I cannot find a single game of ranked Crystalline Conflict since 2 weeks

Hey, due to how the matchmaking system works, I could queue and find players almost instantly. The second I reached plat, I cannot play ranked anymore. I legit can't find a single game even during the weekend from 2pm to midnight

Anyone else in the same situation? Thanks

If you are in plat you will only get matched in gold/plat games or diamond/plat games. If there aren't enough people in those ranks queueing you will simply never find a game. Most of the time queues for ranks below diamond die out during the season and you have to wait for the next season to find ranked games again.

Platinum is an especially bad rank to be in after the first few weeks of the season because gold players tend to get put with unranked/bronze/silver matches and diamond tends to get put with crystal/omega/ultima matches.

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Originally Posted by echo78

If you are in plat you will only get matched in gold/plat games or diamond/plat games. If there aren't enough people in those ranks queueing you will simply never find a game. Most of the time queues for ranks below diamond die out during the season and you have to wait for the next season to find ranked games again.

Platinum is an especially bad rank to be in after the first few weeks of the season because gold players tend to get put with unranked/bronze/silver matches and diamond tends to get put with crystal/omega/ultima matches.

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I'm aware of the matchmaking range, just wondering if this range is already dead with no chance of playing the gamemode until next season just because the dev team can't figure out a proper matchmaking system.
10+ seasons in it's kinda crazy they still can't make it work
people below plat and above diamond are fine
meanwhile I can't play anymore

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Originally Posted by jimmybe29

I'm aware of the matchmaking range, just wondering if this range is already dead with no chance of playing the gamemode until next season just because the dev team can't figure out a proper matchmaking system.
10+ seasons in it's kinda crazy they still can't make it work
people below plat and above diamond are fine
meanwhile I can't play anymore

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You could see if any EU PVP discord does CC queue syncs for platinum but otherwise its going to be dead at almost all times until the next season starts.

I agree the matchmaking system for CC is horrible. No rank decay (many players stop playing the second they hit the rank they wanted) and no actual MMR/ELO for a ranked game mode is so hilariously awful it makes you wonder if the devs are really this incompetent or do they just want everyone to be miserable lol.

SE should really just remove the casual queue; there's no value in it in particular since you would actually get better matches playing ranked anyway.

I agree with you both ngl

rank decay should be a thing, especially since there's a ladder with top X rewards even tho it's mostly wintraders, they force people to SoloQ (or duoQ in casual) which demotivates people to play this mode anyway since it's a MMORPG (btw) and people obviously want to play together so yeah, just losing hope in this game overall when I see how clueless the devs are and the state of Dawntrail, last ult and savage sucked and now that I want to go back to PvP I can't play it, what a fkin bummer

casual queue is useless because ranked is the same thing and if ppl suck they'll just stay in low ranks anyway like you said
but the problem is that casual players will see "ranked" and be scared to queue it hence they'll never do it and just go frontline

also yes, devs are both incompetent and clueless
they know nothing of actual player experience and take wild guesses on what people would like/dislike that's why the state of the game is so mediocre

if you played on JP you'd get games in platinum because you'd have diamonds to play with instead of having them shoved into the NA omega game

I don't think rank decay would help at all with how small the playerbase is. High rated players would just play their 1 required game until they have to play again and that would make few more pops happen but nobody under crystal/high diamond would be benefitting from it. If PvP would be very popular there would be constant pressure from the bronze-diamond people rising up in ranks and contesting the leaderboards but there just aren't enough players interested and making the top players play match to not decay wont change anything.

You guys perfectly described the death spiral that punishes players for not being able to play during the first two weeks of a season. This isn't a you problem, it's a fundamental design failure.

The system's rigid matchmaking creates a ghost town in Platinum. You're absolutely correct—Gold players get pulled down, Diamond players get pulled up, and anyone in the middle is left in a vacuum. The system would rather you stare at the queue for 24 hours than form a match with a slightly wider MMR spread. For a mode they claim to support, this is an insane way to operate.

The suggestions here to just delete Casual queue miss the point entirely. Forcing casual players into a broken ranked system doesn't fix ranked; it just makes more people hate it. The core issue is that ranked offers no incentive to keep playing after hitting a initial goal, so the population vanishes.

The real, practical solutions have been standard in other games for a decade. We need Solo/Duo queue to immediately inject more players into the pool and let us play with a single friend. We need dynamic matchmaking that intelligently widens its search parameters after a few minutes to prevent these dead zones from ever forming. And we desperately need cross-data-center ranked to combine our pitifully small player pools.

You aren't hardstuck. You are design-stuck. The system placed you in a bracket and then took away the ladder. Until the developers implement these basic features, this cycle will repeat every single season, and dedicated players will continue to be punished for wanting to play.

Dynamic matchmaking makes me internally dread what could become of pvp at high level. The skill discrepancies are already abysmal and people are asking SE to add more hard walls between leagues so that you don't end up for example with diamonds playing with omega players (like it is already the case on JP). And I agree with them. Playing in ultima games as a crystal player is already rough, so you can imagine for diamond players when they face omegas (which includes a lot of ultima players dropping occasionally there), it's a nightmare and it generates a LOT of toxicity, especially since everybody knows each other and we always play with the same players.

I'm not saying that it's wrong to have dynamic matchmaking by necessity, but I'd be extremely cautious with that kind of system for the aforementioned reason. I think it would work fine up to platinum frankly, but not above. The difference in skill between bronze+ and diamond is already huge. The counter argument to this would be that if such a system only triggers when more than like, 10-15min of queue time have elapsed, then perhaps I could see a reason to introduce it: people that want to stay in the queue and play with gigantic skill differences in the lobby can, and people that want to queue down also can, but at least it could provide games when the queue is dry. But it should NOT be a thing active at all times and especially not when the queue is already active and kicking.

