Please let us queue with our friends in CC

[GordonGeeko]

Well I have my own views on why PVP keeps failing at this game and I really don't think it has anything to do with the ability to play with friends. Being able to play with friends has historically always led to a wintrading and non-competitive scene. Speaking from an NA perspective at least. I have absolutely no desire to see that return. It's more fun right now to play with friends in Frontlines and Rival Wings, sure, but there's a reason the number of people being able to play together has been reduced to 4 and that your team is randomized.

There are competitive players who love to PVP, I'm one of them, but I just don't think the competitive PVP scene is large enough to support a ranking system that accurately reflects your skill level, especially not a team-based one. You already see that a lot of CC players are the same people who used to play Feast. Not a lot of new blood in the Top 100.

Feast queue times used to be extremely bad for some classes and after a certain point, you could not find any games below the highest rank. And at higher rank, you would just keep running into the same people over and over. That's why I think they made it so Crystal players could not derank. That's better for queue pops but it creates such an imbalance of skill between someone at Crystal 0 and someone that got to Crystal 5000 (in a legit way).

Frontlines pretty much only pops due to people queuing for XP, not exactly because people love to PVP. Rival Wings was dead unless the community organized events.

I thought a new mode could bring more people to the ranked scene and it did, but they keep making decisions to ensure the mode dies a quick death :

1) Very minimal moderation and the sentiment that reporting is meaningless means that wintrading/people throwing games is still very much a thing. There's heavy suspicion regarding the validity of some rank 1s and top 30s.
2) No deranking at higher ranks makes people feel like the game is more RNG based off what teammates you get rather than skill-based.
3) The rewards are very bland.
4) You have to not play ranked to get the lower rewards/achievements if you achieved a higher rank the prior season.

I really feel like fixing these things will do a much better job than allowing you to play with friends. That would just create more problems and drama.