I played for 3+ Weeks and wrote a 5,000 word Article based of my own thoughts and my communitys. Below is a rough transcript if you want to read along or there is a video option.
Ranked Feedback for Gears 5 - 31st July 2020
"Hi, I’m GGZii and for the past 10 months I’ve been playing and giving feedback on Gears 5. I’m very impressed by the turnaround of the game and I’m pleasantly looking forward to the most recent developer playlist update. However today I would like to focus on Ranked play in Gears 5.
I decided that the best way to test the system was to indeed play it, so instead of playing a few games, seeing how it works and making a video I wanted to really test and put a good amount of hours into it. Since the system launched I have averaged around 3+ Hours a day playing the new ranking system and have reached a peak of Diamond 3 as a Solo player. I have played in Solo, Duos and 5 Man stacks for this test. If I were to estimate how much I spent in each mode it would be 2% in a 5 man stack, 8% in a duo and 90% Solo.
To begin I would again like to state that I think the new ranking system is indeed a large improvement and a big step into the right direction however there also is some issues I have encountered. I don’t feel like any of these issues are unsolvable and I have some ideas to help.
Let me be clear though, the current system has destroyed my passion for the game, my ability to stream and my friends desire to play. This might sound drastic, over the top, but I am being honest. I can’t stream due to impossibly long wait times or incredibly uneven games, I am abused on a daily basis through text chat through my own stream, I am sniped ( a means where players watch my queue to find me) and I am asked to dodge certain games so popular stacks can play vs popular stacks and if I don’t oblige they usually repay the favour through destroying me as a stack the next game. Friends that previously were all die hard Gears fans have frequently ALTF’d, turn of their pcs or not played for days-weeks at a time due to the communitys habbits, the system in place and the complete lack of player base for PC. I am here to help and I want to improve your game, I have dedicated myself since 2006 to this franchise despite all of this and this is my last hoorah so to speak.
I am losing faith in the franchise; I have to be open and clear about that.
Obviously each individual player will have their own experiences and expectations of a the ranking system and it’s important to know who’s behind the comment to better understand the feedback and the place/sentiment it comes from. A brand new player to the genre for example would be able to give much better feedback on what turns them off the franchise or keeps them coming back, than compared to me a player who has been here since the launch in 2006. However in a way that does give me a unique viewpoint as there seemingly aren’t many of us left?
So let’s get to the feedback. I’m a player that has played since 2006 and I am still here, so I definitely enjoy the franchise and I want the best for it. Personally I’ve travelled the road of being unable to beat the campaign on casual as a young child, to being competitive on Gears of War 1 and still all these years later I managed to gain masters every season and number 1 across multiple modes for a brief period, so I can see both ends of the stick, how hard the game is and how rewarding it can be.
As a player I have begun to enjoy ladder systems more and more and I understand their importance to a games eco system. A healthy populated working ladder system not only keeps players engaged but inspires other to get better and keep playing. It also means matches are more even, so even though typically people presume a ladder system is there for the high level players it can actually have a direct positive influence on the lower end. Nobody likes to be stomped, even if you are a new player, you like a game to feel back and forth, like you have a chance so a working ranking can place low level players together and they can have much more fun. This would lead to fewer quitters in the long run.
For players to be willing to sink time into a system it needs to consistently work, this allows the end user can build up trust with it, they will put up with a few bad games if the general consensus of the community is “Stick with it, it works, you will find people your level and if you improve, you will go up”. That’s all anyone wants. Where people turn away is when they get stomped or continually stomp, it becomes boring, so tight games and solid consistent matchmaking is key. That’s why I thought the new direction of the system is much improved due to its clarity in how you rank up and earn points. There is however some issues that have made the experience vary and caused it to be a little too hit and miss for me to willingly sink time into.
When you initially load up the game you are given a piece of text that says “compete against opponents of similar ranks”. This clearly lets the user now that this is the game mode to play if they want close games and this was working for me however it has since stopped working and I am enjoying ranked less and less, it’s moved from being that close intense games that kept me playing to a very hit and miss system. I understand the reason why it happened there was a change from One League above and below to two to allow spread, but in a moment I’d like to give an alternate viewpoint as to why this isn’t healthy for the long term ladder.
What I will now do is finish up this section discussing the initial parts of the ranking system and move onto issues and solutions. I will attempt to list an issue, provide some context around it and try to give a solution that may aid you or give you another point of view to consider.
So entering into ranking system the UI is great, it clearly explains what a user needs to do to earn points, what they will earn. The only slight concern is it doesn’t really indicate if there is a quit penalty, there is just a star there which doesn’t give any information about what it is, what it does or if it’s there at all. A simple Yes with description or no would be better.
