My team and I have more or less just reached the point where we laugh at how the ranking system works now. We understand how it is supposed to work thanks to these threads, but in practice…that’s a different story.
These are some of the myriad of oddities we have discovered over the past few months:
We can search as a group for a dozen games, win every game, and see no progress in ranks (though still receive a huge penalty if we lose). However, if we then break out and solo queue during the same play session, we all gain rank much faster and are less likely to lose large chunks of rank on a loss. Additionally, after solo queueing for a few games, jumping back into a party results in continuous gains until we lose a game. Then it seems to reset and we stop gaining (though we are less likely to lose large chunks of a rank).
We can play as a team with the player who is performing the worst in that gaming session rapidly gaining ranks, to the point that they overtake the player performing the best. Ex: diamond 1 increases to diamond 5, while the diamond 3 in the same fireteam that is objectively having a much better night stats wise stays rank locked.
Overall, while TS2.0 is allegedly supposed to be more stable, I don’t think our ranks have ever been more volatile, in what seems like a pretty arbitrary manner. While our ranks may have been inflated before, we have never had a season until this last where we would all, depending on the day and whether or not we’d been solo queuing, fluidly move between Platinum 6 and Diamond 5, sometimes over the course of a single day.
On a totally separate note, I am not sure what was changed in the last few months, but we have been facing more appropriate stiff competition in matchmaking, and haven’t had nearly as many games where we absolutely blow out our opposition. I’m not saying that doesn’t still happen, but before the change we had to endure more games where 3/4 of the opposing team would quit after going down 20-2, only to have one guy stick around for the entire duration of the game and waste our time. There should be some sort of mercy rule for 1v4 games solely to prevent this.
On another note, what are the maps in the team slayer rotation? It feels like several good, staple maps have been removed (we have not played overgrowth in two months). We have finally adapted to the map with snipe and OV, though it is not my favorite because of how easy it is for player to run away. However, the map with the ghost is just potatoes. And the map with rockets in the middle, camo under rockets, and two bases is a frame lag nightmare. Every time we load on that map we have lag issues. The sanctuary remake is not bad, but it feels too large, which produces some absolutely terrible spawns, and a lot of the angles that made sanctuary amazing have been removed.
