Forum Discussion
Without a loss of rank when you lose and/or do poorly, the skill rating system would be meaningless and would be even WORSE at matching similarly skilled players.
There are MAJOR problems with how it is adjusting ranks right now, but I am hopeful they will address those so that the system can get better at matching players of similar skill levels together.
As it is right now, I'm winning around 85-90% of my matches and my rank is barely even moving. And I'm not even teaming up - the vast majority of my games are solo queue. This is a problem for two reasons:
⚽ I can't progress to the higher ranks that I wish to attain, despite clearly belonging at a higher rank (name another MOBA where at 90% win rate results in your rank staying stable)
🏈 I am being matched with players of much lower skill level. It's not fun for them to get shredded 15-20 times every match.
Assuming that EA/Motive can fix the skill/mmr system so that it can more quickly sort folks into the right skill tiers, this will have a BIG improvement on match quality for all players, regardless of where they fall on the skill spectrum.
Rank decay as such would be a reduction of points due to inactivity which is not the case. As such the title of the thread is slightly misleading. That said I disagree withg the OP on the point in principle. Motive has in effect implemented an ELO type system which is successfully implemented from Chess to StarCraft and I have never heard anyone complain about this system in principle before. The implementation of said system in squadrons is however completely broken.
Match making is currently totally broken as is progression. I have repeatedly met lvl 250+ people who should be ace rank and should not get matched against our team but they are instead struggeling to get out of Hero 5 (with 800+ fleet battle games at a win rate of >90%) which is ridiculous. A decent algorithm would be able to quickly figure out roughly where in the food chain you stand (5-10 matches) but would also be able to rapidly adjust due to the uncertainty of the low number of games.
If we take StarCraft 2 as an example (leagues are: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, master, grandmaster). Your first placement match will be at an MMR in silver league. If you win this, you will have your next match in platinum, if you win that you will have your remaining placement matches in diamond. Getting out of diamond into grandmaster will take you anything from 50-100 games depending on how high ranking a grandmaster you really are. Also from a match making point of view as a diamond you will never see a GM or a plat player. All in all said, the progression is rapid if your MMR/ELO rating doesn't match what you currently are. This is missing in squadrons. Let the aces sort it out between themselves ... I don't want to be their canon fodder