Ranked Points Distribuition

This is a very interesting perspective, thank you for sharing. I am one of the players who prefer to play for placement and avoid unnecessary battles, but I feel like I’m often getting matchmade with people who want to go and look for a fight even when we have the God spot. Either our lobbies are very different, or we pay more attention to matches when we get teammates with playstyles different from our own. In any case, I agree that mismatching playstyles is one of the biggest pain points of solo queuing (which I is how I play nearly exclusively).

However, I think current ranked system isn’t generous at all when it comes to placement points. If you in the Platinum rank, you need to finish in the top 4 to earn ranked points without killing anyone. Good luck with doing that consistently, not to mention the amount of time it will require to earn enough to get to Diamond. I also suspect that further reduction of placement points will just turn Ranked Leagues into Trios: if everything but fighting is pointless, everyone will be dropping in a couple of POIs and dying in the first two minutes.

I don’t know how to solve the problem of mismatched playstyles, but I think that alienating players from all but one camp will not be good for the game. Hopefully, Respawn has some ideas and will improve the experience in the future.

I sympathize, but as a player who will avoid danger when and wherever it's avoidable, I sympathize only to a degree.

In my mind Battle Royale is a survival game mode. If the rank point system chooses to reward, to some degree, players who favor survival over engagement then I don't see how reducing the incentive to survive can line up with the objective of the game.

What I will say is that in this game there is more than one path to victory. Some players try to shoot their way to the end of the match, some try to hide their way there, and some try to find a path that's a little of both. My preference would be for an RP system that acknowledges that people play shooters to shoot other people, but that also acknowledges that in a survival game mode shooting is not always the smart path forward. To put it a different way, I think that one of the mainsprings of battle royale is the tension that exists between what you want to do to have fun and what you should do to win. They are rarely the same thing and players who understand that can go farther than raw mechanical skills might otherwise allow. That shouldn't be punished. It should be encouraged.

What the game really needs to do, rather than arbitrarily favor one play style over another, is to allow matchmaking to assemble teams based on play style. Other games have done it. This one could too.

But will it?

Yup, I don't know why they can't get the kills vs. placement points right, but they never seem to. If they lean too far one way then methodical Battle Royale players (like us) complain about the hot-drop arena-shooter mentality that takes over everything. And when they lean too far the other way then run-and-gun players complain about the campfest. I don't know where the sweet spot in between is, but I know we're not there and haven't been in a long time. Maybe ever?

The problem of mismatched playstyles is solvable in a couple of different ways. I've played games that asked players to complete a "psych profile" to enter matchmaking. You had to answer a few simple questions about your playstyle. It's that straight forward. Other games have taken an even simpler approach with "aggression-based matchmaking." At first I thought that approach might be too simplistic for this game, but after giving it a lot of thought I've come to the conclusion that ANYTHING would be better than what we have right now. Which is skill-based matchmaking in name only. Pubs has degenerated into one- or two-bucket matchmaking. Which is as close to random as makes no difference. And ranked is even worse, if only because it purports to be tighter in skill-matching, but is in reality also one or two buckets at best. SBMM in this game just a word the developer bandies about but which any player can see in an afternoon's worth of play has no meaning whatsoever anymore. Which would be slightly less irritating if at the very least they would match teammates based on playstyle.

I’m not sure that reducing placement points alone would solve the problem, but I regularly get teammates who abandon perfectly winnable fights.

For example, we engage one squad and another team arrives, but the new team is attacking our opponents rather than us. Instead of using that advantage, one of my teammates immediately runs away because they see “two teams.” The moment one player disengages without communicating, the rest of us are outnumbered and usually die.

Most of the time, the player who runs away is then killed alone shortly afterward. They are not making a calculated rotation or playing intelligently for placement—they simply panic whenever a fight becomes complicated.

There is an important difference between avoiding a bad fight and abandoning your team during a fight that is still winnable. Good Battle Royale players should understand positioning, timing, third parties, when to engage and when to retreat. Reaching Platinum or Diamond mainly by avoiding combat can leave players unprepared for situations where fighting is unavoidable.

So I agree that mismatched playstyles are part of the problem, but I also think rank should reflect a balance of survival, decision-making and combat ability. A player who consistently cannot contribute during fights probably should not be climbing into ranks where those skills are expected.

I can’t speak for others, but I can share my personal experience. I’ve played Ranked Leagues long enough to abandon a lot of winnable fights and draw a fair amount of criticism from my teammates for doing so. Sometimes it is exactly that – a poor decision on my end. But it’s not always that. Sometimes I don’t have the same information as my teammates, which changes the most sensible action. Sometimes I don’t know how skilled my teammates are (I’ve just met them, remember) and thus underestimate our chances.

I like to think that the vast majority of players have earned the rank they have, and if they seem to be underperforming it’s either “just not their day” or some kind of misunderstanding. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but at least it helps me feel good about solo queuing in Ranked Leagues.