What if you DIDN'T lose points in Feast?

[Zojha]

I have to ask: What do you think is the point of a rating system like ranked in the first place...?

Normally in competitive games, rating exists for one reason: To accurately reflect your skill level, so that you can then use that rating as proxy for skill in matchmaking in order to match people of the same skill into the same game so that the games are always as close and of a high quality as possible. Simple enough concept, right?

In order to accurately reflect your skill level, naturally losses need to subtract from the rating, because a loss means your team was worse than the enemy one. And the gain/loss needs to be entirely dependent on the rating discrepancy between the teams alone - that's very intuitive. If your team lost to one the matchmaker rated higher than yours in the first place, yours shouldn't lose as much, because that was the expected outcome from the get-go. If yours lost to one the matchmaker rated lower, yours needs to lose a lot more and theirs gain a lot more because the matchmaker apparently overrated your team, or underrated the enemy team and needs to correct that error. And in full teams, that's fine and dandy and non-controversial because the team works as a unit.

It's the idea of ranked solo queue that is problematic. Naturally, the game doesn't change between Solo queue and Premade queue, so the ranking of the individual is still determined by the performance of the team, but the team is no longer a unit - the players change every match and can be treated as RNG noise factors that distort the rating. As a result, it requires much larger sample sizes to achieve an accurate ranking for an individual, but it 'can' still work over large sample sizes, as you are the only common denominator in all the games and thus, have the most overall influence in the total distribution of games played. So much for competitive games in theory.

And now to Feast in particular.

Feast throws every competitive sense out of the water by making rating gain/loss only marginally dependent on team rating differences - the majority is based on your own rank, unranked can't lose points, bronze loses 5, silver 10, gold 15 etc, winning is around 25 +- 5 depending on matchup. That goes directly against the point of having a ranked system in the first place, because it awards rating by grinding, rather than skill. And so does the suggestion of the OP.

Moreover, since the player pool is low, it draws from a huge range of ratings in order to make matches based on 'average' team rating. By itself, that isn't an issue so long as the average is identical and every player has an equal amount of influence on the match, i.e. the jobs are balanced, because then the skill impacts are going to cancel each other out perfectly. It is an issue because roles aren't balanced in the slightest and a diamond ranged doesn't weigh as heavy as a diamond healer, making for highly lopsided and frustrating matches in spite of a 'technically' fair matchup. This can be fixed by balancing roles, but people, healers in particular, are highly averse to the idea for obvious reasons.


That all said: We already have a system much akin to the one suggested by the OP: PvP experience. You can simply add rewards to the ranks and maybe add some additional ranks and that would serve the same purpose - Grind based rewards. You can also rename it to Feast XP and make it exclusive to Feast if that's your fancy or/and make them seasonal, it doesn't matter because it's the same thing either way.