Concerns that may have been overlooked with Light Party and Ranking System

[Aviars]

I realize that in general Square Enix is inexperienced with pvp and how to make a system that works, which is quite evident through the wild changes that happen in pretty much every patch.

For the most part I like to give SE the benefit of the doubt and try it out but there are two things that I cannot ignore and in the end will just become a detriment to the PVP community and SE's goal of making PVP something people want to play.



1. Light Party and rewards. As far as I can see it the only requirement to receive rewards in a team is to just be a team itself. So in theory you can just invite someone and they wouldn't have to play a single game in order to receive those rewards. The problem with this is that it will encourage the selling of extra spots to people who either have no business receiving those rewards in the first place or people who did basically no work with the team, receive rewards as well. I am sure SE already sees problems with people selling Ultimate clears by getting other players to play their character for them, so I also think SE should understand that you have made it incredibly easy for people to sell Light Party rewards to people by allowing the current reward requirement, which seems to be just being on the team.

My solution really is to require a personal rating. Your personal rating increases as the team rating increases, and you are required to be within a certain range between your personal rating and actual team rating in order to be eligible for rewards. You can also have it if someone is perhaps at zero personal rating while the team rating is at like 2000 rating that wins received will produce more personal rating that scales down as it gets closer to the team rating so they can catch up sooner.

If this doesn't happen you will see people selling spots in their light party team for real life money, and the funny thing is you won't be able to know about it since people don't need to share accounts to do it. So I hope SE takes this seriously.


2. Saving your highest rating. I can't begin to say how misinformed and stupid this idea is. It is rife with potential abuse, so much so I don't have to explain it that much. People can potentially get a high rating and then purposely tank their rating lower so they can prevent other people from climbing in the rankings by playing at the lower ranking. A simple example is a diamond player tanking there rating to plat and purposely prevent others from getting diamond by playing in platinum when they are actually diamond level, guaranteeing their own win while giving others guaranteed losses. If rating/rank is not risked people are free to abuse the system to keep themselves safe. You create a toxic environment if you go through with this change, please do not do this. People have asked for rating decays forever, yet you pick this horrible alternative. Just don't do it.


SE please reconsider point 2 and please find a solution to point 1. As it is right now you are basically asking for people to abuse the system in a unsportsmanlike way. If you truly want this game to have some sort of esports potential get rid of avenues of abuse that you basically end up ENCOURAGING.

Thank you for reading.

[RiyahArp]

2. is no win, though. Right now, there's no incentive to play more than the first two weeks. This is trying to encourage people to do that by removing the risk of losing it all of you try to do that, but people are assuming people are going to be scum and tank people's rating in lower tiers and throw matches. So there's rating decay, but you have problems with this too. You can't really fix things if the matches needed are too low; people will just queue one day per week and the remaining six are still dead. But if they are too onerous people will get sick of it. It also doesn't help lower tiers, which can't have rating decay at all, and still die really hard.

idk if it can be solved by a dev solution. I mean, people will literally raise alts just to tank ratings in games like overwatch; idk if its done here. I mean, if players are hell bent on destroying the mode what can they really do?

[Aviars]

They can make it so they can't do it on one character. They are basically encourage it. Your top rating is safe so now you are free to just throw games because there is no negative to losing anymore. Thanks SE.

[Yung]

No one can beat you if you throw everyone else's game once you get to the top!

[Zojha]

No one can beat you if you throw everyone else's game once you get to the top!

You can't throw everyone else's game, though.

You can throw the game for 3 people and yourself. In the process, you are boosting up 4 people, of which at least one of them should be a direct competitor to your spot.
The far bigger concern here is that it helps wintraders, because the boosted account can now be safely used for boosting after the deed is done. Better pray that the stimulated activity will be enough to compensate.

[Commander_Justitia]

No one can beat you if you throw everyone else's game once you get to the top!

Sure just snipe him in the role he is queueing. Healer are safe.

[Aviars]

It just concerns me all the majors changes SE makes are just enabling bad behavior. They try to convince people to play but they make changes that make cheating/throwing/wintrading/botting much worse.

If anything it'll just drive the current player-base away and in the end PVP gets worse and worse.

[Commander_Justitia]

I am not so sure about these changes. Yea, its right, you could potentially way easier wintrade if that is what you want. But you could also do that right now already if you wanted to, its just a bit more troublesome. I don't think there are many players out there who think after the patchnotes now "okay lets lose on purpose next season", many players don't want that bad reputation or chat with toxic players spamming them. Its not that bad idea to encourage more matches, if they would go after reports a bit more and show they do something about the top griefer, it would get less of an issue.
I wonder how JP feast player see this for their dc ?

[Aviars]

SE doesn't realize that the rating changes does nothing to solve the real problem. Does it solve top 100 players not playing? Possibly so, because in effect top 100 players are the only ones with anything to lose by playing. They honestly don't do anything that solves the issue with people playing in tiers like unranked, bronze or silver etc where the ques become nonexistent after the first month or so. So yea the top 100 plays more, but the bottom tiers still don't play because they had nothing to lose to begin with. If they can't solve the reason why lower tiers become dead, then nothing changes for them and really the reason why bottom tiers are dead is because the rewards below top 100 are awful and not worth playing for beyond getting to a certain tier.

[Cleanse]

Reworking solo queue in a completely different manner (to motivate people to play till the end of season) would be better than this system. The new system in 4.2 will be used to boost friends by de-ranking and then carrying them or win trading.

Currently, role disparity makes it daunting for some people (ranged) to try and keep up in rating with those who have near instant queues (healers and melee). A revamp that balances this situation might get more people playing to the end since there would be 4 pools.

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Either way, if people would not feel the need to take the easiest route, the 4.2 changes would be fine. However, there has not been a season that has gone by without a group of people cheesing the system (due to a lack of GM moderation).

Also, merge the NA data centers for PvP.