The Ranked Matchmaking System Is Not Fit For Purpose (Materia)

Season 16 has come to an end and what was predicted by all but the most optimistic of players has come to pass
Not a single player on Materia has achieved the Ultima or even Omega rank
Simply being the best player is no longer good enough.

While you could place the blame squarely on our lower player count, or the unusual choice of Crystal Credit requirements. There are other factors that need to be addressed. Yes, there needs to be greater incentive to move your character's home world to Materia. Yes, ranked CC needs better rewards. This is not news and these solutions are difficult to quantify

I don't think anybody is claiming to have a whole solution and while what I will suggest will HELP, it will not fix the problem on its own. I'm going to stick with the solutions that I have polled on the Materia Wolves Den Discord channel and received at least a four fifths supermajority in favour. These solutions are quantifiable and immediately actionable. I have my own opinions about what might help, but I want this post to act as a voice for our community, rather than just my own.

The first issue is purgatory. For those who don't know, you're in Purgatory whenever you are at the top (X1, 3 stars) or bottom (G3/P4/D5, 0 stars) of your bracket. Purgatory means you can only be matched either up, if you're at the top of your bracket, or down if you are at the bottom. For example, a player who is Gold 1 with 3 stars you can only find matches with Gold or Platinum players. This is a problem for a number of reasons. It skill bans people who climb too quickly in a season in an unintuitive way. It's all too common to hear from a player who is confused about why they suddenly can't get games after reaching G1+3. It makes it harder for the higher rank brackets to get matches as they continuously push the less skilled players down into P4+0 (where they can't even be demoted further anyway), punishing the Diamond players who depend on them for games.

AND IT PROVIDES A MECHANICAL INCENTIVE TO THROW GAMES.
If you want to reach Crystal on Materia, knowing that it is unlikely that a D-C game will occur at all, you have 4 options.
1. Give up. Just get to D1+3 and pray.
2. "Network". If you make an alt and help push people into Diamond, you might just get that D-C game you need. Those people might even help you win that game!
3. Cross your fingers and hope that you get a win streak bonus that pushes you from D1+2 into Crystal without ever having to participate in a D-C game
4. Throw matches until you're at D1+0 so that if you win the next three games in a row you'll skip your promotion match like in option 3. If you lose your third game, just throw another match so you're back at D1+0 and try again!

Purgatory needs to go. On Materia at least. In the Materia Wolves Den Discord I ran a poll over the weekend, which is our busiest time for ranked. "Delete Purgatory" received 34 votes for and 0 against. Nobody here thinks it is helpful. If you only take away one thing from this entire post, make sure it is this: "Purgatory needs to go, and Materia needs a lot more help besides"

The second issue is the ranked brackets themselves. There's too many of them.
At present Materia has ranked games restricted to players who are Unranked to Gold, Gold to Platinum, Platinum to Diamond, and Diamond to Crystal.
In patch 7.1 Square Enix experimented with adding a 5th bracket, splitting U-G into U-S and S-G. This made the ranked experience worse, with players being halted in their climb as soon as they reached S1+3, with the occasional player achieving a skill ban in under an hour. So why not experiment in the other direction?

The four players who ended Season 16 in Crystal are now Diamond. They will be unable to find a ranked game on these characters for easily another week, likely a month or more. If they had instead ended in Omega or Ultima they would now be Crystal, and there would be a very real possibility that Season 17 would end with these characters never having the opportunity to play a single match.
In the previously mentioned poll "Make the lowest bracket U-P" received 26 votes for and 5 against, and "Make the highest bracket P-C" received 26 votes for and 1 against.
It would be unfair for me to omit that when making the poll I had forgotten that high Crystal (eg. Ultima) is also segregated from Diamond on other Datacentres, as this has been historically irrelevant to Materia. So it would be dishonest for me to say with any certainty whether or not the community wishes to keep Ultima (and potentially Omega) separate from this.

Square Enix has already shown that they are willing to make region specific changes to ranked brackets, as the 7.1 change that briefly introduced U-S globally was reverted first on the Japanese Datacentres, and only later reverted globally.
Please consider loosening the brackets on Materia. It would help.

More needs to be done, but what is suggested here would be a good start. Please, find a way to stop the skill bans. We have so few players as it is.

Thank you for reading and I pray that the requested action is taken.
Once again requesting you delete Purgatory, Samara Glazghotwyn

Materia PVP enjoyer here.

I was stuck in Plat1/3 stars for 2 weeks. Literally 0 queue pops with daily, hour long ranked queues, while queues were popping in the mixed tiers.

This very much needs a resolution.

Season 17 has ended and with it we have seen zero (0) new Ultima ranks and zero (0) new Omega ranks. In fact, the season ended without a single Diamond-Crystal match, meaning that if anyone had somehow managed their way into Ultima or Omega in Season 16 they would have been prevented from playing that character in ranked for the entirety of Season 17
I was pleased with the patch notes however, despite the lack of matchmaking changes Square Enix has elected to inflate Commendation Crystal pay outs in such a way that benefits players at the bottom end of the ladder on Materia specifically.
In Season 17 you needed only reach the lofty heights of Bronze 1 to make top 100 in Materia. If this continues to be the case in Season 18 then these players, some with under a dozen games played will be awarded five (5) Commendation Crystals.
To achieve an equal or greater pay out in the other regions (assuming the competition remains the same between Seasons 17 and 18) you would need to reach
Platinum 3 in EU for 5 Crystals
Low Crystal in NA to jump straight from 1 to 8 Crystals
or Omega in JP for 5 Crystals
This does however present an obvious problem for the top end of players on Materia.
Despite latency, even I can achieve low Crystal on NA. I did so in Season 9.
If I truly wanted to accelerate how quickly I could buy out all the returning Feast rewards would it not make more sense to change my home world to NA, where Omega and Ultima are distant, but real possibilities? Where whether I can get more than 6 Crystals in a season is only a matter of skill and determination instead of needing to win a coinflip before skill even becomes a factor?

