The Feast

[Februs]

I've received plenty of comments from players similar to "xD why do you care, it's just PvP".

I was always under the impression that Aether had the 'better' PvP community, but some of the stories I've heard from your data centre make me very happy to be on Primal ... >.>

Regardless, I understand your frustrations, but that's no reason to shoot queues in the foot. You might be happy to have a 30+ minute wait time in order to avoid the bronze and unranked tier, but SE has to consider the community as a whole. They can't base matchmaking solely on the whims and wants of the elitists, especially when the actual point of the game is to just play the game. If matchmaking is too restrictive, then you end up with stagnant queues. Stagnant queues create an exclusive and stagnant ranking system. We already saw how that worked in season 1, and it was awfully boring until the failure of Shatter brought people back to Feast. Even then, untested players were still a problem. It's just that the buck of dealing with them was passed down to silver ranked players instead of gold.

Don't get me wrong here, I do agree, wholeheartedly, that there is a certain level of play that should be upheld in a ranked game mode. I just don't think that overly restrictive matchmaking is the answer. An un-ranked game mode sounds good on paper ... but, quite frankly I don't think anyone would queue for it, so it would be a pointless gesture on SE's part. I'm inclined to think that some kind of qualification system should be in place. I just don't know how it should be implemented, especially when SE took pre-seasons off of the table ...

[Enlial]

I think, everything considered, the change I'd most like to see is something along the lines of "upon a loss, lose rank based on the lowest ranked member of your party. On a win, gain rank based on the rank of the highest ranked member of your opponents party." It certainly isnt perfect, but I dont think there is a perfect solution. If we had things working that way I think it'd blunt a lot of the rage towards newer players ("gdi what a horrible loss, oh but thank god we had this unranked player on our team so we only lost 10 points". Would make ppl much less apt to rage against said unranked player). Yeah it might make things more grindy since we'd probably see a higher net gain of points over more matches played, but thats pretty much been established as a necessary evil. Exploitativeness wouldnt really be any worse or better than it is currently, as far as I can see, but if eventually enough people start queuing, well, less predictability would cut down on a lot of it.