Perceived Issues with Solo Queue (Ranked) Crystalline Conflict

[Freelili]

Poor Team Composition Balancing
Team compositions in games can be completely skewed in favour of one team rather than the other, assuming all players are at equal skill levels, Team 1 can easily have a significant advantage over Team 2 purely based on composition from the get-go. Games in which almost full stacks of DPS are stacked against teams with more standard-aligned comps (Tank, 1-2 Healers and rest DPS), or games in which 1 team has double the tank/healer roster of the opposite team happen too often. A team with 1 SGE and maybe a WAR is not of equal strength to a team with a PLD, AST and SCH.

Streaking and Tier Floors
The streaking system is there to reward players for consecutive wins, however a fair amount of the time it ends up rewarding luck rather than more skilled play in the Unranked-Platinum brackets, as people are not really experienced and thus are mostly just coasting off kills and momentum and a lack of regrouping from the rival teams rather than being rewarded for higher level plays. The middle tier of this mode is Platinum/Diamond, but the Platinum Rank is also the last floor, meaning there is a huge mixing of the pot at this rank, with large amounts of experience gaps. This is a team based PvP mode, and 1 person cannot effectively carry an entire team of people who are much less experienced. There are players in Platinum who are only there BECAUSE they cannot derank any further, mixed with players who have fallen from much higher ranks. This leads to Platinum and to a lesser extent, Diamond, being a purgatory tier where you're basically rouletting with your teammates who can have vastly different experience and skill levels.

Tier/Rank Matchmaking
I understand the player pool for ranked crystalline conflict is small, however the matchmaking is grievously unbalanced once a player reaches Diamond and Low Crystal. Diamond players are being put into matches with Omega players and Crystal with Ultima, while this would not be an issue if these Diamond/Crystal players were previously High Crystal or Omega/Ultima, the game simply doesn't care about what rank you were, it cares only about what rank you are. This leads to Diamond players being thrown into matches totally out of their range and Omega players being forced into unbalanced matches with less experienced teammates.

[Freelili]

To add to this, there's also issues with the Quick Chat System in CC. A large number of commands are just fluff commands, with no practical usage, while there is a large hole where useful commands should be.
What you CAN call effectively: Which target to attack/focus on (with a macro), which target a paladin is covering with cover (with a macro), when to fall back and regroup/reset
What you CANNOT call effectively: When you want to leave/take the crystal during contests, whether you need assistance dealing with an enemy (peel/countersend), if you have non LB burst damage available, who you are silencing/stunning/binding (CCing), whether you are stalling point or dying on point etc.
Point cycling is needlessly difficulty in SoloQ purely because of a lack of effective communication, it causes a lot of needless cleave eating, resource wasting, overlapped guards and game losses due to confusion over who is on point. Re-translating or adding commands that can more effectively communicate these things would help a large degree in SoloQ. My most used commands are Attacking Target and Fall Back and Regroup because the rest simply never come into play unless I am on Paladin in which case Covering Target is used for Cover.

[Valence]

110% agree, and I'd even add the craziest skill gaps in the ladder that are actually found in Diam/Crystal games, or especially Diam<>Omega games.
Communication is also a good part of why a lot of players struggles to even get the fundamentals of the mode in lower brackets, that's very true. Quick chat I've seen actually used a lot in all tiers on JP is "Falling Back" for people rotating out of the crystal and asking for someone else to take point, but that's the only difference.

After having played on JP, I truly believe that the devs are completely blind to the issue because they don't suffer from those problems as much. They do have a way bigger pool of players which tends to drown out or at least iron out those discrepancies.

