The State of Ranked Play

I have quit grinding ranked like 3 or 4 times now in past 3? seasons mainly because:

a) soloqing and 90%+ people playing ranked like pubs experience is just not fun for me aka choice to hotdrop and insta die or rat being last one on the squad alive for 15+ min

b) cheaters

Came back this week to take a look and was hooked back up:

1. new system of drops is amazing in my experience:
   - you get actually very good loot from each POI (95% of them and if not there will be a free POI next to yours = you just need to loot a bit longer)
   - no more "Fragment" drops (bless you Respawn for that)
   - it almost feels like those "mental" players who would otherwise hotdrop and instadie start to actually use their brains given that option is off the table
2. frequency of fights are well spaced out = few neighboring squads would get into 1-2 fights -> rotate -> fight again. And you have a choice to do that and take a risk or e.g. Phatfinder zipline / Valk ult over part of the map and have a good positioning play
3. I can read rotations even better, because of no need to guess how many teams e.g. survived crazy hotdrop which used to be between 1 and 10 :D, now with clear drop points + brain + ears you can hear who is going where, fighting whom and figure out the rest easily, much less surprises of getting yourself into impossible crossfire

Only sad thing is that cheating seems to be even worse - low level and/or clearly walling, aimbotting players already in Gold lobbies. I think this was the hardest Gold grind ever = usually it took me like 4-6h to go through G4->P4, now it took like a good 15+h. Situation in P4+ lobbies unfortunately is getting even worse = getting hunted down by clearly brainless and skilless hackers across the map as soon as my teammates die / I break a bit apart from the team and they (cheaters) at this state are actually really bad at hiding it aka looking through walls, perfectly Alter protaling through terrain onto you etc.

My internal challenge is now to get to D4+ and see how things are in my usual lobbies, I can only imagine :D ready to be ragehacked in 2 out of 3 games when reaching that level :P