Personally this game has a massive issue with quitters it’s the number one thing that gets brought up on my videos, stream and discord. Nobody enjoys quitters and it’s a priority that needs to get sorted. The only thing really lacking from this UI screen is a leader board to see the top people from each division, I think people like to see who’s at the top to give them something more visual to chase other than a rank.
Speaking of ranks, I have had many comments that the generic Bronze to Masters Names is just that, a bit generic. It would be a nice Gears naming twist to have the ranks but I do understand this is a minor concern and I can see why you chose the names you chose for clarity and familiarity to those none gears fans. I like how clear the system is and how it rewards you per tier, I would just say that the XP reward is a bit pointless, someone that plays that much doesn’t need the xp and even if they did the value is far too low.
Playing the ranking system
To begin talking about playing the ranking system I’ll do a quick point. All of my work was put into KOTH and it took a VERY long time to rank up, which is fine, I like the grind, the season element is nice. However most games that do these rewards often only have one ranking system but in Gears 5 we have, 2v2, KOTH, Grid Iron and FFA. It would take a crazy amount of playtime to complete all the ranking systems, completing meaning reaching your own ELO where games become fun and close. It would take so long to reach the point where the gamemodes are close to your own ELO that it’s not feasible.
This leads to players basically picking one gamemode and sticking with it for a season which isn’t ideal for the long term heath of certain modes. I personally want to play Gridiron and 2v2’s but I can’t bring myself to play another 2 full ranking systems that take a long time to get out of bronze/silver. Even winning every game it takes you a while and I don’t enjoy stomp games and people don’t enjoy being stomped. People should move up a bit quicker in pace. I played FFA and won 3/3 games and I am Still in Bronze 2/3? Something seems a bit wrong in the early levels of ranking up. This also encourages or adds to the issue of stacks as due to length of time the early climb takes people really can’t be bothered to lose. I’m fine grinding later into the system but getting out of bronze shouldn’t be slower than Diamond.
Now, Quitters are a major issue, I understand this has been in the pipeline for many months and it’s a super hard issue to tackle. You need to punish quitters but also be fair to the accidents that can happen, internets getting switched off, plugs getting pulled, storms, random DC’s. It’s going to be super hard to tell which is a rage quit, a DC, an actual server issue or someone wandering around really not trying and soft throwing the game (A term from league where someone doesn’t leave but passively plays in such a manner that will guarantee a loss for his team)
It’s very difficult to tell a bad player from someone giving up but as you go higher and higher up the ladder it becomes more obvious and there should be a way to report or deal with people that play style. Nobody likes to load into a game and play a 4v5 or a 5v5 where everyone has given up if the game is any sort of reasonable level of play, it becomes unwinnable, an un-enjoyable experience and one you don’t want to repeat so are much less likely to play and queue again. So we know quitters are an issue so how do we deal with them?
Firstly you won’t ever get rid of quitters it’s about controlling the amount and making the end result of the quit less frustrating for the people actually trying. I think with every solution I can come up with there will always be an abusable edge case but for the health and happiness of the population something needs to be done.
There should be a punishment for quitting and an incentive for staying. It’s easier to incentivise staying IMO but both should be in place. From my experience on ladder the most frustrating losses were the following
- 5V4 Losses and losing a large amount of points.
- Solo Losses vs 5 man teams and Losing a large amount of points
- Losses where teammates were hugely different in ranking compared to my own
- When people don’t try
So how could you help someone like me enjoy the game a little more? Personally I know some of these are abusable but for 99% of players the ladder experience will be improved and I think it’s about building peoples trust back up and getting them playing so here are some quick ideas.
- If a game because 5v4, then 5 minutes later the game becomes “free to leave”. The two teams can chose to play on, if the team with the leave wins, they get their GP, if they lose, they lose nothing and the cost of entry is returned. This lets people have a choice, stay in the game and try to get the points or not waste their time and go into the next game. The team with 5 are still free to play on and win their GP or again, opt to leave and have their GP refunded.
Now, there is a major issue where a stacked team could be unsure if they will win, and ask one of the team to quit, so the game becomes free to leave and they save their points. Or a duo plays with a smurf that doesn’t really care about his rank could do similar. If the players are partied up with the leaver, they could all take a small GP to discourage asking people to quit. This is by no means perfect however the amount of people that will do this will be small and the overall health of the ladder would be so much better and players much happier that their 4v5 games aren’t meaningless or a waste of time. Also note that if the person quitting to save his team received a strong enough punishment they may reconsider it. Dota 2 has this system and is a very enjoyable thing for a lot of players.
Either way whether my solution is right or wrong I think we can agree that nobody enjoys having their time wasted or being demoted from situations out of their hands.
