CC ranking system is simply bad

[Scghost]

I usually dont bother with forums but, i feel this needs to be addressed.
I believe that the current ranking system for Crystal Conflict is way too punishing and unrewarding for personal scores. Every time you Q in is like a coin toss, and maybe it's just me but i gone from Platinum 1 to 4 and multiple occasions now and pretty much stuck in the middle or so for a couple of weeks now. This system is simply upsetting all my friends and strait up depressing others, myself included. Its early ff11 all over again with their delveling system...

[Lucceira]

I was looking for this comment.

It's incredibly dishearting to be penalized for playing a team game with team members you don't choose. Also, I distinctly remember one time I was about to go from bronze to silver. I only needed 1 match. The system paired me with 2 new players and all bronzes while the opposing team got 3 (!!!) silvers. Of course, we ended up losing. It could be said that the match was lost before it began.

In the end and after a lot of hours I invested in the CC game mode I ended up in Bronze 3 again, just where I started... I decided to quit playing pvp altogether. The mode is incredibly frustrating and unrewarding.

[Iyrnwaen]

The biggest problem with the ranking system right now is that it's too easy to rank up to Crystal and you can't derank out of it.
Crystal is full of bored trolls who just screw around in matches because there's no penalty for losing if you're not shooting for top 100.

[PotatoTree]

Crystal ranked players past a certain point threshold should no longer get Diamond players in their matches.

Sure crystal players can be good enough to carry lower ranked teammates, but it is neither fun or rewarding. Instead of matches of even teams where a loss feels "close", you get teams of people trying to win paired with teammates who haven't even read a rulebook and are stuck at Diamond 5. These losses no longer feel close but "unfair" and more like a cointoss.

This is neither fun or rewarding. It is just frustrating, and it only breeds animosity among players that do not perform.

[Nanne]

I think biggest issue with is that how it matches people. It always just picks the 10 players who have the longest queue timer and who can be matched together and then it tries to balance those out instead for example pooling up people in the queue and making a balanced match out of all the people in queue

[Gserpent]

The biggest problem with the ranking system right now is that it's too easy to rank up to Crystal and you can't derank out of it.
Crystal is full of bored trolls who just screw around in matches because there's no penalty for losing if you're not shooting for top 100.

Yeah. There's a series of problems with the ranking system, and this is one of the more pressing ones.

Personally, I think you should be able to lose tiers, not just ranks. And it should take more stars and more ranks to reach the next tier (5 stars and 5 ranks per tier, except for 5 stars and 3 ranks to reach Bronze from unranked), and switching streak bonuses from an extra star to extra XP/marks. You can't control the quality of players on your team, but you *will* see upward momentum over tens or hundreds of games if you are actually skilled. There's people with 1000+ wins in the top 5-10 in pretty much every DC, which directly proves that if you work hard enough and are actually skilled, you can get there no matter how badly you get screwed with teammates. But the smarter thing is to only play when the high skill players are also playing - usually prime time, especially on weekends. I've noticed a dramatic shift in overall quality of games and teammates when I play during those times, versus early morning hours or noon or something like that. If I was focused on trying to push rank, as opposed to just playing to have fun, I would probably only play when there's a high density of high skill players active.

I don't think there's anything that can be done about people trolling in Crystal with "off spec" classes. Being able to de-rank to Diamond wouldn't fix anything. The only fix for that would be class-specific rankings, but people tend to freak out when they think about having to do a rank grind for each individual class they would like to play, even if you started like two or three tiers below your highest tier (so if you have a Crystal, your other classes would start at Gold 5/0.)

What I think folks don't realize or want to accept is that if you want actual skill-based matchmaking, you're going to have to create an actual, significant grind to move through ranks. Like, where it would take hundreds of games on average to make it to Crystal instead of potentially just like 50 or 60. With how easy it is to rank up right now, rank really means absolutely nothing about player skill, not even within Crystal. I've personally seen multiple top 30 players play like complete ass (maybe they were playing "off spec" though) and low Diamond players playing out of their minds.

[Sidamel]

There shouldn't exist ranks to begin with. Just a player score. And matchmaking builds around the average score of all particpating players.

What's the purpose of ranks? None.

But knowing the matchmaking of frontline I guess it's too difficult for them to implement something so simple.

[Gserpent]

Square-Enix could do it, but I think their general design goals are "monkey brain see number go up happy," not an actual competitive system. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it's directly at odds with their statements about CC supposedly being competitive.

I would rather they have just given us casual and casual (team) queues and no ranked at all and just called it a day. Ranked comes with the expectation of people playing to win and trying their best and I'm not really sure that's what you always get. I sure as hell don't see people pitching temper tantrums in spawn in casual games, at any rate.

[LeonKeyh]

There shouldn't exist ranks to begin with. Just a player score. And matchmaking builds around the average score of all particpating players.

What's the purpose of ranks? None.

But knowing the matchmaking of frontline I guess it's too difficult for them to implement something so simple.

Purpose of ranks is to implement a system that rewards people for continuing to play (and get lucky with teams) while also being somewhat lenient with losses. It has nothing to do with how good a player is and people don't really realize that (hence complaints about 3 bronze vs 3 silver).

They really do need to figure out some sort of skill based match making (SKILL, not rank). I don't know if this is something they're doing already and that's why you see such a big mix of ranks in games, or if it's just literally random. But if they want people to take this seriously, they need to have a skill rating of some sort which is calculated and used to match people together. It doesn't need to be public (but should). I'd rather see something like that which is poorly created than a straight up random matchmaking.

[Scghost]

Losing tiers would be even worse imo. it might help a little for when you get some people standing at the starting area on purpose for the team mates on the other team (yeah i got screenshots). but it would feel even more punishing for those who arent throwing matches on purpose or worst, losing to hackers (yes i seen them too). i dont even want to imagine deranking all the way to silver again... FF14 is not a pvp game, we had pvp that we mostly did for dailies and the few times i did it with friends we never cared about losing because we never had this very stupid ranking system.