Why is aim assist allowed in Ranked?
People always say that aim assist exists to help casual players. If that's the case, I don't understand why it's still allowed in Ranked and the competitive scene. Is it impossible to see a competiti...
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"a system that narrows the skill gap between beginners and high-level players doesn't make any sense for a competitive mode."
That might be true in a very loose sense - though I could argue convincingly against it - but when was the last time you played a ranked match where the lobby was made up of beginners and pros? And even if you could get into such a match, do you really think the "casual" players would stand a chance - even if they had aa and the pros didn't? AA is just like the tide. It lifts all boats or it lowers all boats. It doesn't selectively raise some and lower others. Until you start talking about PC input devices, which is a whole different can of worms. In the mean time, if you take it away it doesn't change the leaderboard. All it changes is accuracy rates. And not by as much as you think, especially at higher levels of play. Imo.
But wouldn't putting in the effort to "lift that boat" actually make it more competitive? If we're talking about PC servers and turning off AA doesn't even affect the leaderboards, then people shouldn't mind removing it at all. Hearing you say that makes it feel like removing AA for high ranks is a pretty solid move—what do you think about that?
Also, pros matching with beginners feels like a super rare edge case anyway. That’s just how ranked is, which is why casual modes exist, and I’m pretty sure the devs are trying to improve the matchmaking system. Between this and the whole debate about making ranked Solo-Q only, I honestly have no idea what either the players or the devs want this game to be anymore.
"But wouldn't putting in the effort to "lift that boat" actually make it more competitive?"
What does "more competitive" mean? I already said I don't believe it would have any material effect on outcomes. Here's what I think it actually would do: It would widen the skill gap in a game where you already have an huge skill chasm. The net effect, or so says me, would be to make already bad sbmm feel even worse. And that's player vs. player in a normally spread lobby. The effect on individual players would be even worse. Those at the top would go to bed one night with 40% accuracy and wake up the next morning with 22%. You're still winning and losing in the same ratio as before, but you feel subjectively AND objectively like trash because you can no longer hit the things you used to hit. Or at least not as much. So if the goal is to make all players feel worse about their performance for no other reason than to create an illusion of better competition... then so be it. You would evacuate the remaining population overnight. People in this game already spend their lives unhappy with their performance. Now you want to make them feel miserable about it?
And we haven't even got to the worst part yet. Do you know what happens to the accuracy of a cheater when you take away aa? Nothing. Nothing at all. You've only made it harder for a legitimate player to engage a cheater, and it was **bleep** near impossible to begin with. You may say that's not important because cheating is minimal or only affects top ranks, but if you did then you would be wrong on both points.
"Also, pros matching with beginners feels like a super rare edge case anyway."
Not sure how much time you put into this game or where you are on the skill spectrum, but all you have to do is go into unranked trios and look at the skill curve the developer lays out for us in the pre-game lobby. When they first started putting out this information a few seasons ago it was pretty common to see a grey area that spanned two thirds of the curve. That's still common today. And that grey area represents an enormous breadth of skill. So sure, if you're at the right hand side of that curve, it all looks good. If you're anyone else then the developer has just handed you a flaming sack of **bleep** and told you that if you eat it fast enough it won't burn your hands. This is almost every single match anymore. And I may not be able to see the curve in Wildcard, but experience has shown me there may as well be no sbmm at all in that lobby.
And then you have ranked where "I can see this match is high gold to low platinum." But it isn't really that at all. That's the range of CURRENT ranks of the players in the lobby, not the rank they will eventually achieve. And given how many players in this game rank up to their ceiling and then just start over on a secondary, you are guaranteed a skill spread in ranked play that far exceeds the visible rank spread. It's not as bad as pubs, but it's not good.
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It's no accident that aa and sbmm keep coming up in a discussion that started out being only about the former. But both of these are the primary mechanisms that developers use to make their games feel playable to normal people. And then just barely. Take away aa and suddenly the pros look a lot more like spray-and-pray scrubs, and the average players have left for some other game that doesn't expect them to wallow in a pit of failure and be grateful for the experience. Say what you want about competition and what you think would happen to it if you got your way, but whatever else you do you're gonna have to come up with some pretty wild math to convince me that removing aa wouldn't cause 90% of current players to leave for Marathon or BF6 or... anywhere. Anything would be better.
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