A different view on ranked

Since ranked released and to this day, there’s been a ton of complaints about every aspect of the mode and unhealthy comparisons to Power League. In this post I’d like to give my opinion on the topic, and a bit of a different one, because I think we’ve been too harsh all this time.

Before starting I want to say a couple things. Firstly, I don’t want this to read as “ranked is amazing, you are all wrong”. That’s not my point (something something pancakes and waffles). Secondly, I’ve reached power league masters on 2 accounts and was the first person to ever reach 15k elo in ranked, so I’d say I have a fair amount of experience in both gamemodes, enough to build a proper judgement.

There’s several obvious flaws with ranked. The two main ones everyone seems to agree with are the “elo cheaters” (team queue abuse) and inflation. I’m not here to bring solutions, I’m not a developer, but I really have no idea how at least the former wasn’t addressed immediately after ranked released. As for the latter, the lack of an actual challenge made decreasing elo gains the only “quick” fix to achieve a better player distribution across the ranks, but this makes for a pretty awful player experience. Here is where most of the comparisons to power league stem. Unlike ranked, high ranks were actually challenging and elo gains felt fair to the player. All of this is absolutely valid criticism, and i can’t be mad if you dislike ranked for these reasons.

Now let’s talk about some of what I think is less justified criticism. Mainly, rewards. A lot of people have been saying they are terrible, that ranked drops are too luck based and that there’s nothing guaranteed. Yes, it can be unfair sometimes, but even if you had the worst luck possible, rewards are way better than they used to be. A few legendary drops and a couple thousand bling every month? I’d say that’s pretty good. Remember, power league seasons used to last 2 months, and the rewards were… 125 bling per rank. That’s it. I really don’t get where the complaints are coming from in this regard, you have a pretty high chance of getting an epic skin for free on top of all the drops.

Next is the matchmaking. And I’ll just say it straight up, it is NOT that much worse than it used to be. It’s been a while so it can be hard to remember but really, people were complaining about their trash teammates way before ranked came around. It was a pain in the ass, and still is, but that’s just any competitive game in existence. Ranked has the added issue of full monthly season resets which can result in unfair matches against better players climbing up to their previous rank, but again, huge skill disparity was and will always be a thing. The so-called elo hell simply moved from low mythic in PL to legendary in ranked.

A lot of people mentioned the fact that team and solo queue should be separated again as well. Back in power league days, team queue was pretty much dead at around mythic and above, which made getting to masters straight up impossible in some regions (without win trading) due to the lack of active players. Sure, you might get a slightly better solo experience this way but if the elo gains are balanced correctly and the team queue abuse gets fixed, I don’t see a reason why we can’t keep them fused together. Yes, you’ll lose more often against teams, but you’ll also lose less elo and vice versa.

Lastly, the “lack of competitiveness”, mostly due to modifiers. I personally don’t like them, but I know a lot of newer players who do, and that’s great! Gatekeeping the competitive mode from the more casual side of the playerbase does more harm than good. More people playing means more time will be invested into making sure it’s a fun and polished mode, and there’s a better player distribution as well. Having no draft from bronze to diamond has a similar effect, and as a massive tryhard I’m just happy the competitive mode is getting the attention it deserves. Now, of course this has its downsides. For someone trying to take the game more seriously, having modifiers up until masters absolutely sucks. This stage of the game where some people enjoy the “casual” side and some want raw competitiveness is a bit tricky, and again, I’m not here to bring solutions, but hopefully the devs can find a way around this.

*As a side note, the 12 required power 9s starting at Diamond is not some unethical business practice to get you to spend more money or something, it’s just the minimum amount required to ensure you have a pickable brawler in a worst case scenario draft (6 bans + 5 picks).

That leaves us with the other side of the spectrum, the sweats. We are the ones who got hit the hardest after the power league removal, essentially deleting all display of skill past current masters (which isn’t very high). The skill disparity inside masters is ridiculous, and with the recent elo changes you can’t even push for higher elo counts to flex on your profile because you lose, quite literally, over 10 times more elo than you gain.

So while I still think there’s a lot of things that could (and should) have been improved upon a long time ago, it’s very clear the devs are aware of all these. They’ve already told us they want to integrate esports into the game through ranked! Knowing this, and with a rework right around the corner, I have really high hopes for what might be coming. Most of the big issues with ranked are small flaws or overlooks that have a big impact on the player experience. It’s impossible to make everyone happy, but improving upon the current model with a system that caters towards casuals and dedicated players equally doesn’t seem too out of reach.

If you read all of this, thanks, I’d also like to read what you guys have to say!