Mixing Drop Zones and Dropship is stupid

I'll enjoy having drop zones back, but this plan is absolutely bonkers for a competitive ranked system.

If you queue ranked, to some extent you're looking for a competitive experience which allows for quantitative tracking of your proficiency; so you can take the various skills you're expected to use and iterate on them to rank up and measurably improve within a well-defined set of rules (casting aside how well your rank actually tracks proficiency).

This kind of falls apart if those rules suddenly change. Suddenly changing a core game mechanic at an arbitrary rank just seems insane to me. Imagine if low-ranked competitive matches in CS were 10v10, before changing to 5v5 at some cutoff. How would lower-ranked players fare when all of a sudden, they're playing a totally different game to the one they were improving at. I think in this specific case, it might not result in a total failure, but it's such an obvious pothole of a decision that it begs the question: why?

If >Diamond players (note: absolutely should be Plat+ if we have to live with this for a whole season) want drop zones, and Respawn is also in agreement that drop zones are better for >Diamond, then it's the single spawn mechanic for ranked. No questions asked. If you want lower-ranked games to just be pubs, then this change makes sense. It seems to me that there's an elephant in the room, a disingenuous commercial interest in keeping low-rank matches noncompetitive, because why on earth would you make things work this way otherwise?

I think there's a few key takeaways from this whole debacle:

• In switching to drop zones, following in ALGS's wake, the devs inadvertently highlighted how poorly the drop ship functioned as a spawn mechanic in a ranked context. As I see it, some of the issues are:
  • The drop ship path both encourages and enables hot dropping on early or good POIs. Hot dropping is bad in a competitive context and you shouldn't encourage, or even allow, 10 squads to have 2 minutes of DM at everyone else's expense (in ranked specifically).
  • Massive discrepancy in agency when dropping if you're solo queuing. Jumpmaster can and will do whatever they want. Super frustrating to engage with in practice.
  • Huge parts of maps just get ignored on any given match, especially areas which aren't fun to play from. In many ways this just makes the map smaller, leading to less variety. Lifting the floor of maps will make them more enjoyable in all contexts, and dropship incentivizes keeping the floor low.
• Drop zones might have had issues, and they could be addressed. The technical ones were probably all easily addressable, but the random choice of POI does reduce player agency (especially for stacks). 
  • I'd argue that this isn't necessarily a good form of agency - as a BR Apex thrives on players having to adapt to an unpredictable play space, and allowing players to opt-out of some of this might be a bad idea? Maybe forcing players to make do with the hand they are dealt will be both more fun, and maybe mitigate some of the more toxic play styles in ranked (i.e. RATTING).

So, I think you could reasonably either:

1. Continue with drop zones and do nothing. Instant win over even the proposed compromise.
2. Continue with drop zones AND fix the technical issues (POI feed-ability, loot consistency, some POIs always having bad rotates on zone 1, etc.), and maybe try and find an elegant way to give back squads some agency w.r.t spawn location.
3. Move to a whole new mechanic, with the express purpose of:
   1. Avoiding ridiculous hot drops
   2. Keeping squads in the same immediate area on spawn
   3. Maintaining or extending the agency squads have in choosing where to drop; maybe even give them total freedom

This compromise is not reasonable.