The ranked scenarios have been running for a while now and also have announced that there will be new content in 2021. It is rumored that it will include pocket items, jewelry and possibly some sets that will fall between some sets like invader / sovereign or any other that don’t have an in between set. Ranked is the new flavor of the month and it is not for all.
Some classes don’t perform as well as others and it is not that you can’t play with them if you want to, but the fact that they are looked down on by other players and are blamed for the loss / tie, because if you win it is all good and gg. For this reason people that want to only win play the “other” classes. On the other hand, why play a class that is hard to play in ranked and struggle and not play an easier one? This fact and mentality of elitism that fun = winning and not playing = fun is creating a reduced popularity in this content. Most people want to have fun and play the class they love.. not the meta.. not the best option.
The classes that you don’t see much in ranked are mainly ranged with the exception of the Squig herder. Engineers, Magus, Sorceress, Bright Wizards are not as common as Warrior priests, Dok, Slayers, Choppas, Marauders , Witch Elves, Witch hunters and the rest. The mobility and the cast times; make them less burstie in a lot of situations vs melee not to mention their survival ability. In addition some classes can have only 1 way to be played depending on their spec. wait for a moral and use it on the right time. With the recent changes (20/05/2021) on moral build up that have been reduced those classes will suffer even more. The game is mainly balanced for Orvr and 24vs24 and this brings a lot of “side effects” to smaller scale fights. The game was not designed for 6v6 fights or 1vs1 fights thus the balance is even worse as you downscale.
Furthermore the Destruction side has more melee to utilize which is not only a character selection problem but also a player problem. The Destruction side uses a lot more Dok with shields which work well in a melee formation where they have a lot of players in that build in comparison with the Order side that almost no one is using that build anywhere. The fact that this is in the game, makes most fights unbalanced and it can’t be balanced by the developer team.
In season 1 6.165 characters tried out ranked matches and in Preseason 2 3829 characters tried ranked matches. A clear decrease on the character that entered even one match. On a daily basis in my experience, average people queuing is no more than 30 IF that is that much, not to mention the even lower population in North American time zones. So it seems that it is a very acquired taste and a small number of people stick with it. Some of the reason why this en-devour will most likely fail are:
- Solo ranked is with random people; so a full sovereign player can be queued up with a full vanquisher player and have a serious disadvantage.
- An experienced player can be queued up with a less experienced player and cost them the match.
- The two tiers will split the small population and make matches pop even less. In a recent patch (20/05/2021) Top tier players can manually move to the lower tier to increase matchmaking frequency. Mixing skilled players with unskilled players will most likely cause some aggravation disappointment to the lower tier population.
- As it stand, once you rank up to top tier then you are stack in for 10 matches before you drop tier again and this makes some people not to queue if the know you are queuing and you are not that good, in order to protect their mmr rating or log on the other side to farm you. (Hello ranked x-realming). On the recent patch (20/05/2021) reduced to 5 matches. My suggestion was 3. But 5 Is still better than 10.
- Rewards are really not that great and that could change in the future but; if as stated before by the team the top gear is sovereign with no intent to being anything higher; then all gear there will be for appearances or useless as they will be lower than end game gear.( I hope I can be positively surprised soon) In addition the event item is only 1% critical more and a small increase in stats than the weekend war front item which its so much easier to get and to be honest 1% critical will not save you..
- The “defenders” of the MMR tend to whisper people when they don’t perform well and make them feel bad, which will decrease the population. This is a people problem, not a game problem but nevertheless a problem.
- Streams I have watched so far I would say that more than half are not promoting this endeavour but rather make people not want to be part of it. Calling people names for their game play publicly and humiliating them is a bad thing on its own. Some find it funny, some others not so much. Especially, when you assume that all players in ranked have the knowledge, gear and skill that you have. Having high gaming expectations from random people is silly on its own. Hurting the thing they love to do, by discouraging people to try it out.
- Not all classes perform well in this setup which also is reducing the possible player population that could queue and the possible group formations to make it more interesting.
- Some people also create unfair fights, where they use the small population to queue with friends which could potentially be in discord over others that are true randoms gaining an unfair advantage, since this is called solo queue ranked.
- If new gear or cosmetics are introduced some people might feel “forced” to play this content to get those. This might result in people playing badly. Since you get a reward even when you lose you can just queue, lose, and get them slower. However most of them will expire and you might need to re grind them. This will result in low level game play and possibly result in people losing interest very fast, same as dungeons or cities.
- Ranked in many games is reserved for the high end skilled and competitive players. This server has 90% casual players and 10% competitive players and with the limited population and time zones this will not work.
- The matches can be extremely boring. In all three possible outcomes.
- Killing the enemy in the first 1 min and then they don’t continue and wait to end.
- On the other side after losing 1-2 people give up and wait to end.
In both cases above is a wait after 1 min in this case the teams are unbalanced which is not as rare as someone might think.
- Last case scenario is when the teams are balanced and skilled, it always ends up in a tie so 15 min of fighting for nothing.
These are the main reasons that I feel will contribute to the failure of the ranked en devour. There Is also a group ranked which at this moment is only for challenging other premade groups only. I am sure this will change at some point but even then, I fear that no one or almost no one will use this option. At this moment and to the extent of my knowledge, this challenge option has been used only for training / testing exercises by some guilds that have people on both sides.
Ranked will remain in the game for those who have the taste for it, but don’t expect it to be there for the majority of the players. Therefore it will remain a side project. Over time I feel it will be forgotten due to long queue times and lack of interest. The same way the Dueling arena was abandoned due to bugs and since the community is not using it no point fixing it.
Finally, the game itself does not provide the necessary balance in the classes for small scale fights. Adding the low server population on top of that, along with the limited resources of the development team both in man power and editing tools. It will result in stale slow moving content and updates that will not keep people motivated for long.
I don’t mean to be negative about trying new things and attempting to provide new content, but I can’t also turn a blind eye and not mention the things I see. I hope that this can be used in a positive way to overcome the obstacles and problems I see in this endeavour and make it a success rather than a failure.