Remove "Casual" from CC / CC needs another overhaul

[zeth07]

TL : DR = Remove casual/ranked, make it one mode just "Crystalline Conflict" and add Ranked decay to higher tiers probably aggressively so.

I was trying to do Ranked matches in CC and it has "More than 30m" wait time at around 11pm eastern, this is when I would usually try give or take an hour. Then I try to do Casual and it has "Less than 5m" and did in fact get a fast queue.

The game's PvP player base cannot sustain 2 separate modes, especially with how they've handled the Ranked system. This isn't a competitive game to begin with like Overwatch/etc where it's entire user base is playing the "same game".

The rewards are literally identical for both modes, except Ranked has the added bonus of the trophy crystal tiers. There is pretty much no actual reason to play Casual other than not having to worry about your rank which I don't even think is a real issue since the rank decay doesn't exist until resets. Or flip the logic and say there is no reason to play Ranked after the rewards are given out anyway since Trophy Crystal usage as stagnated on what's available. Which is another issue.

Some people will have the thought process of not caring about Ranked and never do it, so already that is a subset of players not available to queue. Then you will have another group of players who have already hit whatever rank they wanted so they no longer have a reason to play Ranked, this is a second subset of players that are now not available to queue. Then you will have a third subset of players, like myself, who will see the queue is "More than 30m" and say I'm not waiting that long and just try Casual instead and thus not have a Ranked queue.

It doesn't take much logic to realize Ranked CC is losing out on player queues because of all of the above. Whereas if there was only one single queue it wouldn't matter and everyone would be queued together properly and the "Ranked" aspect of it would just be attached regardless. Which should not even be named Ranked it should just be "Crystalline Conflict".

The one issue would be skill level matchmaking, which in my opinion already became a problem with the changes, and the Casual queue solves this by being a free for all at the cost of any sense of balance unless it's doing it on the backend anyway (which I doubt).

Previously in the first two seasons if you were Bronze you got queued with Bronze and Silver once you were near the rank up, and that mostly applied at least up to Gold, with Bronze-Silver, Silver-Gold, etc.

Now with the new matchmaking as Bronze you are queueing into Gold players which seems like such a large gap you just increased the RNG skill level of the teams. Before you were mostly on equal ground and maybe Silver were meant to carry. Now you have Gold players who are meant to carry Bronze and it's just feels so random.

My only guess is that this was meant to speed up the non-existent queues by expanding the range of ranked players. Now imagine if instead of only having the ranked queue, you had every single person who wanted to play CC in the queue so that those ranks were now expanded to more players.

You can keep the queue gap as three ranks if need be and then just do the closer rank queues if the CC player base can now sustain that if everyone is now together.

I do think there should also be a proper Ranked decay for the higher tiers. Given the fact that the seasons are relatively short compared to the series, they probably have to have a more aggressive decay in terms of time. The higher the tier the harder it should be to passively maintain.

The issue is that because there are more risers it would actually be harder to get demoted out of a rank because of decay. Crystal would be an entirely separate problem because of the credit. Some people have thousands of credit so if you were to aggressively balance the decay around them you would quickly get rid of the ones who got to Crystal and stopped, which maybe is a good thing.

If you did something like 500 credit decay per week, the season seems to roughly be 12 weeks and for most that would take them out of Crystal tier, there's only 1 person who would maintain it since their credit is 6700+. For everyone else once they hit that 0 threshold they would go back to Diamond 1 2 stars.

Then it would be a decision of how aggressively they want to do it. At 2 star decay per week it would take a full Diamond player roughly 10 weeks (almost the whole season) to demote into Platinum. If it was 3 star decay it would take 7 weeks. For a Platinum player it would take ~8 weeks at 2 stars to decay into Gold.

This would be if there were no banked days timer to have a buffer of not playing the game, which would be more generous. I don't really see how they could handle that without being MORE aggressive as in "1 star per day" if they were to opt for a banked days system. Yes it would mean people have to maintain their subscription if they wanted to maintain their rank which I'm sure people would hate. But the alternative is clearly not working.

Added Bonus: Put Crystalline Conflict in it's own Roulette to give other people more rewards for doing it.


TL : DR = Remove casual/ranked, make it one mode just "Crystalline Conflict" and add Ranked decay to higher tiers probably aggressively so.

[Gserpent]

You have it backwards. Remove ranked mode. There's no point to it in any sense of it. If you still want to have a "top 100," just do it by total games won. Don't even pretend to have ratings.

As I've said from pretty much day 1, they should have debuted CC with casual queue (you can take one buddy with you) and formal Team Ranked, using PvP Teams. Not allowing people to play with their friends was a horrible decision, and ranking systems in modes designed around team play are always a questionable choice even in the best of circumstances - better, then, to limit the ranked play to formed teams.

