those same ranked teams that faceroll you anyway, also queue for normal warzones too, just in case you forgot that !

I like normal WZ's I think rated would be too stressful, you can get worked up enough in a normal one anyway, so rated would be much worse. I wouldn't ever entertain the idea of rated until I have full war hero and all that is fully augmented anyway.

Here are the major issues as I see them:

1. Ranked WZs caters to a small subset of (PvP) players who want to make an Esport out of MMO PvP. Any game design that is only desired by ~5% of your playerbase is not a good use of development resources. There are far more issues that far more players would prefer to see BW working on rather than a PvP option that only serves a very small minority of Epeeners.

2. For all the reasons players hated Arena in WoW (forced PvP gear progression, excacerbated class imbalance issues, excluded class/specs), they will hate Ranked WZs. For all the reasons that Blizzard admitted in an interview years ago that their biggest mistake was introducing Arena, Bioware will find themselves in a similar position.

3. Ranked WZs were badly implemented. There's no ladder system to allow better teams to move up so that similarly ranked teams can be matched against each other, which is in large part due to the lack of participation and could be alleviated to a certain degree with cross-server queues. As it stands, new teams are forced to play against veteran teams, and the result is that one or two teams on each server completely dominate everyone else. This discourages participation, and in turn, causes Ranked WZs to become stagnant and undesirable.

4. There's no incentive for Ranked WZs other than purple-black/orange-black Expertise crystals you can't get without a sufficient Ranking. Most players need to be full WH before stepping into Ranked WZs, at which point Ranked commendations are no longer important to a player. This means that the only real incentive for Ranked WZs is doing them for fun, which they currently are not, or for Epeen (also see #1 above).

5. Ranked WZs require an 8-man team that not all guilds are able or willing to support due to other interests or availability issues. Some players who have actually wanted to participate in Ranked WZs are then forced to seek teammates from other guilds, in effect forming a PUG (pick-up group). Logistics issues aside, these PUGs are inherently at a disadvantage against full guild teams who have the benefit of constantly playing together (also see #3 above).

6. Ranked WZs highlight class imbalance issues, and as a result, certain ACs/specs (Advanced Classes) are excluded because they aren't as competitive as others. An exclusionary PvP system isn't conducive to encouraging participation, which is necessary to keep it both viable and worthwhile. Unless Bioware is willing to focus a significantly larger amount of development resources on tuning balance issues than they currently do, this will only continue to plague them and erode player satisfaction.

In summary, it's my opinion that BW should get rid of Ranked WZs, at the very least in their current form. It's a feature that will only be missed by a very small percentage of players who aren't even getting to hardly play right now, let alone against any real or meaningful competition. If BW decides to push this PvP option forward against the wishes of their greater number of subscribers, then they need to figure out a way to make it much more fun, accessible, and fair for all players who wish to PvP. Frankly, their track record with PvP in this game doesn't give me much faith that they have the wherewithal to make that happen.

Should be pretty obvious why.

Just about everyone in this thread is singing the same tune.

Here are the major issues as I see them:

 

1. Ranked WZs caters to a small subset of (PvP) players who want to make an Esport out of MMO PvP. Any game design that is only desired by ~5% of your playerbase is not a good use of development resources. There are far more issues that far more players would prefer to see BW working on rather than a PvP option that only serves a very small minority of Epeeners.

 

2. For all the reasons players hated Arena in WoW (forced PvP gear progression, excacerbated class imbalance issues, excluded class/specs), they will hate Ranked WZs. For all the reasons that Blizzard admitted in an interview years ago that their biggest mistake was introducing Arena, Bioware will find themselves in a similar position.

 

3. Ranked WZs were badly implemented. There's no ladder system to allow better teams to move up so that similarly ranked teams can be matched against each other, which is in large part due to the lack of participation and could be alleviated to a certain degree with cross-server queues. As it stands, new teams are forced to play against veteran teams, and the result is that one or two teams on each server completely dominate everyone else. This discourages participation, and in turn, causes Ranked WZs to become stagnant and undesirable.

