How do you expect to retain a player-base for THE FINALS when your ranked system actively punishes the players who put the most into it?
I've been grinding ranked seriously. I'm not a casual. By every individual metric I am outperforming my lobby. Consistently. And yet I'm stuck because the RS doesn't care about any of that. I not only speak for myself here but for the countless other people in this very situation. The system cares solely about where your team placed, and when the algorithm pairs you with a returning absentee or a fresh ranked player against two or three coordinated stacks, that placement was never yours to control.
That's not competitive matchmaking at all but rather a lottery with extra steps.
S10 made incremental moves and I'll give you credit for that. But the core flaw we raised remains completely untouched. Placement trumps everything, including the individual performance that placement is supposed to reflect. You can do every single thing right and still lose elo so unbelievably heavily. Every. Single. Round.
This game is genuinely one of the most creative, ambitious and dynamic shooters in years. That's why it hurts so much. Right now, ranked is quietly driving out a whole horde of players who care the most about it, and in an already small player-base, those are exactly the people you cannot afford to lose.
Arc Raiders has already lost 80% of its player-base in just a few months. Sure, that happens sometimes with post-launch cliffs but it happened faster than natural attrition should account for. The Finals isn't too far behind unless you take action and address the issues we are raising. You have the data, you know what's up. Fix it.
If any of this is incorrect, I welcome the correction.
TL;DR: The RS punishes individual performance, rewards placement you can't always control, and it's slowly killing the ranked scene.