The real problem is that if you look at JP ranked that pops at all times in the day (yeah even in the early morning), and where at prime time you have more than one lobby of the same players going, facing difference faces every time, then you can see where the true problem lies on EU/NA: not enough players period. JP has enough to fill up organically skill tiers without having to widen the skill gap too much and can keep games going at any time. We can't.

I think that beyond more rewards and incentives to invite more players to try ranked, like for example a ranked roulette with clear disclaimers for players using it (like mentor roulette). I think roulettes are a great tool to push players to try things out, and I'm amazed SE has never even tried making one for extreme trials either tbh, but at least they tried with Unreal and it seems to work somewhat, so why not for ranked?

we also need SE to seriously rebuild how the riser system works and introduce an actual MMR/ELO rating like in any serious multiplayer game and not that clunky ratchet system that's just there to make sure people go up until they reach crystal (and then go back down because they have no business being there, and then eventually get hard stuck in plat 4 when the lowest plat risers can't get matched with diamonds anymore and gold has stopped popping since long). They also need to remove the safety nets of each rank to keep lower ranks active, especially the platinum floor that literally empties gold and below past a certain time in every season. The Feast had a better system that was a lot less arbitrary and based on rng and coinflips (CC ranking is essentially fishing for win streaks below crystal): in Feast Bronze for example winning games earned more points than losing removed points (like 30pts for winning and 15 for losing), and this difference lowered as you ranked up where in Diamond the gains were neutral, which was not based on win streak fishing.

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Originally Posted by RedAkihabara

You guys perfectly described the death spiral that punishes players for not being able to play during the first two weeks of a season. This isn't a you problem, it's a fundamental design failure.

You aren't hardstuck. You are design-stuck. The system placed you in a bracket and then took away the ladder. Until the developers implement these basic features, this cycle will repeat every single season, and dedicated players will continue to be punished for wanting to play.

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ye i'm aware was just wondering if I was alone in this very fucked up position
I was top 100 first season and crystal for a few others just quit pvp for a while when I took a break from the game, didn't expect to go from having insta queue proc to literally no queue proc at all by gaining 1 rank
the design is just straight up horrible and I hope the devs actually acknowledge and address this issue

This is why I don't understand why they added even MORE levels, like I'm at upper plat and it's impossible to get matches of ANY kind right now.

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Originally Posted by bortmode

SE should really just remove the casual queue; there's no value in it in particular since you would actually get better matches playing ranked anyway.

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Forcing players who just want to play the mode in a casual manner into ranked dilutes the matches and makes the overall experience worse.

same, tbh i blame some super toxic asshole mnk players just ratting new player in casual, pretty much killed the gamemods popularity but hey it is wat it is. i feel like the game punish new player way too hard. most of the pvp game have some kind of safezone or ways for players to anti-ratting but this gamemod is really sth. when u see an asshole mnk chasing a poor healer the entire game is really sth...

I could see casual being merged with ranked actually work if all manner of leagues only unlock for players that do opt in, and have casuals be paired with up to Gold rankers, while for casuals that don't opt in they'd just not have any league or rank. Materialistically this would work I believe, but the real issue is the toxicity and the mindset. There is a huge difference how players take something competitive like ranked and something semi competitive like casual, it's night and day. You'd get ignore marks flying everywhere, a lot of hatred immediately directed at casuals from rankers, etc.

So nah.

The problem is that new player just start playing for a month being thrown into players that been playing for years, and theres no ways to protect them. Most of the people I know try a few game until they run into some asshole making their life measurable and they just stop playing. Thats ... all my friends. I trired to ask them to play some game with me and they all gave up after like 5 games. You know if they can just chilling in the bass for a bit or run behind a turret to take cover or sth... they might keep playing a bit longer.


Because of that, there is no new blood for the gamemode. Its just a bunch of old asshole being asshole to each other until they also give up, that explain why rank is dead.

If you mean ranked, yes, the CC ranked pvp communities are truly something. Stick to casual if you don't want to get harassed or called names outside of the game, but to be fair, the real harassment happens at high rank within those communities. Low ranks below diamond don't even meet or interact with those people, so at best you'll have people malding with quickchat spamm or some ignore marks in the game, which I'm not saying is okay, but it's not on the level of the toxicity of anything past diamond level, which tends to happen outside of the game (discords and streams among other platforms).

In any multiplayer game the people actually getting into ranked ladders tend to be minorities to begin with. But seeing the average vibes and culture that's being bred at higher levels, that's no wonder people reach diam+ and just stop after.

Let's start making excuses for the development team.

How they have no resources,
How they have no man power,
How they have better things to do,
How they have random projects that get scraped in a year or 3,
How they are okay to do the bare minimum,
How even when their bare minimum is unacceptable but hey, surely next time,
How they are humans too!!!

I know I love having my time wasted and paying for it on top.

Well its a dead game mode, what can you expect? Devs so incompetent to even try to keep it alive. Pushing 2 new ranks was just a placebo effect so crystal people can bark at each other and "feel" good.
People should demote from ranks including plat, gold, there's no need to protect them. You as plat will be able to play with diamonds but since only crystal+ players play at this part of the season, good luck finding games. Spoilers: it won't be any.

Meanwhile it pops 24/7 in JP all ranks. So what's up with westerners?