 

4. There's no incentive for Ranked WZs other than purple-black/orange-black Expertise crystals you can't get without a sufficient Ranking. Most players need to be full WH before stepping into Ranked WZs, at which point Ranked commendations are no longer important to a player. This means that the only real incentive for Ranked WZs is doing them for fun, which they currently are not, or for Epeen (also see #1 above).

 

5. Ranked WZs require an 8-man team that not all guilds are able or willing to support due to other interests or availability issues. Some players who have actually wanted to participate in Ranked WZs are then forced to seek teammates from other guilds, in effect forming a PUG (pick-up group). Logistics issues aside, these PUGs are inherently at a disadvantage against full guild teams who have the benefit of constantly playing together (also see #3 above).

 

6. Ranked WZs highlight class imbalance issues, and as a result, certain ACs/specs (Advanced Classes) are excluded because they aren't as competitive as others. An exclusionary PvP system isn't conducive to encouraging participation, which is necessary to keep it both viable and worthwhile. Unless Bioware is willing to focus a significantly larger amount of development resources on tuning balance issues than they currently do, this will only continue to plague them and erode player satisfaction.

 

In summary, it's my opinion that BW should get rid of Ranked WZs, at the very least in their current form. It's a feature that will only be missed by a very small percentage of players who aren't even getting to hardly play right now, let alone against any real or meaningful competition. If BW decides to push this PvP option forward against the wishes of their greater number of subscribers, then they need to figure out a way to make it much more fun, accessible, and fair for all players who wish to PvP. Frankly, their track record with PvP in this game doesn't give me much faith that they have the wherewithal to make that happen.

Wow someone who gets it completely. You can pretty much end the thread now. Everything is covered here and correctly.

I don't play ranked because I'm just not that good.

This is why 99% of players don't do ranked but let's complain more about gear, class imbalance etc.

Wow someone who gets it completely. You can pretty much end the thread now. Everything is covered here and correctly.

Only if he's right about the matchmaking. If the queue really doesn't take your rank into consideration and matches you against a team that has a significantly higher rank, well, then that needs to be addressed. Otherwise, I think ranked is perfectly viable.

Here is the thing. Losing a ranked > winning a regular warzone. I lost a ranked match and got 65 ranked comms. That's better than many regular warzone wins, where you can get 115 normal comms if you eek it out.

The funny thing: it was a pug match and 2 players quit 1/3 of the way through because they could tell it was a loss. What the heck did they expect? Of course we lost, we were a pug going against a full premade. But if you queue againt another pug team you have a shot at winning and really reaping some rewards.

The sooner people realize this and make teams and queue, the better it will be. The longer it takes for this to dawn on people, well, things are going to get worse before they get better.

P.S. I have a feeling the PVP servers have a much better participation rate when it comes to ranked matches.

It's already been said many times in this thread, but here are reasons that I don't do many ranked warzones:

1) Ranked Warzones are extremely competitive, which is the point. Unfortunately, it means you have to have the right 8 people on at the right time to be able to queue. If you grab some filler players, you can no longer compete in this type of environment and I have enough gear to where I don't need to farm comms.

2) Class composition is too important. We don't have a geared marauder or pyro PT. No matter how good we play, we can't win without these classes against a well coordinated opponent.

3) Gear. We don't have enough people with the gear to compete. Sure, you can hop in and get comms faster through ranked warzones, but that doesn't make it an enjoyable experience for those of us who don't just need comms.

Overall, I think the teams that really wanted ranked warzones are happy with the competition they are seeing when they don't run into PUG's. On the occasions where I fill a spot for some of the better ranked teams, I greatly enjoy how competitive and close all the games are in ranked. I think they're working as intended, they just don't appeal to all players.

Here is the thing. Losing a ranked > winning a regular warzone. I lost a ranked match and got 65 ranked comms. That's better than many regular warzone wins, where you can get 115 normal comms if you eek it out.

 

.

So basically if you are using ranked to get comms and don't mind a terrible ranking that makes sense. Most people who do ranked actually want their rank to mean something and are not going to ruin their rank so they can gear up quickly. I'm guessing even the ranked teams don't want to see this, they waste all that time in queue to go up against a team with no challenge willing to lose for the comms and then they hardly get any rank because of how low the team wanting gear only was.

This is why 99% of players don't do ranked but let's complain more about gear, class imbalance etc.