If that means there wouldn't be enough activity to keep the team ranked queue active, then it just indicates that there's not enough playerbase activity to warrant even having a ranked mode. At that point you can just remove it and no one will really miss it.

[GordonGeeko]

Ranked has been a complete failure. The only good move they've made to that system was to add demotion, but even that was poorly done (Platinum floor and Platinum 1s playing with Crystal).

- Failure to identify wintrading and resolve it quickly.
- Failure to punish cheaters (speed hacks, crowd control resistance) fast enough so they don't poison queues.
- Failure to to give decent rewards making you want to queue up (portrait frames with different roman numerals is not cutting it).
- Failure to create an environment where people of similar skill are paired together (Platinums with Crystal, Unranked with Gold). "Dynamic matchmaking".
- Failure to keep the trophy crystal shop up to date with new things to spend them on.

If they have no intention of improving moderation and start giving out some real incentives to play ranked, it is as good as dead and you'll only be left with Casual games. A new map every 9 months is not going to change much. Maybe that's better this way. Pretty much everything else in the game is casual as hell and that's clearly the direction they're taking.

I would have liked to have some competitive PVP, but if it's not meant to be, so be it. I'm clearly in the minority on that. A shrinking minority.

[Kansene]

During early EW I just quit for a while over the disappointment that I couldn't queue for CC with even a single friend.

I have other reasons to play nowadays, but none of them are CC.

[Gserpent]

During early EW I just quit for a while over the disappointment that I couldn't queue for CC with even a single friend.

I have other reasons to play nowadays, but none of them are CC.

I feel confident in saying that CC would be a lot more popular if they'd just done the absurdly obvious thing and made it so that you could play with your friends. Maybe not an entire party, because people get upset when they're getting rolled by premades, but even just one friend would have made a huge difference.

Quite simply, what kind of moron develops a team-based game and then makes it so that in neither case are you allowed to play with your friends? Imagine if the only way you could raid was through Duty Finder, and you could only enter queues solo...

[Blinding_Awesomeness]

In a 6.1 live letter, Yoshi-P said that playing with friends would come "eventually." When that eventually is or if they just want everyone to forget they said that, only CBU3 knows.

[Gserpent]

It'll come after it's already too late to "save" the mode as anything but an occasional tome/XP farm while people grind out the new level 25 series item. I'd really love to get "why didn't you let people play with their friends?" on a Q&A sometime. Though I guess Yoshida would just deflect it...

[Blinding_Awesomeness]

True words :/

[Valence]

I have been mulling over the same thing recently and do think that both modes compete with each other in a bad way. There should only be one CC mode that you queue up for, and an elo behind everybody to keep people of similar skill matched with each other preferably. I have actually no illusion that this will always pair similar skills together with the small population of the pvp game, and we might see occasionally some crystal level player thrown into a gold or lower game, but that would keep the queues alive anyway (much like current casual as well, high rated peeps also play in casual if just to learn other jobs), and I also believe the current elo system doesn't work well either due to the insanely disparate skill levels at the level I can judge: plat to crystal.

Go back to the basics, make the system work like this, keep elo hidden not to spook casuals and to prevent endless whines about unfair pairings, just show it privately to the player they belong to. And make people able to queue with a single friend, I am extremely confident it would boost queues tenfold. Actually, also add a roulette for the mode. Why is this a thing for a broken mode like FLs but not CC?

And introduce team ranked maybe, but I really doubt that those queues would ever pop, as much as I wish they would.

[ThaCa]

Overall pretty good points. I would personally like to see it consolidated into Crystalline Conflict and forego both the Casual and Ranked in name, have it still calculate rating on the back ground without all this star nonsense and either allow showing your current situation under the PvP tab or reveal them to everyone at end of the Season.
I think the current system of highest achieved score is still good in a way that it in theory keeps people pushing up, whether it should revert or stay should probably depend on if your final rating is visible at any time or only at the end.
Passive decay could be nice even if it counted the highest achieved, this would help rusty players a bit if they take longer breaks

Pre-made parties should be allowed, at the very least up to 3 players. Prioritize matching similar sized parties as long as it doesn't break the team ratings too much and if it can't match soon enough it will give some estimated extra for the partied team to compensate in team vs team rating if it has to put it vs solo or smaller parties.

Overall rewards should be revised, there's so much filler levels in Series with Trophy Crystals and yet you can't use them for much anything. Wolf Marks can buy plenty of random jank, allow at least the same for the Crystals to cut the janky Crystal to Collar to Wolf Mark boogaloo (which isn't very good rate anyway). There's been plenty of good ideas from others over time like having some sort of PvP relics that could cover other modes too or just straight up "upgradeable" Hellhound weapons for effects.

Almost anything would be better than the current inactivity of the mode, even just slapping a roulette for it and RW would help a bit.