they would coordinate wins in a way that made it look like they were actually trying, making sure to take out any non-guild players first and then "oh-so-barely" lose despite having superior healing output and damage output. Whoops.

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Yep, it was awesome trying to play with tanks who would /stuck to die after the first win against guild mates. I loved getting on teams who had guild mates in discord on the opposing team. It was interesting to see how they would coordinate wins in a way that made it look like they were actually trying, making sure to take out any non-guild players first and then "oh-so-barely" lose despite having superior healing output and damage output. Whoops.

Barely experienced stuff like that.

''You must be one of those guys then'' No, Thanks

Edited by Stubenhockr
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Yep, it was awesome trying to play with tanks who would /stuck to die after the first win against guild mates. I loved getting on teams who had guild mates in discord on the opposing team. It was interesting to see how they would coordinate wins in a way that made it look like they were actually trying, making sure to take out any non-guild players first and then "oh-so-barely" lose despite having superior healing output and damage output. Whoops.

 

Such things definitely happen. Hopefully Mike B can detect these kinds of wintraders.

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