Ranked mode needs several improvements#737

Since a lot of people seem to think that EVO can be a cathalyst for this game i think the best “return for money investment” is the ranked mode. its very lacking and in some parts outright bad.

Lets get the first thing out of the way since its already been discussued, confirmed and most likely still far in the future since its the most complex change: char based rank. the game needs it, there is no excuse, lets hope they finish it sooner than later.

Second most important thing is the matchmaking algorythm. Currently the game matches you with people +/- one rank. So for example if you are gold you can get matched with everyone from silver, gold and plat. This is a massive ELO range of 600 points. And while i understand that a small player base needs a bigger MM range to find games, this approach has a big downside. It shifts the likelyness of getting highly advantagious or highly disadvantagious matches based on where inside your rank you currently are. what i mean is, that when you are low in your current rank e.g. 1101 points since you just made it to plat, this means you can get matched with anyone up to 1499 points (the highest possible ELO thats still Diamond) while the lowest possible ELO to match you with is 900 points (lowest possible gold ELO) this means ~400 points upward and only ~200 points downward. And this switches to the exact opposite (400 down, 200 up) if you are high in your rank e.g. high gold at 1099 points. This creates this bizzare scenario where ranking up feels much easier than staying in a rank you just achieved. sure, you get more/loose less points against someone vastly higher than you, but if the likelyness just went up by times two to get someone far superior than yourself, you will most likely loose several matches in succession. Similar you may rank up just by getting a few less skilled player in a row with a bigger likelyness.
this is a complete contradiction to what other games do and what feels good as a player. Ranking up should be the challenge not staying in your newly achieved rank. Thats why many players stop playing once they achieved their “desired rank” (dans words), since staying in a new rank is so much harder than getting to it.
So instead of this approach just making it a fixed +/- X points range would already improve it a lot.

Next issue is general match quality or fairness. Even when playing during prime time the game does not seem to find a lot of equal matches. This would be understandable and ok if the game was searching for quite some time and then gave you the best possible match after a few minutes. But thats not whats happening. Many nights i get 5+ matches in a row that are either +200 or -200 points from me while the game never searches longer than 20 seconds. Since none of those games feel good or fun i would rather have 3-4 quality matches with a longer wait time inbetween. In its current form the game is essentially wasting my time and nothing else. Especially since 200 points are already a massive skill difference in this game. which leads us to the next point.

Ranks are WAY to compressed. The difference between someone who is low and someone who is high inside the same rank feels like a massive skill gap and even 100 points difference feels huge even though they are just a handfull of wins apart. So i think ranks need to be decompressed by a lot. We need subdivisions in each rank. maybe 3-5 so e.g. Gold 1-3. Where each division is at least 150 maybe even the current 200 points so gold 1-3 would span 600 points. the finer the granularity will make finding fair games much easier and it will also give incentive to play ranked more since the climb is longer. Coming back to the second issue from above, many people stop playing once they get their “desired rank” and the faster that happens the sooner they will drop out of the pool for ranked play. Thats why early in the season you see many different faces and later on its only the same handful of people.

These are the main issue i see with rank and appart from the char based rank, they are not that hard to fix while they would massively improve the ranked experience. There are other smaller issues, like unranked players. those never feel rewarding to fight because the game treats them as if they where at your level, so you loose lots of points if they beat you, while in reality they are just on their way to their usual rank. so you can meet a master rank player in plat as an unranked player, get stomped and loose lots of points. The game should never punish you for the current uncertainty of an unranked players actual skill/rank. SF6 does this way better where it gives you lots of points when you win against unranked players and you loose barely any if they beat you. So they always assume a best case scenario for you.
And we didn’t even talk about other QOL features other games have, like rank down protection, propper win streak bonuses, loss streak protection etc.