PVP-CC-Rank

[Valence]

On the merging of casual into ranked, I'm opposed to it. It would just kill the mode (and the potentially coming dual queue as well).

[*]1.) Ranking up with specific jobs that rely more heavily on team synergy (PLD, SCH, maybe DNC) so you can use them in the higher ranks will be a painful experience as a lot of the viability of said jobs hinges on one's teammates knowledge/ability to capitalize on the support they bring. The common recommendation has been to use self-sufficient or solo carry jobs over supportive jobs in the early skill tiers to climb for this reason, so job-based rank progression gives supportive jobs a huge handicap at the bottom end of the ladder, even if you might be a Crystal player usually.
-[*]2.) This hard-enforces onetricking, which can become an issue if you play one of the more common jobs on ladder (depending on meta balance at the time) to get queues as only two of a specific job can be present per match. Making it per-role (tank, healer, melee, ranged, caster) would at least allow for "some" alternatives in your job pool to help with job diversity.
-[*]3.) Speaking of making it per role/job, for anyone on the high-end of the ladder it would essentially discourage them to switch jobs/roles (which is something you should consider depending on maps and specific high-profile players in the queue) as it would not benefit them for Top 300 progression in the slightest. This punishes someone who may be both an excellent Astrologian and Dragoon for instance as they have nothing to gain to switch jobs.[/list]

While you might hold the opinion that it may be a good idea, this is what most likely will be the side effect if that opinion would be implemented - based on logical conclusions and/or precedence cases from other games that tried this.

Having been a big defender of the per job ranking option (I don't know who came up first with it):

1) It may be incredibly easier to carry with melee jobs and specific ones (DRG, GNB, etc) especially at lower ranks, doesn't mean it's a painful experience to rank up with team oriented ones. If you're good enough you'll climb. Anybody knows it takes more effort to climb with team focused jobs, until you reach a point where your skill with even more individualistic jobs averages over 50%, and then it becomes identical. I fail to see how this is a problem. We have many people way past gold that do main support or team focused jobs (ranged, buffers, etc). Maybe there is less of them even in high crystal, but that's a problem of meta there if anything, because some melee jobs like VPR don't fare much better.

2) I do understand it may be frustrating to have longer queues when a job is saturated in the games you play, but that's like queuing as a DPS in pve: you can choose to keep doing it (it pops eventually, it's not like you're getting 1/10th of the game pops anyway), or you can choose to try and rank up another job. I understand your argument there, but I don't think that's a problem at all.

3) That could be a problem for very high ratings (with the coming Ultima and Omega ranks). On the other hand, they're also no lifing this so...