For the last three points, they all roughly have a consistent element of frustration
- Solo Losses vs 5 man teams and Losing a large amount of points
- Losses where teammates were hugely different in ranking compared to my own
- When people don’t try
All of these three things were very frustrating to me and the one consistent element of this poor matchmaking. People generally don’t try when they feel it’s unwinnable and games typically feel like that when you are Solo, versus a stack or have very uneven teams.
An easy solution would be to first disable stacks, if you want a ladder system to be played and respected, as in people look at the players at the top and go “these are good players”, you can’t have 5 man stacks rising to the top because they gained 95% of their points by smashing solo players. Now ideally I would say get rid of stacks (3+) for ranked or separate queues, but I understand the population can’t support losing its stacks or separating people out. So again rather than block stacks from playing, let’s encourage solo play or stacks. For me of these is easier to do though, it’s hard enough to play gears, it’s a niche game, needing to find 5 people in your region through a discord, LFG or forums is quite tough and people might end up not queue at all if they only have 4, which is 4 less players that could be queuing which would inturn improve the quality of match making, the speed and accuracy. So let’s encourage people whether they are in a team or not to hop on and play some ladder.
For some context I’ve reached Diamond 3 as my peak as a solo player and beyond that, it’s become almost impossible to consistently win to climb up due to facing stacks. This has also massively impacted my match making times, as everyone is in a 5v5 stack, I have to sit and wait for 1 slot to become available which is very rare. 50 Minute queue times are my average, which I could just about handle (most High elo games have long wait times) IF and only IF the resulting found match was even.
However what’s now happened is due to low population and low open slots the matchmaking restrictions of finding an opponent one league or higher or below has been opened up to 2. So now I have to wait almost just as long for the open slot but now I end up in a situation where I am diamond playing with golds, against masters. This results in a very unbalanced game and nobody enjoys that. This scenario happened 4 times in a row and I was demoted to mid onyx.
As a result even though I understand why you opened up the searching parameters and made them wider, it’s had a knock on effect of making matches very lop sided and I can’t recommend my friends get back into gears and play a system that disregards your effort. What I mean by that is I’ve spent multiple weeks to reach a certain level and expect to play with a certain level, that’s my reward for playing and improving. However I technically may as well still be in gold league, and have quicker MM times if I can still play with golds. Again I am happy to wait longer for better games, yes it’s not ideal but the more and more good games get created, the more close experiences happen the more the system gets praised and recommended and as a result the population grows, currently that’s not the case. I can’t recommend anyone gets into this system certainly not as a solo player.
Here are a few solutions. I think ideally the game would be superb with +1/-1 matchmaking and solo/duo only. However I don’t think that will happen so I recommend encouraging solo play through the new GP system. I believe a good solo player should still be able to perform against duos, so I propose this. If a solo player queues for ranked and encounters a 3+ Man team, then the cost of entry should be lowered and if they win, they should regain their GP it cost to enter. This would drastically shake things up and would make those losses vs stacks feel way less painful and even better to win.
Let’s take Onyx for Example: 150GP to enter with 5 members on the enemy team it means each person is worth 30GP.
Cost = Solo/Duo vs 1/2 Man teams = 150GP
Cost = Solo/Duo vs 3 man = 150GP-3(30GP)=60GP Entry
Cost = Solo/Duo vs 4 man = 150GP-4(30GP)=30GP Entry
Cost = Solo/Duo vs 5 man = 150GP-5(30GP)=0GP Entry
So losing vs a stack would almost be a free hit and rightly so, a stack shouldn’t be losing to a solo player. Now you could argue that what if the solo player has a stack on his team, a 4 man, he might actually have a good chance of winning and a very low entry fee, that’s OP. Well that for sure would encourage solo play and more and more might come out and do it.
Again, I’m not saying my solution is the right one, but if you can’t ban stacks or change matchmaking options due to player base then something should be done to encourage solo play. Again I really dislike being walloped by a stack, losing all my points and having to carry people two ranks below.
Sidenote, I don’t see any reason for displaying my teammates rank in the lobby this is just another. If the matchmaking option is +1/-1 then I don’t need to know their rank, it just makes people quit pregame if they see lower ranks on their team and again, lower ranks shouldn’t be able to queue with much higher ranks. I understand they get matched with their highest party member and that’s ok. They as a group have accepted they are willing to potentially have to carry their bronze friend and that’s fine. I however haven’t and I haven’t played to level my elo to suddenly have to go back to carrying brand new players.