[Freelili]

Yeah, genuinely awful how ranking, matchmaking and ladder works in this game, if it were up to me I'd prob want changes like: 1. Remove the safety floors or at least drop the final floor from Platinum down to Silver or Bronze, as it stands, there's way too much intermixing of weaker players who stumbled into Platinum and players who can get sent down there from higher ranks from tilt queueing, bad luck or off-jobbing etc. and there's not enough buffer between them. Plat isn't a middle tier it's just the worst kind of mixing pot and is intensely undesirable to be in due to that. 2.There needs to be some kind of system that factors your peak rating into matchmaking so you aren't just being grouped with way weaker/stronger players purely off what tier you're currently in. 3. The game needs to actually have functional job comp matchmaking or a role queue or something so that unbalanced games aren't the norm.
SoloQ is such a straight up worse experience compared to Customs because of how half-effort the matchmaking and ranking systems are. I agree that it is likely nowhere near as bad on JP due to the issues fixing themselves somewhat due to larger player counts which smooths out the matchmaking and skill gaps somewhat. I do not play a lot of Team-Based PvP games, but I would be very surprised if the kind of rating and matchmaking systems this game has would even remotely fly in other games that are actually focused on competitive PvP, while I understand that this game is somewhat thinly stretched and tries to do a lot at once, I find it hard to believe that we cannot get some form of improvements to the systems currently in place at least over the course of an expansion if not just a few major patches in the first half.

[Valence]

It's just Square trying to reinvent the wheel when it works perfectly fine everywhere else and relies on similar systems:
- Your rank/league
- A variable hidden matchmaking rating that lowers or raises your "value" in the queue as you win or lose: the more you win the more it will pit you against higher rated players, the more you lose, the more it will pit you against lower rated players, without touching your rank/league. Streaks and "rng" are absorbed at this level, which smooths out the rank without having players constantly bounce up and down like crazy like they do in XIV—especially with that stupid win streak system that's trying to emulate what hidden ratings already do for placement games.

[MayuAmakura]

Agree, but unfortunately not like devs will try to fix this anytime soon. The reason why teams are so imbalanced is because there aren't enough players to fit the queue... So you will regularly see 5 dps against 4 dps and a scholar. Guess who wins there. Only time when 5 dps wins is when they are perfect dps combo like dancer + dragoon + sam and similar and enemy team has a WHM that will die instantly because whm is just worse than the others when escaping. A lot of the jobs also feel underwhelming compared to others like mch or blm that jsut spams ice and wins.

Lucky streaks are also a problem. Matchmaking is also dumb because a diamond 5 with 0 stars cannot be matched against crystals but requires at least 1 star in order to be matched with them ??? Which makes those players miss the queue and games entirely for entire season if they aren't playing at the beginning.

FOMO - biggest problem of this game mode. Due to lack of people and games, you are obliged to play at the night time or follow discords to see when same 10-20 faces are up to play so mathematically you can't even rank up. If you don't play at the start of the season, good luck! Later it will be chaotic unless you are at crystal rank.

As for people being bad, that is an unfortunate thing. Some got extremely lucky (where enemy team decided to afk 5 games) or they test their new job. Many omega players are trash as well.

[TimotheusReed]

Agree, but unfortunately not like devs will try to fix this anytime soon. The reason why teams are so imbalanced is because there aren't enough players to fit the queue... So you will regularly see 5 dps against 4 dps and a scholar. Guess who wins there. Only time when 5 dps wins is when they are perfect dps combo like dancer + dragoon + sam and similar and enemy team has a WHM that will die instantly because whm is just worse than the others when escaping. A lot of the jobs also feel underwhelming compared to others like mch or blm that jsut spams ice and wins.

Lucky streaks are also a problem. Matchmaking is also dumb because a diamond 5 with 0 stars cannot be matched against crystals but requires at least 1 star in order to be matched with them ??? Which makes those players miss the queue and games entirely for entire season if they aren't playing at the beginning.

FOMO - biggest problem of this game mode. Due to lack of people and games, you are obliged to play at the night time or follow discords to see when same 10-20 faces are up to play so mathematically you can't even rank up. If you don't play at the start of the season, good luck! Later it will be chaotic unless you are at crystal rank.

As for people being bad, that is an unfortunate thing. Some got extremely lucky (where enemy team decided to afk 5 games) or they test their new job. Many omega players are trash as well.

I already know you are playing on EU without really looking. You are completely right.
It often seems like the opposite of what people on NA and JP want needs to be done on EU. Instead of narrowing the MMR it needs to be widened on EU, because we have so few players that almost no matches are happening at all.

I agree that the general idea of this thread is a good one. But for the idea to work on all datacentres all queues of all datacentres (NA, EU, JP and OCE) need to be combined.
This is the only way that the current matchmaking system will kinda work. Otherwise the idea in this thread will make it even harder for people on EU to find matches (especially in the lower ranks).

