Fix ranked - Ideas on how to make it better (For MikeB)

After brainstorming today, I figured I would create a condensed thread of ideas to improve Ranked PVP. Hopefully others add their ideas.

The sole purpose of this thread is to not create a battlefield of arguments over semantics but instead give us a place where we can add ideas on how to improve ranked PVP. Right now, it's in pretty poor shape.

Improvements to ranked PVP would bring in subs, make PVPers happier, and overall make the game better. Really it doesn't make any sense letting it rot the way it has for the last few years.

I honestly believe BW have ideas alrready, but maybe some of these ideas listed will reinforce them to make some specific changes sooner than later.



Ideas on How to Make Ranked PVP Better:



1. This is an easy one. Remove Vote-Kick. Only losers and cheaters use it to abuse it.


2. Musco once asked a few years ago when he was scorned into communicating with us that he had an offer for us... For the players of SWTOR - he asked if we wanted frequent small class changes to balance finer details, or did we want large sweeping patches that would come much less frequently but with far more change.

Obviously, frequent small changes is best, and 100% of the forum posters responded accordingly that YES, we would prefer smaller frequent patches to address class imbalance.

What happened to the follow up on that Eric? Remember when you asked the forums this? I remember. Maybe be a responsible and address your own query that was answered by us now, that sure would be swell.


3. Add a gear gap to enter ranked. This can be done in a less restrictive manner by making it so the requirement is simply having full 306 rated gears, or go further with aug requirements and other.


4. Add in rewards for WZ completions. More tech frags. More gear drops. Make it so PVP is a viable way to gear up! This can also be added to ranked, which is why I add this change for all PVP with this specific thread made for ranked PVP. In this same vein, BW can consider adding back crafting mat rewards to encourage more participation in ranked. Those who participated in ranked group have claimed the population was much better with that one addition. Maybe that would be good to add back to the game.

I completely agree with your suggestions, except for adding mats back to group ranked. My position has softened on that, but I'm still not convinced that that's the best solution. Farming mat farmers shouldn't allow mediocre teams and players to get top rewards. Maybe if Bioware made different flairs and titles for group ranked vs solo ranked, that would address my concern, but I doubt that will ever happen.

1. Add a 2v2 unranked and ranked queue. 4 Less players = more chances of getting games. Less intimidating than 4v4 and offers newer players a chance to get better and learn how different classes work.

2. Need a rating/ELO system that works efficiently and doesn't deter players from queueing because they are afraid of getting stomped/flamed/trolled. 5-10 placement games and then a rating system with parameters on how high of a rating you can match with.

3. More desirable awards and I want to break this down into 2 separate categories. First an incentive to get people to queue whether it be mats, items, tech etc.. normal gives watered down version and ranked gives a bolstered version or something you can't get in regs. I would also add a big incentive for people that play 100,200,300 ranked games a season, give rewards just for queueing. 2v2 and 4v4 have different rewards (4v4 being more desirable).

Then for the people that want to grind rank and rating. Add specific rewards for certain rating tiers (flairs, titles, items, armor sets you cant get anywhere else, credit bonuses) Besides wanting to be the best there has to be a reward for grinding and being better than other people.

4. Requirements for entering ranked queue: Level 75, certain item level required, and I would even put a potential number of regs played account wide.

5. Lastly a very strict cheating policy. BioWare needs to crack down on any wind of wintrading, botting, etc.. with a potential higher population it would hopefully be tougher. I would like to see an MVP vote and rewards for getting voted MVP. People will abuse any kind of voting system, but a potential 'block' button that would prevent you from queueing with certain trolls for a certain number of games. With the small population and elitest behavior I could see this getting abused but just an idea. Also, you lose rating by not playing after a certain amount of time.

That's my 2 cents, hope it spurs some conversation and more ideas.

I support the OP(s) Suggestions 100% w/ emphasis on removing vote kick.

Theres a .0000000001% chance that anyone at BW will actually read this thread lol

But since we are all just shouting into the ether, I'll tack on another suggestion: Prevent matchmaking from putting more than 2 of the same class on a team.

Yesterday I had a game where one team had 4 DPS Mercs on it. Yeah, that went as well as you'd imagine for the other team

Wishlist for deaf ears:

1. Allow utility changes before timer starts. Do I need to play defensive or offensive based on the enemy team composition? Tacticals are changeable and they are just an extension of the utility system anyway.

2. Shrink Solo Ranked to 3v3. The population just isn't there to support consistent 8-man matches. Also, since the burst is currently really high, this will alleviate an additional source of burst pressure the focus target has to survive through.

3. For Solo Ranked, allow only 1 "support" class (heals/tanks) to be on a team with 2 others required to be DPS. Compositions consist of 1 Healer + 2 DPS or 1 Tank + 2 DPS. One DPS is not enough to kill through Guard and Healing.
No one wants to fight 2 tanks or 2 healers.

