Forum Discussion

5 years ago

Ranked seems broken for bad players

I have the opposite problem to a lot of the other people posting here. I'm bad at Apex (415 games, average damage of 130.29!) - but I enjoy playing it any time I can get matched against other simila...

gameplay discussion

Babbediboopi

5 years ago

@eyemessiah

You are absolutely correct; ranked is broken in a negative way for players that arent as skilled when it comes to the fighting part of the game (aim, movement, game sense etc). To sum it up; almost any player regardless of his fighting skill can climb up to at least Plat 4 without having to prove himself when it comes to fighting. Up to platinum, you literally just have to jump safe and avoid fights and you will be gaining RPs...

Im in the same situation, but in Diamond 4. I recently got from Gold 2 (reset from last seasons diamond) to Diamond 4 in 70 games, with a K/D of >3, 15% winrate and 60% top 5. Needless to say, Gold and Plat was super easy for me. But now Im literally hard stuck at Diamond 4. I might go +6, +10 a couple of games, and then BOOM, I get instakilled by a top 20 predator team at drop, -48 RPs and im back at square one.

I dont know what Respawn is thinking tbh. I would have paid money to just be a spectator on their meetings when they decide things like that. How can they decide NOT to have demotions between divisions? How can they decide to have a min level requirement of lvl 10, which is an invitation to smurf? Ranked could be the solution to all sbmm/matchmaking related issues people have with this game if it was designed properly. Then casual and unskilled players could play at low divisions forever or until they get good enough for next division. But instead, they will keep progress because the system is so grind compatible, until they reach a rank where they get totally stuck.

eyemessiah

5 years ago

Its interesting to hear that a similar version of the same problem exists in higher brackets also. Its strange that they don't allow down-ranking between tiers - seems like that would help. I suppose its demoralising though. In Dota, for instance, players constantly complain about how punishing losing streaks can be.

The more I think about it the more I reckon this whole design is to give the illusion of progress so that players who overestimate how good they are at the game (the norm in Dota - don't know about Apex!) will feel like they either in the "right" tier or at least moving towards it. The thing that bad Dota players find intolerable is reaching their true MMR fairly quickly after calibration and getting "stuck" there. If you read reddit\dotabuff etc. many people are convinced that their MMR is thousands higher than the place where their win-rate hits 50% and therefor the matchmaking is just broken (which then leads to all kinds of conspiracy theories about how the matchmaking essentially "fixes" the results of games to keep people "in their place" etc.). I suppose on the bright side the Apex model sort of works-around this issue by allowing players to rapidly climb - and the point where they get "stuck" happens much later.

I can't help but feel though that this is at the expense of the overall match quality - at least in terms firefights etc. Less skilled players in a more punishing ranked implemntation might get demoralised because they don't feel like they are making progress fast enough but at least they'd be squaring off against players of similar mechanical skill - maybe they'd win more or at least even if they weren't they'd feel like the were achieving more within matches. Currently its often a case of "you run around looting for 20 minutes and then get headshot by an enemy squad while you panic spray them and inevitably go down first - but never mind you survived long enough to get a decently positive score so here is some RP - and oh yay, you ranked up!" - which does nothing for me personally.

Yes - for me the ideal would be playing in bronze either forever and having fun occasionally holding my own in firefights. Maybe I'd get better at aiming & movement over time and creep up into Silver but at least in that case I'd feel more like I was "ready" for it.