Materia Players Deserve Better Crystalline Conflict Matchmaking

[Guntank81]

Hey everyone, Happy Holidays!


I wanted to bring some attention to the struggles players on the Materia Data Center are facing with Ranked Crystalline Conflict queues. While I’m not on Materia player myself, I’ve seen how their smaller player base has hard time to get matches going, especially for ranked CC PvP.

Right now, the queue times are long, and it’s hard for Materia players to find enough people to even start matches. Meanwhile, adjustments have been made to help with matchmaking in other regions/data centers, like the Japanese Data Centers.
If those kinds of changes can work there, why not apply them to Materia DC too?

Oceanic players already deal with a lot of challenges due to the smaller community size, and this is just one more hurdle that could be fixed with a little attention from the Dev team.

I think giving Materia the same consideration would not only improve the experience for their players but also encourage more engagement.

If you’re on Materia or just want to support the idea of making the game better for everyone, let’s get the devs to take notice!

Thanks!

[Sililos]

It needs to be for all Duty finder content.

Even PF is pretty dead as of late. 7.15 sadly did not bring people back too the datacenter.

As for CC ranked, thats a rigged game.
Same 100 people reach the top rankings then they quit playing CC securing their spot.
No ranks for lower ranked players, no chance of losing their top 100 slot.
Its why i always encourage SE to not reward top ranked PvPers. At least on OCE its win traders, bots and the same people ensuring nobody has a shot at breaking in.
Cant gain ranks to oust them if there are no matches.

[EdenPrime]

Not only you have 0 idea of what you are talking about, but you do it so confidently it's honestly annoying.
I'm tired of posts like yours yapping about how Materia PvP is rigged and there's some sort of hidden T100 mafia controlling the standings. The Materia PvP community is small, but passionate. There's a dedicated bunch that plays constantly and actually wants to be good at the game mode. A lot of us train outside OCE and come back to teach others and give newcomers a chance. We have people that started Ranked pvp *last week*, fresh as can be, and they are already at gold. You only need 10 friends to help you with queues if you hate the other players that much, but I guess you wouldn't have luck finding half of that number.

The fact that *YOU* personally cannot reach the T100 is your problem.

Please consider actually contributing to the PvP Materia scene in a meaningful way instead of spreading rumours.

On the other hand, OP's message is very appreciated, we would love an opportunity to get better queues for our sprouts, and ensuring the veterans get daily pops!

[Taketori]

As for CC ranked, thats a rigged game.
Same 100 people reach the top rankings then they quit playing CC securing their spot.
No ranks for lower ranked players, no chance of losing their top 100 slot.
Its why i always encourage SE to not reward top ranked PvPers. At least on OCE its win traders, bots and the same people ensuring nobody has a shot at breaking in.
Cant gain ranks to oust them if there are no matches.

Hey Sililos. Really sorry to hear you feel like that.
We also find it frustrating that the only way for anyone in gold or above (which coincidentally is almost exactly the same demographic as the top 100) to actively help trigger a ranked match for you is to play a smurf character.
For what it's worth there were multiple unranked-silver games on Saturday night thanks to the participation of the Sophia FC "Jim's Free Company" (that's its name), and we hope for more games next weekend
In all previous seasons the lowest bracket was unranked-gold, with all ranks in between included. 7.1 introduced a change that excluded gold from that lowest bracket. In 7.15 the change was reverted for the Japanese Data Centre only.
It's very demoralizing to see the affects of such a poorly considered change play out in real time, and to see the change reverted only in a single Data Centre.
From Season 3 onwards it has been possible to attain top 100 on Materia using nothing but luck and perseverance. Season 12 is shaping up to be no different, with the current cut off being Gold 3. In Season 4 the 100th ranked player had only just left bronze. It's hard to imagine a group colluding to keep others out of the top 100 in such an environment.

You are right in that if and when I reach Crystal this season I will likely put considerably less effort into playing ranked, if I do not just quit entirely as you predict.
But why should I continue? My top 30 placement is all but guaranteed already. I do not think I have very good odds of making rank one this season and I already have all my series rewards.
More to the point, how does my future participation, or lack thereof affect you?
I'll continue to provide live coaching and help with VoD reviews for anyone who asks, regardless of my personal participation. I'm not sure how much more I can contribute to help new/latecomers, especially given how conflicted the wider community seems to be about smurfs at lower ranks.

I hope that you are wrong and that lower ranked games will continue to pop until the release of 7.16. But if you are right I hope to see you in queue with the rest of us for the start of Season 13 in late January

Back to the topic at hand, I would like to see the lowest rank bracket expanded back to unranked-gold at least (to match JP) and potentially further, to platinum.
My ideal solution would do away with hard rank cut offs entirely and using a numerical rating system like Elo or Glicko instead of stars. But baby steps I suppose.

[Edelgarde]

As for CC ranked, thats a rigged game.

Sililos Sanura, I know who you are, and I have been in games with you. Based off your skill level that leads to detrimental outcomes for your teams, it is in no surprise that you never got to top 100 in Materia, DESPITE how incredibly easy it is if you put in the effort to learn. There is a lot of leeway for players who still play at a novice level to reach top 100 with ease. As long as you're recuperating, constantly casting your abilities, applying pressure with your team to push enemies back and also knowing when to retreat when your team is staggered, you will get top 100 as long as you use the basic common knowledge of Crystalline Conflict.

Constantly pinning the blame on other players who you think are conspiring against you to not reach top 100 will not help your case and it's the reason why you don't improve, since your resort to worrying about others than yourself. The OCE PvP community, although having a few bad rotten apples spoiling things for others, a huge majority of people in the MWD community are filled with great people who are incredibly supportive and put in the effort to help pop the ranked queues on specific days at a specific time for the people interested in climbing ranked and test their abilities to see if they influence their matches positively based on their skill level. Instead of you joining the community, getting along with them, and asking for help to improve, you resorted to deluding yourself in thinking that players are working against you when you could not be more further from the truth.

Also, SE screwed up not allowing Unranked - Gold to queue together, which lead to people being stuck in purgatory, which lead to the activities in ranked queues severely slowing down more faster than it should. Knowing how neglected Materia is, SE, being the absolutely BIG BRAINED WIZARDS they are, completely forgot how detrimental changing the bracket system for Materia would be. But despite the huge mistake on their end, the community did their best to work with what they have with that inconvenience and kept the queues going whenever they could. You even had people using alts to help people pop unranked - silver games to help stranded people.

The skill level is pretty damn low in Materia due to the population and lack of competition, and we've only got a handful of players who have alts to climb ranked pvp in other data centers, and those players are always going to be the one that dominates top 30 in Materia because the skill discrepancy is so large from players who strictly just play in OCE data center, and players who play high ranked in other data centers to practice playing high pressure games for a longer period of time.

You have a lot of leeway. I even see a couple players in top 30 this season who purely got there by luck, but still play at a novice level. If they can do it, I'm pretty sure you can.

[keeeeweeee]

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