A fair solution would be allowing them still to queue with their lower rank friend IF they were a 5man, then nobody else in the game has their experience involuntarily impacted. It’s a win win. Personally I have been masters every season and it’s pretty much impossible to reach it these days as a solo player which indicates something is wrong
As these things improve, overall player enjoyment will increase and more and more will recommend it and the player base will slowly increase. I feel you have to be brave and accept slower MM times, accept it’s a slow process but don’t rush it, don’t hurt the ladders integrity for a quick flood of players who will end up not enjoying the system and leaving. Get a working system and I guess the age old “Build it and they will come” phrase springs to mind.
Costings.
Now I don’t really have in house metrics or numbers to really come and say “This value should be this”. I’ll just give some values and ideas. Personally the post gold rankings seem to cost far too much to enter, especially as a solo player. It’s impossible to consistently win streak in the current system as a solo player and sometimes 2-3 man too. Often you get put up against some brutal setups and you can’t break, cap or even kill. You need a team to allow you to perform properly, to allow you break and kill and it can very punishing due to the cost of entry when you are on the receiving end of one of those defeats. It feels like you win 4 and lose 1 and your back to square one. This can be demoralising and makes people not want to queue. My chat and viewers also disliked the elimination limit and the fact once you have hit it, if you think you are going to lose, it’s literally best to mindlessly run into the hill to break it to get 1gp each time.
Recently you updated the game to be 1point per elimination, this makes this even more brutal and losses that are out of your hand even more punishin. I personally like the way Gears used to have a personal twist, a gears twist. A solution or idea that was tossed around was using the medal system to earn a bit of GP. Let’s say you are losing heavily, you can’t break the hill, cap it and you have 40 Elims, there is nothing more for you to get out the game. However if your medals gave you GP it could be a nice thing, “Well I didn’t break the hill but I got a triple medal, a hail mary, put someone on swords.” I’m not sure on the medal or values but it’s an idea. Also MVP on the losing team getting no lost points would be a nice touch, that could be a bit abusable as people could intentionally feed to get breaks to become the MVP but it’s a thinking point for sure.
Personally I think score per minute is a nice measure of individual ratings for an MVP system, it could be alongside the GP score and then the “true MVP” of each time would earn no lost points for loss. GP isn’t really an indication of who was the best on the team, just who perform the GP earning actions, SPM (Score per minute) is the best metric we have.
Side note on eliminations, an elimination should be given for someone given an assisting factor in the kill, meaning a good 40%+ of damage. Currently one tap of a pistol is an elimination, I play support so I know this would impact my KDA but I’m fine with that, I should only be getting eliminations for actually helping a lot and changing the outcome of the fight, not just tapping 2 bullets.
One of the last topics I want to talk about is ping. I dislike playing with or against “laggy” players, now as I type this I understand it’s kind of an unfixable situation but I wanted to mention it. When I search for “lower ping” over “faster matchmaking” that’s me tell the game I want a good ping game, vs good ping players. However what ends up happening I get placed on the right server, which is fantastic BUT my team can all have 200 ping and I lose or I face 200 ping lag compensation players and lose or have many un-enjoyable kills/experiences in the game. I would like it if I couldn’t face these players BUT I understand if they were unable to match with “lower ping “ players, some regions wouldn’t be able to play. But it is a frustration to lose ELO as your team all has 200 ping so I thought I would mention it.
Lastly I’d thank to thank you if read or listened this far and I’ll move onto my smaller last point, maps. Personally some maps are really enjoyable to fight on and some less so. I think the ranked experience should have maps that suit that game mode and not EVERY map available. Maybe it’s because my experience is playing 5 man stacks and maybe if that issue gets sorted then the map problem goes away, maybe the new balance fixes this but again, this video/text is to showcase my experiences so I’m mentioning it.
Blood Drive, Checkout, Damn, Reclaimed all feel utterly impossible to play vs a communicating team due to the long routes, long lines of sights and it seems impossible to get a good flank as you are spotted and need to run down long corridors. Also the spawns typically are “visible”, this means they can spin their setup and beam you down. This feels more like a legacy issue of older games not supporting respawn modes and now they suddenly do. It can feel very oppressive.
All Fathers was my favourite map now I play stacks all game it’s become a map where it’s just 5 men stand on the point, smoke and chain revive and it’s hard to work an angle to get in there. Again these aren’t specific points about the new ranking system but it is mentioned as a stack can swing the map vote in ANY way they want and it’s easier on certain maps for sure to setup. Side note, I’m really enjoying reactor for that reason; you can get out of spawn and find an angle or a way to enter.
Also people often don’t vote, a great way to encourage this would be offer xp or GP for voting on the map. There could also be 2 options of maps and “random” map option if the result is a draw. This might help some issues with certain maps never being picked.
Anyway, thanks for listening or watching.
-ggzii
