Post#142 » Thu Jul 29, 2021 10:17 am
Negative MMR was a bad idea to start with : anybody could legitimately believe the bottom limit was zero, but in fact it just discouraged people when they got one loss, then one win, and their mmr was still zero.
If you want people to get a sense of progress, you have to ensure they feel that way, or pretty much everybody will give up after seeing no progress over multiple matches.
I got the courage to continue after my initial 13 loss/draw in a row before my first win, and only because people repeated me "eventually your mmr wil rise over zero".
Now after 56 matches I got to less than 200 mmr, and the perspective to reach 1k is too far away, even for me (and I'm somehow a hard-tryer).
So imagine how bad most other felt after just a few matches with zero mmr progression, and you got the picture.
Like casino, if you want to involve enough people to start with enough wealth to not stop playing after their first loss, you have to give them a bit more for a start or they will broke too early, and nobody participating is what is killing the thing, it's a lose-lose for everyone.
In ranked you want to get the more people you can in the bandwagon, since top players need to hit someone to win, and bad players can alos play against each other and get a fair chance to win. You need at least 20-30 people queuing at all time (at least on primetime hours) to make it work, and while it was almost the case on the first week, the punishing mmr system made short work of almost everyone.
I know there is also the "summer vacations" effect and such, but overall I think we have to restart the interest to ranked, one way or another.
And you will also have the "full geared" effect, when the most hardcore players will be full ranked-stuffed, and will quit mostly ranked (maybe playing some matches a week for event item or vanity items) ; that will thin the ranked playerbase even further, and you absolutely want to get enough participation to keep this mode going on with fresh people.