Match Making

First, good post. Tough love, as they say.

"Devs, we need all Ranked info to be in the game; leaderboards, distribution charts, top performing legends, how to play competitively, best ranked strategies, etc."

Two things here. Last one first: "How to play competitively, best strategies, etc." These things go far, far beyond the simple act of making data available to the players. It's a big ask. And I have to say that every time anyone posts their own "how to" or "best practices" on YouTube or even on these forums... I watch/read them. And they're often either "right" only in very narrow and specific circumstances, or they're just plain wrong altogether. There, I said it. This mid-gold player said out loud that pros and streamers are wrong. Because I know better. But the thing is... what's good for them is not necessarily what's good for normal players. And if the argument is that normal players will never get good without changing their half-assed ways? Yeah, sure. And they also won't get good without a fistful of Ritalin, twelve hours a day to practice, and a paid-in-full subscription to a cheat maker.  Yeah, I said it out loud. Again.

First thing last: Full data disclosure in ranked modes would be a huge problem for the developer. In this way: Showing players the rank distribution for a match, as they now do, is one thing. Showing an mmr distribution, which they should but don't, would be a game killer. Imagine you are Joe average player at your beginning-of-season grind. You're in a gold lobby. The rank distribution shows a mostly gold lobby, with two silver squads and two platinum squads. Nothing wrong there. So far so good. Now let's imagine that they also show you an mmr distribution, and suddenly you realize that the lobby is, as most genuinely are, spanning a full range from silver to master. Because, as we all know, there are many, many "gold" or "plat" or diamond" players in every lobby who are actually master/pred but just haven't yet finished their grind. And we haven't even talked yet about the phenomenon of high-skill players using secondaries and what that does to the integrity of sbmm. How many Joe average players are going to idly stand by watching their grind get torpedoed by real-world matchmaking if they are actually being told in graphic detail just how unbalanced their matches really are? The whole point of ranked is, after all, to let you compete against your peers to see if they really are your peers or not, and whether you have the mettle to move up. Last time I checked a hard-stuck diamond was not the peer of anyone in a silver/gold lobby, but there they are in their legions just the same. And now if Respawn starts demonstrating that openly with data... I'm pretty sure you would see an exodus from ranked. And you already know that I believe there's a strong correlation between the health of ranked play and the overall population of the game.

I could be wrong on this, as on so many other things, but that's the way it looks to me. Your two cents?