One thing that has never made sense to anybody is how ranked tiers completely ignore class and faction balance issues. When you look at the leaderboards, you will see the top flooded with sorcs, PTs, sins, and mercs (kidding). Why do people play the FoTM en masse? Well, because they want to put themselves in the best position possible to get as high of a rating as they can or want to achieve. Why play a commando in ranked when a sorc is so much easier, especially when the reward tiers are based entirely on a rating number? You may like your commando better, but good luck with that....

 

If it were up to me, here is how I would set up the ranked tiers.

 

Gold = top x percent

Silver = top y percent

bronze = top z percent

 

Let's say that Gold is set for the top 3% of all players. Take the total number of participants, multiply by 0.03, then divide that by 16 (8 classes by two factions). The resulting number sets the bar for gold on a class and faction basis.

 

Let's use S5 as an example. In S5, there were 15331 participants. So, (15331 * 0.03) / 16 = 28.7. Let's round that up to 29. So, the top 29 sorcs, top 29 sages, top 29 mercs, top 29 commandos, etc. all get gold tier.

 

So, you want to play FoTM and on the dominant faction? Ok, well it's about to get a lot harder to get the tier that you want. Still using S5 as an example, this means that in order to get gold as a sorc, you would have had to hit around 1793. As a commando, you would have only needed 1357. I understand that the leaderboard data for S5 does not show highest earned, but you get the idea, right?

 

I think that this would be a pretty good way to grade on a curve so to speak, factoring in class and faction balance issues. Since class and faction balance will never be perfect (why no x-faction for solo ranked whyyyyyyyy!?!?!?!), this seems to me that it would be a good way to not completely ignore the weaker arena classes. Play what you like and what you are good at, not what equates to the easiest rating.

Edited August 6, 2015 by teclado

Agreed, this seems like a great idea!

 

Nobody has called me an idiot yet, so it can't be all bad I guess. Not completely inept I suppose. Bonus points if you use "you're" properly while calling me such.

And all will reroll to class in which gold tier points will starts at 1300 they will be grinding it like madmans and still it willnot uprise the quality of theirs game. In theory it could be not bad idea but in reality it can ruin all gameplay.

It's kind of self-correcting, though - if a bunch of players re-roll to an underpowered class, suddenly they are competing with more players and the odds of getting the desired tier suddenly become lower. The point is for underpowered classes to compete against their own, not OP vs UP.

 

I understand that having more mercs in 4v4 would ruin some people's gameplay experience in that they perceive no chance of winning. But that's the thing with solo queue - the mercs can be on either team. With a decent number of games played, it averages out quite well. If you only play 10 games, then yes, luck plays a major part in your rating. If you play 100 games, luck is insignificant. Personally, I would also increase the number of games required for rewards from 10 to 20 or more.

I'm absolutely sure this would have some negative unintended consequence, BUT that said it would certainly shake things up a bit and the current meta is very boring. So +1.

delete Edited August 6, 2015 by Hahnolus

I'm absolutely sure this would have some negative unintended consequence

 

Yes, more players would play Merc / Mando and the other underpowered classes, then come onto the forums and create threads lambasting the combat team for poor balancing.

 

I'm not sure if that's a negative, but that's about the only one I can think of, aside from it screwing with metrics a touch.

 

I like the idea of tiers being set per class, per faction, not as one big clump of players (which really doesn't highlight skill of the player, just class imbalances). One for Alex to ponder, and something that's been called for on more than one occasion now.

Edited August 6, 2015 by Transcendent

outside of actually balancing the classes, your solution seems overly complex.

 

isolate leader boards and rewards according to AC (not mirrors). set reward tiers based on individual AC performance rather than flat numbers. to that extent, you could go ok: top 5% mercs? what's the cutoff? if it's 1400 then so be it. if it's 2000 for PT? so be it. if it's 1800 for VG? so be it.

 

the ratings in my example are random-ish, but the idea is clear. 1400 for a merc is not the same as 1400 for a sin or a sorc, so why are they being weighed as if they are?

 

I would also say this should happen per server, but so few ppl participate on so many servers that it's prolly not worth it for the servers. but isolating class and faction are pretty fecking obvious and relatively easy to implement.

the ratings in my example are random-ish, but the idea is clear. 1400 for a merc is not the same as 1400 for a sin or a sorc, so why are they being weighed as if they are?

My thoughts exactly. Having the classes segmented on the leaderboards seems good to me. That just may be a bit more work than they would want to put into it at this point. Although more complicated in calculation, I think that doing it the way I outlined might be less work overall and achieve a similar effect. That's what I was thinking.

Edited August 6, 2015 by teclado

yes. this "failure" of the leader boards was pointed out by numerous people the moment the boards went live. I don't think anyone has squawked about it since s1, but I chalk it up to one of the plethora of things about soloQ (in particular) that BW screwed up and is either incredibly slow to rectify or flat out refuses to even acknowledge. here we are in s6, and this is the FIRST season in which full expertise is required to enter the queue. I mean...really? 6 seasons to figure that out? so don't hold your breath. Edited August 7, 2015 by foxmob

Cheers to level 65.

 

(No offense but my idea for ranked was better. The developers know this but are too arrogant to change.)