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.