I see a lot of people talk about how they don't like getting stomped by the same hardcore teams over and over, which is fine. Once season 1 starts up, similarly ranked teams will be playing eachother. Preseason is going to be pitting random teams against eachother, whether they are guild teams or pug teams so that everyone has a starting rank going into season 1. I think once season 1 gets underway we'll see a lot of people returning to rwz's.

But yeah, for me, I do fine while I'm playing on a team with guildies. But I'm still learning MMO style PvP as this is my first MMO, and I've been playing since launch. At this point I just don't think I'm competitive ranked wz material. So I'm still trying to get better and trying to yield good results consistently while queing individually.

it's a numbers problem.

with ranked WZ being 8, it means it's harder to put together people vs. say, 4. you also have a lot less teams with the relatively higher number of players, which means longer queue, which means people losing interest.

course, you can't very well have objective based pvp with only 4 people, so i'm not sure where that leaves us.

it was easier to deal with in WoW, with 2v2, 3v3, 5v5. it's too hard for a brand new pvp player like me, to assemble a RWZ group to start playing the game, since everyone else is already in a team.

TL;DR - entrance barrier set too high

A lot of the premades that were steamrolling regular WZs weren't as good as they thought so after losing few rated games they went back to facerolling regular WZs again. These premades don't need gear and losing is not fun so they don't queue ranked anymore.

That leaves hardcore pvp'ers sitting in long queues and finally getting matched with random trade pug. The match is not fun for either of them so after few loses and getting 20-30 ranked comms the pugs stop queuing.

This is what's happening on my server, couple of pvp guilds that were murdering opposition on their old servers just don't perform as good versus other organized teams so they're back to facerolling undergeared pugs and calling it skill.

^ pretty much right on

So basically if you are using ranked to get comms and don't mind a terrible ranking that makes sense. Most people who do ranked actually want their rank to mean something and are not going to ruin their rank so they can gear up quickly. I'm guessing even the ranked teams don't want to see this, they waste all that time in queue to go up against a team with no challenge willing to lose for the comms and then they hardly get any rank because of how low the team wanting gear only was.

I pretty much agree with you. But that WarHero grind is gawd-awful, and I think Bioware gets more of the blame than the players. Doing the grind on a second toon is just insane. Also, I was assuming that:

1. As your rank declines you will be matched with similarly ranked opponents until you get to a point where you are winning about half of your matches.

2. Your rank will be reset at the end of preseason.

Am I wrong about either of these? Was this information made available somewhere?

it's a numbers problem.

 

with ranked WZ being 8, it means it's harder to put together people vs. say, 4. you also have a lot less teams with the relatively higher number of players, which means longer queue, which means people losing interest.

 

course, you can't very well have objective based pvp with only 4 people, so i'm not sure where that leaves us.

 

it was easier to deal with in WoW, with 2v2, 3v3, 5v5. it's too hard for a brand new pvp player like me, to assemble a RWZ group to start playing the game, since everyone else is already in a team.

 

TL;DR - entrance barrier set too high

ye its a problem

i played 4 guys premade for a long time and after 1.3 we had problem of getting 4 more decent guys.

then we had trouble with getting all online same time.

still playing 1 time per week

Here are the major issues as I see them:

 

1. Ranked WZs caters to a small subset of (PvP) players who want to make an Esport out of MMO PvP. Any game design that is only desired by ~5% of your playerbase is not a good use of development resources. There are far more issues that far more players would prefer to see BW working on rather than a PvP option that only serves a very small minority of Epeeners.

 

2. For all the reasons players hated Arena in WoW (forced PvP gear progression, excacerbated class imbalance issues, excluded class/specs), they will hate Ranked WZs. For all the reasons that Blizzard admitted in an interview years ago that their biggest mistake was introducing Arena, Bioware will find themselves in a similar position.

 

3. Ranked WZs were badly implemented. There's no ladder system to allow better teams to move up so that similarly ranked teams can be matched against each other, which is in large part due to the lack of participation and could be alleviated to a certain degree with cross-server queues. As it stands, new teams are forced to play against veteran teams, and the result is that one or two teams on each server completely dominate everyone else. This discourages participation, and in turn, causes Ranked WZs to become stagnant and undesirable.

