S21 - The State of The Game

Save for the dark ages of S17~19, the game is about as playable as it ever has been for me. For what it's worth: I started playing in S7 and basically always hit Diamond in ranked without a huge sweat.

That said, the past 3~4 weeks have been particularly bad in my experience. I only ever play ranked on the London servers and I've noticed a pretty sharp uptick in cheaters and overall server issues -- infinite loading circles, games starting with as few as 30 players spread over 15 squads, and general ping/latency fun with bullets rounding corners. I'd say around 25~30% of games start without giving me a full squad to play with which (in ranked) isn't that fun. I don't need or want a crapshoot to decide if the game will even start, then another dice roll to find out if a match will be properly populated before a final coin toss as to whether or not I'll run into a hacker that's using a CAR like a sniper rifle. 

It's also disheartening that the whatever-matchmaking system seems to prefer big swings in progress as opposed to smaller incremental gains. Once you're into Plat you basically have to go ham and score a bunch of kills to creep over the high entry cost but, in doing so, you risk being wiped yourself and taking a big loss. Sometimes it seems like the best way to climb is to throw a few games to start and wait for the system to take pity on me with some decent teammates and I can get a big win to recoup. But the opposite is just as true -- I'll usually end my session after a win because I can be kinda certain my next match I'll be put with some window lickers that will take a quick notch out of my newly gained RP.

And the total radio silence that the devs give us between seasons is tragic. I can appreciate they want to let the pot settle before giving it another stir, but there's months and months of certain legend/weapons being utterly dominant before the tiniest tweak and it happens all over again. When you look at the data collected by third parties (which probably pales in comparison to that which the devs harvest) from the pro scene it's blatant how oppressive certain elements of this game are. Do more little tweaks through a season to stop such concrete metas forming and players getting complacent and/or at least tell us that you know what the issues are and where you're looking.

In conclusion, you know we're in a bad spot when King's Canyon is the least worst map in rotation.