Solo Player Ranked Experience/Thoughts at Master+

[past berry]

The solo player ranked experience is terrible at Master +, The ranked system as it's currently designed is making me really dislike this game. I’ve been hovering between Master III and Master IV for the past couple days or so, and while I’ve been playing it's rare for me to run into another player at my rank or above my rank. And at most I only get 1 master player on my team when I queue most games (if I do run into one that is). Most of the time, I get people in the range of Bronze - Platinum, while I occasionally get Diamond teammates.

I don’t want this to make it seem like I’m complaining about being stuck in between these two ranks currently. I just find it incredibly frustrating how random the matchmaking can be. Sometimes I get teammates who want to win, they will communicate and try to play the right way, other times I get teammates who are clearly newer to the game and don’t really understand how to play (which is OK), and then of course you will get toxic teammates/throwers etc.

I get that they have to make matchmaking this way to make queue times faster (and I can imagine just how long they would be if they implemented skill based matchmaking compared to the ∼ 5+ minutes I have to wait already between games) But for example when I’m playing with 2 platinums and a gold teammate, our definitions of a ‘’good’’ game are very clearly different. Currently, the most RP that I can get if I have a good game (multiple kills, team does well too etc) + win is 45 RP. I no longer receive bonuses (which I think is normal at master+? I could be trash idk) but if I die early, that is instantly -35 RP just because that’s how much RP it takes for me to queue up in the first place. My point being, is that these lower ranked players can gain RP a lot easier than I can even if we as a team die early for example. This fundamentally changes how people play this game at different ranks. If you understand where I’m coming from you can see how incredibly frustrating it would be to lose that much RP early in a game off of a bad fight, coin flip drop, bad rotation into a fight etc etc.

Currently I’m in a cycle where I win a couple of games, and am up RP, but then I get matched with lower ranked players, and because their definition of a good game is different than mine, and they have a different way of playing the game because of their current rank, I end up losing the RP I just gained by winning. I’ve had times where I’ve won back to back, and instantly lost the RP I gained in the next two games simply because of a bad fight or a bad rotation etc. It just makes me not want to queue up. The last game I played my teammates were hiding on the bullet train playing for placements, one of them said ‘’It's fine just get top 5 and then u can die’’ meanwhile i’m still -15 RP. The games where I also gain 0 RP in 16-17 min despite my placement being high are pretty annoying as well, but I guess that’s just a skill issue on my end.

My ranked goal in this game at the moment is to get to Grandmaster, so even when I lose I remind myself why I'm playing ranked and try to keep going. But I also find the fact that current legend/GM players were simply able to queue up as 4 in a squad and just run over teams and get to the highest ranks or close to the highest ranks in the game VERY annoying. Their ranked experiences were and are completely different from mine. I also don’t like how instead of just resetting the ranked ladder to at least diamond, they were just reset to Legend 500 RP. So now if I did want to even hit Legend, I would have to not only duo queue to get there (if I wanted to do it optimally), I would have to overcome the 500 RP gap that is already there from when they were able to queue with a 4 man premade team.

Sorry if I rambled a bit, hopefully I’ve articulated my issues clearly and I hope at least some of them will be addressed in the future. I really like this game, and I think it has a lot of potential. I just currently find the ranked experience to be pretty frustrating. Is anyone else experiencing this or share some of the same thoughts? Should I just get good? Please let me know.

[worldly imp]

No MMR it feels like

I get bronze players with 2 games under their belt, while I’m in masters