 

4. There's no incentive for Ranked WZs other than purple-black/orange-black Expertise crystals you can't get without a sufficient Ranking. Most players need to be full WH before stepping into Ranked WZs, at which point Ranked commendations are no longer important to a player. This means that the only real incentive for Ranked WZs is doing them for fun, which they currently are not, or for Epeen (also see #1 above).

 

5. Ranked WZs require an 8-man team that not all guilds are able or willing to support due to other interests or availability issues. Some players who have actually wanted to participate in Ranked WZs are then forced to seek teammates from other guilds, in effect forming a PUG (pick-up group). Logistics issues aside, these PUGs are inherently at a disadvantage against full guild teams who have the benefit of constantly playing together (also see #3 above).

 

6. Ranked WZs highlight class imbalance issues, and as a result, certain ACs/specs (Advanced Classes) are excluded because they aren't as competitive as others. An exclusionary PvP system isn't conducive to encouraging participation, which is necessary to keep it both viable and worthwhile. Unless Bioware is willing to focus a significantly larger amount of development resources on tuning balance issues than they currently do, this will only continue to plague them and erode player satisfaction.

 

In summary, it's my opinion that BW should get rid of Ranked WZs, at the very least in their current form. It's a feature that will only be missed by a very small percentage of players who aren't even getting to hardly play right now, let alone against any real or meaningful competition. If BW decides to push this PvP option forward against the wishes of their greater number of subscribers, then they need to figure out a way to make it much more fun, accessible, and fair for all players who wish to PvP. Frankly, their track record with PvP in this game doesn't give me much faith that they have the wherewithal to make that happen.

Sums it up for me.

I pretty much agree with you. But that WarHero grind is gawd-awful, and I think Bioware gets more of the blame than the players. Doing the grind on a second toon is just insane. Also, I was assuming that:

 

1. As your rank declines you will be matched with similarly ranked opponents until you get to a point where you are winning about half of your matches.

 

2. Your rank will be reset at the end of preseason.

 

Am I wrong about either of these? Was this information made available somewhere?

The way I read it you are still going to be up against teams with much higher rating than you have but your rating will not go down as much because you were playing a higher rated team. They also will not get as much from beating you because you were a lower rated team. I don't know of anything that stops teams from being up against much higher rated teams.

On my server there seem to be so few people doing the actual rated PvP that there would be no matches ever going on if people could only be against teams in their same ratings.

Only if he's right about the matchmaking. If the queue really doesn't take your rank into consideration and matches you against a team that has a significantly higher rank, well, then that needs to be addressed. Otherwise, I think ranked is perfectly viable.

 

Here is the thing. Losing a ranked > winning a regular warzone. I lost a ranked match and got 65 ranked comms. That's better than many regular warzone wins, where you can get 115 normal comms if you eek it out.

 

The funny thing: it was a pug match and 2 players quit 1/3 of the way through because they could tell it was a loss. What the heck did they expect? Of course we lost, we were a pug going against a full premade. But if you queue againt another pug team you have a shot at winning and really reaping some rewards.

 

The sooner people realize this and make teams and queue, the better it will be. The longer it takes for this to dawn on people, well, things are going to get worse before they get better.

 

P.S. I have a feeling the PVP servers have a much better participation rate when it comes to ranked matches.

If you're doing Ranked WZs for the Rated commendations, then chances are, you've already lost because you're not in full WH. There's a significant difference in gear now between fully augmented WH and non-augmented BM gear. Teams that are not full augmented WH will have to pull some amazing coordination skills out of their rear ends to overcome that gear disparity. Farming Rated WZs for Rated commendations is also not really what they were intended for. They were intended for a higher level of competitive PvP where the intention is to win, not to lose your way through the Rated commendations grind. If you're not in full WH already before you step foot into Rated WZs, then you aren't there to win. Speaking for myself, I don't find it fun to lose over and over and over again just to get some better gear, which is also why I won't join a PUG in Rated WZs, especially ones where not everyone is in full WH or they're missing key classes. Yet I think Rated WZs, if BW plans to keep them in the game, need to be expanded and segregated so that players can participate in them without the need to be full WH first. Rift currently does something like this for their regular Warfronts where you are queued against similarly geared (tiered) players in the 50 bracket so that players in tier 2 gear aren't playing against players in tier 8 (i.e., Recruit vs War Hero, in this case).