That aside. Uncharacteristically, Materia has had ranked matches prior to the first weekend. If you read this on the day it was posted we already have 3 characters in Purgatory, with another 2 characters who have managed to win streak into Platinum. Along with the 3 characters who ended last season in high Diamond they will be unable to play for a few more days.
I am pessimistic, I doubt the returning feast rewards and change in reward structure will be enough to allow our best, most dedicated player(s) to achieve Ultima. If I am wrong, I will be happy to eat these words. But if I am right, please do more. Communicate with us.

Edit: Only two and a half hours later I have climbed from my starting point of G4 to P4 and am no longer able to play ranked tonight!

They need to open travel between OCE and JP in my opinion, but keep the DF limited to ranked pvp for travelers. Latency should still be bearable for OCE players on those DCs.

The ladder system is a bad design in multiple ways and definitely needs improvements as it doesn't just affect OCE either.
- The rank purgatory, while less egregious on EU/NA, is still annoying and makes no sense.
- Bronze to Gold is just rank bloat. Those are essentially the same skill level across all regions. Platinum is where the first skill wall appears and has players of all skills merge there, with the ones stuck at the bottom of plat4 in the safety net (who are gold level), and the ones oscillating between diamond and plat1. Plat and Diamond could therefore be merged if the gold/plat safety net was removed. The real skill gaps start appearing above, where every rank has a justification for actually existing.

I just want to add to this that it becomes harder for Chaos/Light (EU) as well to find matches during the middle of the season and even at the end (which was usually not a problem before) if you haven't ranked up soon enough.

I just wanted to add that this problem exists on ther EU Datacentres as well, even though people usually are able to reach Omega/Ultima ranks.

But usually during the season the queues start to die down and then you are stuck with the rank you got if you were not fast enough.

So you are not even able to reach a higher rank, even if you wanted to or tried really hard.
Right now queues are still popping regularly, but if it ends up like it always does, there will be no queues after some weeks into the season.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TimotheusReed

I just want to add to this that it becomes harder for Chaos/Light (EU) as well to find matches during the middle of the season and even at the end (which was usually not a problem before) if you haven't ranked up soon enough.

I just wanted to add that this problem exists on ther EU Datacentres as well, even though people usually are able to reach Omega/Ultima ranks.

But usually during the season the queues start to die down and then you are stuck with the rank you got if you were not fast enough.

So you are not even able to reach a higher rank, even if you wanted to or tried really hard.
Right now queues are still popping regularly, but if it ends up like it always does, there will be no queues after some weeks into the season.

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This is caused because of their ratchet ascension system that literally pushes people upward with a two layers of protection:
1) No deranking until you reach Diamond, meaning that everybody eventually ends up in Plat until not enough players remain below to keep queues alive.
2) Victory streaks that keep pushing people up. This means that below crystal, anybody "stuck" in a specific league is losing more games than they win on average.

This generates a three level system with gold and below, then plat and diam, then crystal+.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valence

They need to open travel between OCE and JP in my opinion, but keep the DF limited to ranked pvp for travelers. Latency should still be bearable for OCE players on those DCs.

The ladder system is a bad design in multiple ways and definitely needs improvements as it doesn't just affect OCE either.
- The rank purgatory, while less egregious on EU/NA, is still annoying and makes no sense.
- Bronze to Gold is just rank bloat. Those are essentially the same skill level across all regions. Platinum is where the first skill wall appears and has players of all skills merge there, with the ones stuck at the bottom of plat4 in the safety net (who are gold level), and the ones oscillating between diamond and plat1. Plat and Diamond could therefore be merged if the gold/plat safety net was removed. The real skill gaps start appearing above, where every rank has a justification for actually existing.

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I'd like to steer clear of forcing Materia ranked onto a specific DC. Partially because I think the 150 or so players we already have should be enough for a healthy competitive environment, so long as those players go less segregated than they currently end up, and remain properly motivated to play every week. But mostly because low latency ranked is one of the VERY few things keeping me on Materia. And that my latency on JP is even worse than it is on NA. I'd be a little more enthusiastic if choice was offered but I really don't think that's on the table.

I like the idea of trimming down on the lower tiers. I personally would like if we had numerical matchmaking right from the very start, rather than requiring you to reach Crystal before it's abruptly turned on. I am aware however that this is an incredibly unpopular idea, which is why it was excluded from my initial post.

Sadly I don't see enough people yap about this, so cc rank is gonna be dead in 2 weeks. (I am just kidding cc rank is the best, dev is the best, they know what they are doing. I love you dev, keeping cc alive forever. Plz don't ban me, I love ya)