[Bureda]

Poor Team Composition Balancing
Team compositions in games can be completely skewed in favour of one team rather than the other, assuming all players are at equal skill levels, Team 1 can easily have a significant advantage over Team 2 purely based on composition from the get-go. Games in which almost full stacks of DPS are stacked against teams with more standard-aligned comps (Tank, 1-2 Healers and rest DPS), or games in which 1 team has double the tank/healer roster of the opposite team happen too often. A team with 1 SGE and maybe a WAR is not of equal strength to a team with a PLD, AST and SCH.

Streaking and Tier Floors
The streaking system is there to reward players for consecutive wins, however a fair amount of the time it ends up rewarding luck rather than more skilled play in the Unranked-Platinum brackets, as people are not really experienced and thus are mostly just coasting off kills and momentum and a lack of regrouping from the rival teams rather than being rewarded for higher level plays. The middle tier of this mode is Platinum/Diamond, but the Platinum Rank is also the last floor, meaning there is a huge mixing of the pot at this rank, with large amounts of experience gaps. This is a team based PvP mode, and 1 person cannot effectively carry an entire team of people who are much less experienced. There are players in Platinum who are only there BECAUSE they cannot derank any further, mixed with players who have fallen from much higher ranks. This leads to Platinum and to a lesser extent, Diamond, being a purgatory tier where you're basically rouletting with your teammates who can have vastly different experience and skill levels.

Tier/Rank Matchmaking
I understand the player pool for ranked crystalline conflict is small, however the matchmaking is grievously unbalanced once a player reaches Diamond and Low Crystal. Diamond players are being put into matches with Omega players and Crystal with Ultima, while this would not be an issue if these Diamond/Crystal players were previously High Crystal or Omega/Ultima, the game simply doesn't care about what rank you were, it cares only about what rank you are. This leads to Diamond players being thrown into matches totally out of their range and Omega players being forced into unbalanced matches with less experienced teammates.

I like how you're a Falafle main and the text size is for Falafles.
Anyway, I agree, the system gives you whatever slop composition because it tries to balance your WR eventually.

Play a few games as NIN and the game has you as solo 'bruiser' in more games than not. Good one! :^)

[Eastwall]

Yeah, genuinely awful how ranking, matchmaking and ladder works in this game, if it were up to me I'd prob want changes like: 1. Remove the safety floors or at least drop the final floor from Platinum down to Silver or Bronze, as it stands, there's way too much intermixing of weaker players who stumbled into Platinum and players who can get sent down there from higher ranks from tilt queueing, bad luck or off-jobbing etc. and there's not enough buffer between them. Plat isn't a middle tier it's just the worst kind of mixing pot and is intensely undesirable to be in due to that. 2.There needs to be some kind of system that factors your peak rating into matchmaking so you aren't just being grouped with way weaker/stronger players purely off what tier you're currently in. 3. The game needs to actually have functional job comp matchmaking or a role queue or something so that unbalanced games aren't the norm.
SoloQ is such a straight up worse experience compared to Customs because of how half-effort the matchmaking and ranking systems are. I agree that it is likely nowhere near as bad on JP due to the issues fixing themselves somewhat due to larger player counts which smooths out the matchmaking and skill gaps somewhat. I do not play a lot of Team-Based PvP games, but I would be very surprised if the kind of rating and matchmaking systems this game has would even remotely fly in other games that are actually focused on competitive PvP, while I understand that this game is somewhat thinly stretched and tries to do a lot at once, I find it hard to believe that we cannot get some form of improvements to the systems currently in place at least over the course of an expansion if not just a few major patches in the first half.

l agree the safety net needs to be removed. l thought that worked great in feast where yoi could go all the way back down bronze. for the role queue, it would kill the queue time. at least back then during the feast, healer and melee, especially healer, get fast pop Time because these roles have less people to play. tank and ranged can take 20 minutes to pop. l still can't forget a random bard's ranting in discord when he waited for 20 min only to lose because he got a new healer taking attunement and largesse,lol
and... l want how feast reward weapon skin.