The other major problem I forgot to mention in my earlier list is that there is currently no penalty for a team quitting a losing match to avoid losing Rating. So if you happen to be outplaying a better Ranked team, chances are they will all quit the match the moment they realize they can't win. Ranked WZs will never mean anything until this is addressed.

Finally, the participation level of Ranked WZs on PvP servers shouldn't be the metric used to measure how healthy or successful Ranked WZs are for the game in general. Of course there's going to be a greater density of Epeen type players on a PvP server than there is on an RP and/or PvE server.

Well I would like to, but don't. mainly because I have rerolled on a server and it is going to take a while.

I have a feeling though that even when I get to 50 I won't play ranked and will likely stick to unranked warzones.

I don't want to try ranked wz out in a pug.

I do think that bioware could have and should have looked at other MMO's to see what can be done better and we all know that this game is crying out for a well organised open PVP area,

We need SOLO RANKED WZ that keep people

of similar skill and gear together.

It's the only way.

Why?

Pvp at YOUR level WHEN you want it.

Solo Ranked PVP will be a gateway to TEAM ranked PVP.

Doesn't work the other way around as right now Bull S, Politicing and

FOTM DOMINATE team decisions, and skill rarely has anything to do with it.

For Team Pvp to really work you'd need to make teams 16 players each

and force a team to have 1 of every advanced class. (eliminate FOTM balance issues)

Balance is unachievable in any MMO and therefore you need to FORCE team composition.

p.s. NOT EVERYONE wants ranked pvp for epeen. Ranked pvp will also help those of us

who are not THE BEST still have interesting game play. One sided matches are no fun for

either side honestly and stop folks from really learning and improving on both sides of the game,

winning and losing sides.

RANKED TEAM pvp is a bit about epeen sure, but it also makes for compelling watching, rooting and should be encouraged.

Sadly the current system... no work.

Why don't I play ranked... long story... transfer... and my friends split into different guilds... so... Im confused, and trying to figure out what to do ... till then I pug...

1) There's only one team we have even semi-competitive matches with on the server. Some of those games are fun, but playing the same team over and over still gets boring. Other teams queue up once or twice, get stomped, then quit.

2) It's hard to actually improve as a team because we can't field the same people each game. We'll bring in one or two friends who may have not played with us much before just so that we can queue, but then if they don't understand how we want them to play, it's more frustrating than it is fun.

Those are the two biggest reasons. Class imbalance also hurts since we have three Mercs in the guild.

Reading over the vast consensus of replies here, and understanding that there will always be players who disagree and who won't be happy about a particular game feature (you can't please everyone all the time), I have to ask at the risk of derailing the discussion.....

Why is Bioware dedicating their limited resources to PvP features like Ranked WZs (which are arguably only desired by a very small minority of the playerbase) instead of working on fixing world PvP? I mean, am I alone here in thinking that a vibrant, redesigned world PvP feature would be FAR superior in terms of fun to anything they could possibly reinvent for Ranked WZs?

When YOU rolled imperial cause you JUST HAD TOO cause <insert short sited selfish reason here>... YOU CHOSE TO NEVER EVER HAVE MEANINGFULL OPEN WORLD PVP. GG!

and NO if you were republic you couldn't fight 10 on 1 and win... try it if your so sure you could.

If your not happy about this... REROLL REPUBLIC WITH A BUNCH OF FRIENDS.

otherwise help us fix the Warzones then we'll push for big Wz's... like 100 on 100 and that will feel like OWPVP but without the issue that Impreial outnumber Republic at insane game destroying rates.

Why is Bioware dedicating their limited resources to PvP features like Ranked WZs (which are arguably only desired by a very small minority of the playerbase) instead of working on fixing world PvP? I mean, am I alone here in thinking that a vibrant, redesigned world PvP feature would be FAR superior in terms of fun to anything they could possibly reinvent for Ranked WZs?

If ranked is failing horribly (I've heard it's doing OK on some servers...), the logical reaction would be to emphasize world PvP. They're polar opposites on the PvP spectrum.