Why is it so difficult Ranking up from Bronze to Crystal

[NevaehQuest]

This comes down to the player retention issue again. In CC the snowballing happens very soon and sometimes matches become very one sided bullying. It is not fun to just be the punching bag the entire game, and if you get rat just because you play better(or sometimes being a healer or a caster, just any reason) will totally ruin your experience. You can't really run for safety and there is nothing to stop a mnk and a pld chasing you the entire game just because they think your are a bigger threat, and there is no way to punish them if your team also fail to apply pressure. Sometimes it takes one super horrible experience to make a player completely stop playing.

[Valence]

This comes down to the player retention issue again. In CC the snowballing happens very soon and sometimes matches become very one sided bullying. It is not fun to just be the punching bag the entire game, and if you get rat just because you play better(or sometimes being a healer or a caster, just any reason) will totally ruin your experience. You can't really run for safety and there is nothing to stop a mnk and a pld chasing you the entire game just because they think your are a bigger threat, and there is no way to punish them if your team also fail to apply pressure. Sometimes it takes one super horrible experience to make a player completely stop playing.

I completely agree with this and I think it's a problem they could work to alleviate.

[TimotheusReed]

I personally don't really have a problem with putting effort into getting better and working for the rewards.

But the current system, especially in EU, discourages lower-ranked players to play, which leads to matches completely dying down for any rank lower than Diamond.
The current system would propably work well if there were more players playing in EU all across the matchmaking pool.

But right now no amount of skill, effort and time can compensate a lack of players in lower ranks.
There is no way for people to improve and get better if matches on some ranks are just completely dead.

You could propably create another character and try to train and play in NA or JP, but let's be honest, especially lower-ranked and newer pvp players don't want to commit to create a whole new character just to play Pvp.

The current system does not work for lower ranks at least for EU. I can't really speak for NA and JP. The whole situation might be different.
In EU you either have enough time to commit at the beginning of the season or you won't be able to rank up at all later.

If you look at current scoreboards the lowest Top 300 rank in EU is Diamond 3. And it has been this way for a long time. This already shows the situation on EU compared to other datacentres.
At the top ranks matches are still happening on EU, but for the majority of people Pvp Ranked queues have died down.
And don't even let me start with OCE.

[Reginald_Cain]

Ok I'm gonna step on a lot of toes here but ranked video game ladders are just glorified gambling. Look at league of legends and overwatch, you will get gatekeepers who just troll on purpose to keep people low rank, smurfs that play on alts to bully low skill noobs and the worst part of it is that people who participate become deluded and think they'll be rewarded for their effort but don't realize despite trying hard you need to learn things you didn't even know exist like macro and tempo. If your progress is completely at the mercy of not only your performance but a bunch of other people then it's better to step back and figure out how to better yourself in something more tangible. I think video game ranked modes are degenerate by nature.

[Stormfur]

Ok I'm gonna step on a lot of toes here but ranked video game ladders are just glorified gambling. Look at league of legends and overwatch, you will get gatekeepers who just troll on purpose to keep people low rank, smurfs that play on alts to bully low skill noobs and the worst part of it is that people who participate become deluded and think they'll be rewarded for their effort but don't realize despite trying hard you need to learn things you didn't even know exist like macro and tempo. If your progress is completely at the mercy of not only your performance but a bunch of other people then it's better to step back and figure out how to better yourself in something more tangible. I think video game ranked modes are degenerate by nature.

Unfortunately, in their infinite wisdom to want to turn ranked PVP into an eSport, SE decided to lock highly desirable rewards behind this function.

[Loggos]

But right now no amount of skill, effort and time can compensate a lack of players in lower ranks.
There is no way for people to improve and get better if matches on some ranks are just completely dead.

Yeah, that is one of the most frustrating things. You basically only get proper training in your bracket for a couple of weeks and then have to wait months. Whereas there's stuff you can also practice in casuals it just doesn't compare.
This makes it even harder to bridge the gap between lower and higher ranks because Diamond+/Crystal+ players queues being active longer (or even throughout the entire season) also means they have more opportunity to train/gain experience.

You could propably create another character and try to train and play in NA or JP, but let's be honest, especially lower-ranked and newer pvp players don't want to commit to create a whole new character just to play Pvp.

And unfortunately it also isn't a great training replacement because the ping leads to completely different gameplay experiences. I've tried to rank up on the Japanese side and the delay is so strong you have to play a much bigger game of "foresight" than on your home server. That in turn makes you play differently (in my case a lot more defensively) compared to scenarios where you know you can react much faster. You just can't practice "split second" decisions (sniping an enemy that is about to break LoS, escaping by a hairbreadth, etc.). Skills also get refunded or cast into the void much more often.

[ThreeBeastSmile]

Ok I'm gonna step on a lot of toes here but ranked video game ladders are just glorified gambling. Look at league of legends and overwatch, you will get gatekeepers who just troll on purpose to keep people low rank, smurfs that play on alts to bully low skill noobs and the worst part of it is that people who participate become deluded and think they'll be rewarded for their effort but don't realize despite trying hard you need to learn things you didn't even know exist like macro and tempo. If your progress is completely at the mercy of not only your performance but a bunch of other people then it's better to step back and figure out how to better yourself in something more tangible. I think video game ranked modes are degenerate by nature.

Or stick to more established mano et mano formats for less of that. But ye. Even when just speaking 'bout this game, sometimes it's less than clear as to just what you're fighting against (with that sentiment stretched to accommodate those playing alongside you as well...) than what a token rank badge suggests... and no, not a skill diff thing. Not a combat-related one anyway!

