Remove safety floors from Gold and Platinum

I’ve been playing on an alt in EU Crystalline Conflict lately, and the number of sub-80k DPS players I run into at Gold rank is honestly mind-bending.

At this point, I’d genuinely prefer being dropped all the way down to Bronze and climbing back up, rather than continuing to get queued with players like that.

For context: I’m a pretty casual Crystalline Conflict player. I reached Diamond 2 in my first season and Diamond 1 in the most recent one I completed. I don’t play super seriously, but I can comfortably play with and against Crystal-level players.

If the devs want to prevent players from dropping all the way back to Bronze, they should consider adding a new rank between Diamond and Crystal as a lock point. Diamond does filter out a lot of poor performance, but even then, some players still manage to make it that far.

The current matching system and its rank structure feels incredibly frustrating, unfair, and borderline unbearable at times. Some drastic changes are long overdue if the goal is to make Crystalline Conflict feel truly competitive and rewarding.

They should revise the lowest bracket along with that. Having Unranked to Gold is awful for both new players and those pushing their way into Platinum. Combine this with the Rank floors and you get just awful matches all around to people in those brackets.

Playing some matches on my NA alt and getting grouped with unranked/bronze against silver team was a babysitting exercise I'd rather not repeat.

As you said, Diamond and up the games start to be pretty decent.

Not necessarily. The gap between high crystal and diamond is an abyss.

You think SE will let you limit the high rank population so people can play fixed match like they used to in the Feast?
The bracket is lower and cross datacenter changed for a reason
Be graceful that they didn’t raise protection to Diamond to counter the shady operations

Majority of the active players being in Diamond/Crystal is exactly why they get to do what they want to do up there. There are no new challengers to challenge them since majority quit at platinum. If you take out win-trading it's just too easy to boost. You can be a platinum player with a 40% win rate, and you'll never know since the devs don't show you your own win rates. Throwing everyone on one data center did not boost participation.

As a non top player, playing under the boosted system has been the worst experience for me. With the exception of the last feast season, I played every season in Shadowbringers and was forced to sit out every second half because of the lack of people at the silver level while the plat/dia played the entire season. Last expansion in one of my seasons, I got walled out being pitted against top 100 players as a D4 player, sometimes being the only diamond player in a crystal lobby, before being demoted and being locked out from playing the rest of the season simple because there was any gold/plat/dia players to play with. I don't feel like being punished anymore for simply being a bad player. I can't 'git gud' if the system punishes me with little to no play time leading to an experience gap overtime. The high ranking players should have long queue times, not low ranking players such as myself.

Right now, I would rather play casuals and deal with the problems there than to sit out and not pvp simply because I'm not good enough to keep up with the good players. They need to fix their system, because I do not feel like trying again under this boosted system. If people deserve to be in bronze then let them so that they can get more practice in.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

You think SE will let you limit the high rank population so people can play fixed match like they used to in the Feast?
The bracket is lower and cross datacenter changed for a reason
Be graceful that they didn’t raise protection to Diamond to counter the shady operations

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I'm not sure I get the logic? The highest they raise protection, the easier it is to keep a sandbagging alt up there to grief/rig high ranked games...

A lot of the population issues could be solved if they bothered to spend some effort to make good enough Ranked rewards, just upgrading the basic match rewards to be more than Casual would be a first step.

Casual seems to pop fairly often throughout the day, but then again there's no limits who get matched in that mode which often results in completely one sided matches, despite the system clearly trying to place people based on some variables.