4. A gear requirement of 306 for both Solo Ranked and Group Ranked. I believe they have had a similar policy in place before some expansions ago. You could not queue unless you had all 2018 expertise rating, iirc.

5. Change the ELO rating system. Bonus points for a winning streak and a decreasing point loss for losing streaks. More reward for winning and less punishing for unfortunate losses due to throwing, wintrading, cheating, etc. This might actually cause more wintrading in Grouped Ranked but might work for Solo Ranked.

6. Set aside some new Cartel Market items for Ranked rewards. I suspect a lot of people save their monthly CC stipend for cool CM items and don't actually buy CC directly. Keeping us chasing the "carrot on a stick" gear rewards will keep us subscribed and shift new cosmetics away from the CM and into actual game content.

No thoughts on Group Ranked nor how the above changes would affect it.

Tacticals aren't supposed to be changeable during the arena anyways.

What....? You do understand that the 4v4 meta is build with 2 support classes whose role is to alleviate the pressure?


Again... what...?

If Bioware could detect throwing, wintrading, and cheating in real time in their matches, don't you think they would have done something about it?

Bioware already sets aside Cartel Market items for ranked Rewards. It's called reskins.

But they are so, do one or the other. You'd rather be locked into Tacticals as well?

Your "4v4 meta" does not happen every time in Solo Ranked. I'm willing to bet the percentage of "4v4 meta" matches is pretty small compared to 4DPS or 3DPS + 1Support. There is a separate mode for that.


If the system for Solo Ranked changed to 3v3, deny 2 healers or 2 tanks from being on the same team.

Okay, so put something in place as a band-aid fix and see if it works. There is currently no mitigation for losses due to these things.

I don't remember any Ranked rewards being Cartel Market items. I just remember them being very desirable because they were exclusive to Ranked content. Can you provide some examples?

I never considered the 3v3 thing. That's an interesting idea, but goes hand in hand with the idea of 1v1s. and 2v2s. They could even have 4v4s for guys like Septru that enjoy it.

Leave it as an option and after a few months BW could see if it was active enough over that span to keep it. If they found it was not popular they could always remove it and just keep the 1v1s/2v2s and 3v3s.

They really could do a lot more with rewards I agree there too.

As for ELO, I agree it's far too costly on losses. If they want to have a ELO facet to the scoring, then at the very least lower some of the penalty for losing a match. So much focus is on losses it creates a ton of trouble in the game.

Here's my 2¢ as a gold rated sniper since season 7 (probably not this season though):

3v3 is a decent idea, with games having either one tank each team or one healer each team. Tank & healer games right now are cancerous due to Force Bound, and they were generally not that great in solo ranked due to lack of communication anyways for the last few seasons.

Disabling vote kick is a hard no from me, since it allows us to kick throwers and auto-loss people who actually belong in unranked. I am all for increasing the ranked population, but it is not abuse to kick people who might as well be someone's bots - they need to actually learn to play. And no, my definition of auto-loss doesn't include people who just don't happen to be great.

On group ranked, they either need to bring mats / ops drops / good gear drops into it, or remove it altogether. It is a dead game mode.

Hard no on removing ELO - it can fluctuate, but it is still a dependable representation of skill level. You will not see a garbage person at 1.5k ELO or a great player at 700 ELO. I currently have a Rage Juggernaut only character (without Force Bound) stable at 1.3k ELO to prove the point. (My main is sadly not standing great right now, but I have no illusions about my skill level on sniper since I came back a week ago)

We have seen better anti-cheating policies, and the queue has been free of them as far as I have seen.

On my own ideas:

(1) MORE FREQUENT SEASONS: We were promised 3-6 month seasons in return for weaker rewards. We got the promised weaker rewards, but not really shorter seasons. Season length should be 2-3 months, with flairs / titles / flags as common rewards. Have armor sets / weapon boxes every 2-3 seasons as rewards also.

(2) No gear barrier to PVP: Just pre-determine stats per spec upon entry to PVP, thereby eliminating the gear barrier to PVP. This also allows balancing classes for PVP only by adjusting the given stats of each individual spec in PVP. Maybe allow some customisation - several thousand points of stats you can spend on accuracy, critical, power, alacrity, or have multiple options divided by alacrity (1.4s, 1.3s maybe 1.2s) and accuracy thresholds (+0%, +5%, +10%) per spec.

(3) More frequent balancing of classes: balance is arguably best it has been in some while, but there is still glaring errors. Also, there's some bugs regarding PVP that existed for a long long time (AP PT / Tactics Vanguard Cell Burst goes through sniper's evasion DR, much to my dismay). More frequent passes would be great.

(4) Fix desync if possible: this would include higher number of client/server updates in PVP instances maybe, or a general reduction of mobility abilities in PVP (by disabling them in Warzones and Arenas, or generally scaling them back?). I don't know, but it's no fun missing a kill or not being able to CC someone on you because they glitch under the map due to de-sync.