"Ranked will be gone at some point or will be changed to be more like Wildcard."
If I had to guess I'd say that unranked trios will "evolve" (maybe "devolve" would be a more appropriate description?) into something very akin to Wildcard. Free respawns until the last member of the squad is wiped, more map-based rapid transit, and very likely more evo-based or drop-based motion gimmicks like speed boost and walling running. The kids love that stuff.
And I think what you'll see along side that is a rapid evolution of ranked play into something far more structured than the battle royale we've come to know over the last seven years. The gameplay in ranked seems to me to be moving in a direction where gunplay and gun mechanics are pushed to the fore as the only real critical success factors. Arsenals take any real degree of luck out of the process of finding the weapons you want, and obviously they've gone to fixed drops - I assume as a way to further minimize randomness and luck. Because, I guess, players can't be relied on to manage their own risk exposure. So you no longer have to look for guns or for shields, only for attachments, and their importance, or unimportance, could be argued about. Then they reduce the number of evo harvesters to ensure that the game becomes purely fight-or-die, with no other avenue to better gear. To me that starts to look an awful lot like team deathmatch with a circle. Well, if that's what keeps the kids happy....
So in the end we'll probably no longer have what we've always had: one single game played out in two different queues, one ranked and one not ranked. What we'll have instead will be two almost completely different games with very little continuity between them. And that may be no bad thing. It could be argued that it gives the average player a lot more to learn and therefore a lot more reason to put time into the game. I'm not looking forward to it, but what's new in that?
