My first gripe is with the way you use the word "competitive." If you ask me drop zones are for people who need their "competition" doled out to them in small, digestible doses, and the jump master system is for people who have mastered their patience, teamwork, and strategic thinking just as much as their mechanical and motion skills. That feels a lot more seriously competitive to me. But I quibble.
My second gripe is that asking for two separate ranked trios modes is a little bit like a Goldilocks thing. "This mode is too casual!" "This mode is too competitive!" "Ahhhhh, this mode is JUST RIGHT!" Where does that kind of fine tuning end? Every individual player gets their own private ranked mode tailored to their own desires where they can grind away... completely alone? It's already bad enough that ranked and unranked are diverging at all. It should, imo, be one game that plays exactly the same in either mode. In one you rank up or down, in the other you don't. How simple is that? And is simpler not generally better? Note how I phrased that question to beg the answer I'm looking for?
Third gripe: as someone else already said, the population is currently too low to support viable skill-based matchmaking in any mode I've played this season. Ranked regularly gives me two-tier spreads, and that's just players' current visible ranks, not their true skill level, which is often much, much higher. And trios is generally single bucket matches, meaning roughly bronze to diamond or even master. When I get lucky it manages two buckets, which is still too wide by a gigantic margin, but better than rookie-to-pred. And it tries to justify these matches by outright lying to me about my mmr, as if to justify putting me in matches with anyone on the right side of the skill curve. It's pretty tragic. Already. More playlists is throwing gas on the fire. Whatever benefit a player gets by being coddled into their preferred ranked mode, would be completely erased the moment they realize that the ludicrous skill gaps of the single mode are now obscene gaps in both of the separate modes. How satisfying could that kind of grind really be, drop zones or no?
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