Can we talk about rank system?
I'm a gold casual player. Most of the time I play meme/non-meta deck, so I stay in this bracket. I have a competitive deck that I can play in case of duel cup event or playing against friends, but I feel like the casual environment is more fitting to me, so I stick around in gold and avoid using floodgate/negate setup decks.
I personally think the rank system right now is very flawed and it messes with player experience so much. It only rewards you once for climbing to diamond and then it encourages people to stay in lower ranks to farm on newbies and casuals.
Here's how it works. Silver and below can't derank, so they serve as a one way introduction trip to the game before send you into gold, the lowest bracket technically. So you can compare MD gold as bronze in other games, BUT it has a lot of high ranked players intentionally staying in it, bots and smurfs. Half of the match in gold will queue you into meta decks, and they're not new players netdecking, because most of them are high lvl account with diamond frame.
Why is it a problem? Because this it mess up new player experience and push them away from the game. If you just start learning chess, you dont want to be playing against chess grandmaster. MD doesn't have anyway to communicate, so it's not like they're teaching new players.
Many other games have smurf problem as well, but most of them are shunned by the community. MD community seems to widely accept smurfing as a way to "afford other deck". It's an understandable reason, but also selfish imo.
Not to mention MD community can be very toxic and hostile toward new players and casual players, especially in the main sub.
Another problem is bots. There are a lot of bots since the game launched, now only afk and few ftk left(nurse and numeron dragon heal). But there are some people botting with their main accounts which usually has impossibly high lvl (50~60) running around in the bracket and that's just stupid.
My suggestion is to remove bracket derank prevention and just add reward cap for monthly gems. I feel like the bracket derank is needed to make the ranking more organic. It might help putting players to where they belong and create more space for casual players.
(It's not like I can directly communicate Konami anyway, so I'll just write them in surveys.)
I'd like to hear your opinion on this subject.
Posted Nov 30, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC · edited
There's three problems with the rank system that make people like me want to stay in gold/silver rank.
Events are tied to your rank (outside of duelist cup and the recent link event). I don't have a fusion or synchro deck. The last fusion event was hell for me in diamond when all I saw was Branded and DPE all over the place. I stay in gold precisely to avoid going against the meta event decks. Can't really think of a way to fix this outside of having a new ladder for events. Like if we get a new event reset everyone to bronze kind of like the link event, but with rewards not based on progression but how the current reward system is.
Dailies are tied to rank only (aside from the 2nd half of the month when we get events). I don't get why they don't just allow dailies to be acquired anywhere. Free rooms or unranked. Yes, bots might abuse this, but bots are abusing the current system anyways. A lot of the time I want to just hop on and do my dailies then get off. Only time I really play is during events or when a new archetype releases that I've been waiting for.
End of the month rewards after reset. You get 1,000 gems every end of the month by climbing the ranks after reset. You mentioned this yourself, but instead of putting a cap or prevent deranking, I suggest just creating monthly missions that give 1,000 gems total. Give cosmetics for climbing ranked every month. It really can't be too hard to give us sleeves, a deck box, profile pic, mate, or whatever by climbing ranks. That way people who only want gems won't need to climb, but people who want cosmetics (which are a huge majority) will want to climb ranked. Can even make a pity system where if you played X games you get the reward anyways, that way it won't punish people who aren't good enough to get to diamond 1 but at least rewards you for playing.
All of these are the reasons why I stay in silver/gold every month. I've gotten to Diamond 1 twice, but after the fusion event it made me never want to climb again.