Good too many posts insinuating that it's totally squeaky clean here lately, and an exclusively finesse vs finesse matter. Nope! Just like in other games you get this behaviour here too, and it's more off-putting than any genuinely bad teammates, easily. For me anyway, cuz you just get those overall team diff moments too, it's part and parcel. It's way more noticeable the more insular a community is, and MMO PvP is about the worst it gets. Unfortunately.

So nah, not stepping on that many toes mate, for putting it like that.

[Reginald_Cain]

Unfortunately, in their infinite wisdom to want to turn ranked PVP into an eSport, SE decided to lock highly desirable rewards behind this function.

Esports are like a cancer that ruin any new pvp game.

Remember everything square Enix did right with dissidia 012? Yeah they threw all that away to make dissidia nt a forced 3v3 esports wanna be with a trash story mode and single player experience in general. Ff7 last soldier was some garbage wanna be csgo clone that they wasted money on to join the esport hype train. Make a good game first then let it become an esport if the community supports it do not design games from the ground up to be an esport. The only time that sorta worked was with overwatch but that had its own issues too.

[MayuAmakura]

This comes down to the player retention issue again. In CC the snowballing happens very soon and sometimes matches become very one sided bullying. It is not fun to just be the punching bag the entire game, and if you get rat just because you play better(or sometimes being a healer or a caster, just any reason) will totally ruin your experience. You can't really run for safety and there is nothing to stop a mnk and a pld chasing you the entire game just because they think your are a bigger threat, and there is no way to punish them if your team also fail to apply pressure. Sometimes it takes one super horrible experience to make a player completely stop playing.

Likewise;

- Not enough people to rank up
- Queue times are obnoxious and work only at late night hours. Specially after a few days of new season start.
- Get to see 10-20 same faces every single day. Enjoy it.
- Getting useless people who troll / afk and spam emotes in your team. Just unlucky and you lose the game that could have been won otherwise. Forces you to quit queuing up or be at their mercy again.
- People who class queue snipe you.
- Broken classes that never got adjusted like GNB, where it's very common that throughout the entire match they don't die a single time and can hold against 1v5 easily.
- Unbalanced teams. A team with scholar and GNB is more likely to win against a team that has full dps or just 4 dps + astro. GNB alone makes a huge difference to who is going to snowball.

Square won't fix it, your best bet is to spend time here and play until you finally reach crystal and get your desired weapons. It's pain, it will take a lot of time. What you can do is play 1 game per day and rank that way which will eventually be faster if you manage to keep your streak and luck of course.

[AnotherPerson]

This comes down to the player retention issue again. In CC the snowballing happens very soon and sometimes matches become very one sided bullying. It is not fun to just be the punching bag the entire game, and if you get rat just because you play better(or sometimes being a healer or a caster, just any reason) will totally ruin your experience. You can't really run for safety and there is nothing to stop a mnk and a pld chasing you the entire game just because they think your are a bigger threat, and there is no way to punish them if your team also fail to apply pressure. Sometimes it takes one super horrible experience to make a player completely stop playing.

I agree. The way the game mode is designed certainly favors early snowballing much more than anything else once you get kills/moving the crystal far enough and overtime becomes an issue. The PvP map design lacks any robust way to tackle this, but players in your team can also just be clueless on what to the most optimal thing to do is while you're busy getting chased (far more often than not, this is the case at lower tiers). Sometimes it's just a team skill gap and can't be helped. Other times, dying too often can put you too far behind when needing to chase the crystal past a certain point and people don't know to regroup instead of going in and dying 1v5 while there's still time because they panicked.

Maybe it could be better if there are player guides on how to play CC with a job for the community or a way to create a game with npc job enemies in casual matches to practice the basic mechanics (kind of like a pve version against bots). The chat restriction is both a positive and negative as some concepts are just hard to communicate on the fly and there isn't a solution for practicing and learning at your own pace other than 'trial by fire', even in casual matches. This might also help account for noticing any big disparities in jobs with more data.

- Getting useless people who troll / afk and spam emotes in your team. Just unlucky and you lose the game that could have been won otherwise. Forces you to quit queuing up or be at their mercy again.

This is a reportable offense. Make sure to report people like this and if possible, provide evidence through a screenshot or video recording. There's not much you can do about it other than making sure these people don't return to future matches when climbing.

- People who class queue snipe you.

Interestingly enough, I find this quite useful information when it happens to me. If someone at the same tier level as you is so confident that they can beat you in a different job/role that they may or may not be accustomed to and make such a big difference, they either do not belong in that tier (and will eventually climb up anyway regardless of whether you are there or not) or you do not belong in that tier (in which case, becomes a skill issue). You should take anyone who tries to queue snipe you in stride and either confidently beat that person up on a job/role you are familiar with for thinking you're an easy pick or figure what you're doing wrong that makes people think you're so easy to beat in this tier.

The latter is an exceptionally useful thing to note for anyone who wants to climb, because it means you're facing some sort of wall that players in the higher tiers take into account when climbing. If players at lower tiers notice the mistake now and it's big enough to capitalize on to climb up, players at higher tiers will naturally also see the same mistakes if you don't correct it earlier, making the climbing process much harder since you're relying on luck of good teammates to climb and cover for your mistake rather than your own skill. If someone specifically tries to snipe me and makes me lose matches consistently that not even my team can cover due from my own skill gap, it means I am doing something really wrong with the job I'm playing and I will start recording and watching the old footage to see what mistake I'm making.