Ratcheting ranking system makes for an utterly miserable experience

[Valence]

The irony is that people complaining about their allies the most - and don't get me wrong, we all get paired with hopeless hands regularly, yesterday I had a 0 damage dealt PLD in my team, guess how it went - are often the players hard stuck in plat 4 trying to deflect their own shortcomings onto their team out of habit because they don't know any better, and can't control their salt levels. Removing the ratchet and I bet anything they all would drop back to silver/gold, if not lower.

There is definitely a factor at play with this system though, meaning that it prevents the rating to decant down significantly over time unless people get in high diamond or crystal.

[SweetPete]

I said this years ago that ranking should be job based. Like if you got to platinum on WHM then if you suddenly switch to say SGE then you will have to start from bronze 3 again. This way, people who are trying to climb won’t have to deal with your newness to a job just because you see other players playing it well and now you wanna try it. Stop disabling your team like that. Try jobs in causal not in ranked.

[Loggos]

I said this years ago that ranking should be job based. Like if you got to platinum on WHM then if you suddenly switch to say SGE then you will have to start from bronze 3 again. This way, people who are trying to climb won’t have to deal with your newness to a job just because you see other players playing it well and now you wanna try it. Stop disabling your team like that. Try jobs in causal not in ranked.

This honestly seems like the most intuitive and effective solution. I’m surprised this is not how the game handles it because it would be such an easy way to solve certain problems.

[AlliciaCapulet]

This honestly seems like the most intuitive and effective solution. I’m surprised this is not how the game handles it because it would be such an easy way to solve certain problems.

Well it's the same thing in almost every game. I agree that it would be a solution, but, just an example out of many, if you play League of Legends for example, you can play any champion and you will stay on the same rank. It's also impossible to fall down in rank, like here.

And why is it like that? Because it allow players to adapt. Let's say that the queue is full of WAR that queue. Well, you might end up with an higher waiting time between 2 matchs because too many people play your job. Then, you can swap to something else and play faster. Sometime when I play and that I keep getting the same bad person on a job, and that I know that I can do better, I will take the job so that way I'm sure I won't be queued with that person again. But when you try to reach Diamond or Crystal for the weapon reward, you don't want to rank up on multiple jobs.

I understand that I don't know how to play the 19 jobs in pvp, I'm good with maybe 2 and ok with another 2, that's all. But yeah, I did my practice in non ranked. Some player doesn't care, that's the issue.

Maybe SE should instead put a restriction, like you need 30 match in casual with a job to be able to play ranked with it.

[Loggos]

Those are good points. Being able to switch jobs to adapt to long queues or to make sure another person playing a job (badly) is on the enemy team are very legitimate concerns. I guess then there's no easy solution after all.

[Gunz_Zbestest]

Pretentious Op. Not going to clip that response because it's so huge. Explaining the meaning of words you choose to use in a particular context, ensures clarity and context for people providing clear definitions or interpretations of key terms. Go buy a journal if you don't want your thoughts to be made public.

[Loggos]

I agree, as another person whose native language is not English I initially read "ratcheting" competely differently. I primarily know ratchet as a demeaning slang term, so "ratcheting" read like an adjective à la "this godforsaken match making". It didn't help either that OP's initial elaboration of the problem in their first post was very sparse.

They didn't directly say "not being able to demote is a problem" which might have made the metaphor with the tool, that is a ratchet, much more intuitive. They just said having bad people in plat, whose statistics are significantly lower than those of their team mates, ruins the experience. And that a ranking system that doesn't even remotely reflect the actual skill is useless.

But a system that better reflects people's skills can be approached from various angles so "bad people in plat, system bad" doesn't exclusively and inherently translate into "my particular problem is the fact that people can't demote before diamond, anti-demotion protections should go completely, no exceptions".

Removing the anti-demotion system from plat and below is one way. But you could also think in other directons, so reading the initial post you can at best guess what OP actually had in mind in terms of solutions.
Alternative readings could entail:

• Giving points/stars for individual performances such as good KDA numbers instead of just wins.
• Having more finetuned match-making that's not just based on ranks but in addition puts together teams (and enemy teams) with similar statistics (e.g., by calculating an ongoing average across your past X matches).
• Lowering the threshold for non-demotable ranks (as in making gold 4 the last rank from which you can't be demoted).

(I'm not saying those are good/bad ideas. Just that they are possible interpretations of the statement "system bad, doesn't reflect skill, pls fix".)

So throwing your vaguely phrased frustration out there and then complaining that an (international) forum doesn't immediately get your rather specific metaphor comes off as a little insincere. Neither does it lead to helpful and productive discussions.

(Thanks to the other people in this thread who explained the meaning of ratchet in this context.)

[IDontPetLalas]

Well thanks to the people that added their comments, this thread got a lot more interesting for me with the various suggestions that were being discussed

[Valence]

If we really want to get technical and look at how a lot of other games deal with ranking, they do have an ELO which correlates to your rank and league, but they also do have a hidden ELO which is actually the one being taken into consideration by the matchmaking. That hidden ELO is where the game is trying to evaluate your position and will swing a lot more than your league, since the league is supposed to be more stable. For instance, when you start an account, the game will attribute you an average hidden ELO, then match you with people of similar hidden ELO, and depending on your success or failure, will adjust the hidden ELO accordingly, and usually very dramatically until it can reduce the range to where your skill level is the most probably closest to. Once you have played enough games, you get delivered into the league that corresponds roughly to that. The hidden ELO however stays and if you get through a win streak, it will adjust immediately and increase the level of the adversaries you face, which can then be of the higher leagues compared to yours if you win enough. And if you keep winning, the rewards to your real ELO will be bigger and bigger to make you actually climb. On the other hand, loss streaks will dramatically lower your hidden ELO and suddenly match you with lower leagues past a point. Almost every multiplayer game works like this, where XIV doesn't.

[AlliciaCapulet]

Now that SE merged the pvp on a few datacenter, it would be interesting to have some stats. How many players are playing CC ranked in average at every hours of the day, how long is the average queue, and, how many player in each league.

Maybe having those stats for every weeks. It already feels that the queue time is increasing. For the first 2 weeks, it was always an insta queue. Now, it's always something between 15 sec and 5-6 minutes. But it's probably because the player pool is less big in gold/plat/diamond. It can also be that less player are playing now, because they didn't like the actual pvp or simply got the CC rewards they wanted and stop playing.

It's an important stat to know, especially if you want a more selective matchmaking without ending up with dead queue for some people.