Current State of Ranked

As many of us already know the new rank system introduced in season 13 ruined rank for a lot of players.

This new system also lessened the gap between gold and diamond to pred players, so we'd just end up running into these players more and more. That means seeing a masters player in a silver or gold lobby, or seeing a diamond player on a team with a gold and plat player, (even though the rank restrictions wouldn't allow the gold and diamond players to party up in the first place) hasn't just become more common, it became the new normal or "meta" for matchmaking.

I think the rookie rank could be partly blamed for that as a lot of the bronze and silver players are now in the rookie rank, and so there's less players getting into gold and plat, which means the diamond and up players have less plat players to stomp into a deathbox. The other part of this issue is that a lot of players stopped playing rank or the game as a whole when getting kills were less valued and placement was all you need to do. Now the meta is placement and "participation".

For those of you who don't know what participation points are, its essentially the points granted to you when your teammates kill an enemy player who you did no damage to and it seems to be granted even if you were nearby or not. I've had teammates run off and kill other squads while I was still looting, and I just see that I got participation points for doing nothing but picking up guns and ammo. This point system needs to change into something more balanced and that's because it encourages players to run from fights and to continue to rat all over the map. You already get more points for placement and if your teammate manages to kill a player or take out a squad, you get rewarded with more points, so why bother being a team player when you can look out for yourself?

I've also tested how participation points were given out, and found that if you hit a knocked player, its counted as a participation if you weren't involved in the damages that lead to the knock, its counted even when your teammates are 100+ meters away, and seems to be counted if your teammate assisted in a kill where another team had 3rd partied the enemy player.

The participation icon is this icon right here:



Here's a picture of one of my match summaries. Look at how much participation points are valued vs everything else. Also, I've finally reached plat again which was a real challenge when every match was at the skill level of a TTV player playing as Wraith using the Liberator skin with the heirloom in hand:



I also have a match summary of when I was still in gold and didn't preform quite well, but only got points primarily because of placement and participation.

When I got promoted to plat, it said I got like 427 points. 100 of those points were the "promotion bonus" points, while some of the points came from placing 1st, only about 27 came from kills and assists, with the rest being participation points. I had around 15 participation points and around 7 kills / 3 assists. I don't fully remember the numbers and I had forgotten to screenshot that summary screen, but oh well. It just seems that if you want to rank up quickly, you just need to place high in rank matches and let your teammates do most of the work, which honestly isn't how the game should be played.

Matchmaking also is claimed to be "skill based", but that doesn't seem like its true. How can it be true when players are dropping into matches with diamonds and up players while being gold and below? This "skill based" matchmaking claim was essentially made on day 1 of rank as well, so for the longest time we thought the system was fair.

However, matchmaking seems to be using EOMM despite the devs saying that the game doesn't. EOMM is "engagement optimized matchmaking", which is designed to "rig" matches of a game to favor you and to also go against you. This is to create a pattern where you would feel like you're doing better and then when you're taken out, you would feel like you're at a new skill ceiling that needs to be overcome. An example of this is placing 1st in a match with 7-15 kills and enemies seemed to be around your skill level or slightly worse than you, then in your next match you get destroyed by another team and you just assume that since you ruled the last match, you're in a higher skilled lobby.

I would love to believe that the game is using skill based matchmaking, but I'm just not seeing it. Many players aren't seeing it, and I've even found this from 6 month ago on Reddit detailing the same experience with the matchmaking: https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/v43rfg/matchmaking_and_eomm_in_apex/ All of the points made as being experienced by other players were also my experiences as well, even the opinions of new players. I've invited friends to try out Apex over the last few years and there's few words they would use to describe the game. Those few words were "its toxic" and "its sweaty".

The only other problem with rank (besides servers, audio, etc.), is that there's a bunch of cheaters and smurphs. I'm constantly seeing low leveled players aimbotting and even higher level players wall hacking. If you're in rookie to gold rankings, you'll see plat and up players, mainly diamonds and masters players. A lot of these "higher ranked" players are actually just players cheating. I've sat down and spectated a masters Horizon aim snap to everyone on the map and they would ping "enemy here" at various walls in which then their team would go push and squad wipe whoever was over there. Their teammates were an Octane who was using aimbot with the Wingman and a Seer who was using wall hacks (pinging players outside the heart passive range). Octane was in gold and Seer was in plat.

Here's a summary for those of you who skimmed:

1. Rank has gotten worse after the season 13 changes with the reasons being due to the rookie rank, players leaving the rank scene (or the game), and high ranking players became part of the "low ranked" lobbies
2. The game rewards more points if you're participating and getting top 5-10 placements, which means not doing anything that would award you an assist or kill point. Also known as not being a team player.
3. SBMM (Skill based matchmaking) seems to not exist and instead EOMM (engagement optimized matchmaking) seems to be what does exist

4. More players (or at least it seems like more since the matches have less players queueing up) are cheating or using smurph accounts, which also reminds me that I'm seeing the same players on my team and in the kill feed, even after a few days