Marvel Rivals Ranked 2.0 Is a Huge Mess

Summary

Highlights

• Marvel Rivals' new ranking system is counterproductive, rewarding players for stats over true skill. 📊
• The system disincentivizes team roles and strategic play, affecting competitive integrity. 🤝
• Ottr highlights how the changes could drive away dedicated players crucial for long-term game survival. 🚨

Key Takeaways

• Performance-based ranking in Marvel Rivals is backfiring, leading to flawed gameplay incentives. 🎮
• Players are more focused on padding stats than playing strategically, harming overall teamwork. 🤔
• The creator, 'ottr', strongly suggests removing performance-based rewards to restore game balance. ✨

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction to Marvel Rivals Ranked Mode The chapter delves into the recent changes in Marvel Rivals' ranked mode, criticizing them as potentially detrimental to the game's future. The author argues against the new performance-based matchmaking and reward system, a concept familiar in competitive multiplayer games, often called skill-based matchmaking. This system, despite its various iterations, essentially functions by adjusting players' ranks based on their performance, particularly in securing wins.
• 01:30 - 03:30: Initial Thoughts on Performance-Based Matchmaking The chapter titled 'Initial Thoughts on Performance-Based Matchmaking' discusses the use and evolution of a skill-based matchmaking system in the game Marvel Rivals. It explains how in ranked matches, players' future games are adjusted based on their performance. Initially, in season 1, players received more points for a win, and performing exceptionally well could earn even more points. In season 2, adjustments increased the emphasis on individual performance, greatly impacting the experience and making the updates very noticeable. The narrator appreciates these changes as they make the game feel more balanced and validating.
• 03:30 - 05:30: Criticism and Research Insights The chapter discusses misconceptions about the ranking system in gaming, emphasizing how standout performances are rewarded even in losses, and how underperformance is penalized even in wins. Criticism of the new patch system is explored, highlighting various flaws and apprehensions about its impact on fair competition.
• 05:30 - 08:30: Game Statistics and Trends The chapter discusses the challenges and issues within hero shooters, particularly focusing on a broken game mechanic. The author mentions conducting extensive research to understand how it works and highlights its flaws. Before delving into details, there's a promotional note about accessing a script and research material through a membership at the author's community, offering additional resources and events for those looking to improve their skills in Marvel Rivals. The chapter implies upcoming details on the specific game mechanics issue.
• 08:30 - 11:30: Impact of Performance Metrics The chapter delves into the impact of performance metrics on player rankings, particularly focusing on the speaker's personal experiences and observations. The narrator discusses the frustrations experienced when achieving a 60-70% win rate yet struggling to remain in the top 500 due to high variability in points gained and lost. To understand this better, the speaker analyzes both personal and other professionals' stats, mentioning specific instances like zero healing and zero damage accounts. This exploration highlights how performance metrics can significantly influence rankings and player sentiment.
• 11:30 - 14:30: Ranking System Flaws The chapter titled 'Ranking System Flaws' discusses the intricacies and potential issues within a ranking system utilized in a gaming environment. Specifically, it highlights the disparity between high-level players (Grandmaster to Celestial ranks) and lower-ranked players (like those in bronze). It notes that in higher ranks, players face unique challenges that aren't present in lower ranks, and this affects the point system differently. A win for a high-ranking player results in a small point increase (20-25 points), while a win for a low-ranking player can result in a much larger point increase (50 points or more). This discrepancy suggests flaws in the system's ability to fairly reward players at different skill levels.
• 14:30 - 18:30: Implications for Competitive Play The chapter delves into the mechanics of scoring in competitive play, emphasizing a notable observation regarding the impact of earning an SVP (Special Valuable Player) designation even during a loss. The analysis reveals that players who receive SVP points tend to lose significantly fewer points compared to their teammates. This phenomenon is highlighted as a consistent outlier across many games, suggesting that players can mitigate point losses by optimizing specific performance metrics, such as final hits and damage, despite the overall game outcome. The chapter further explores how this strategy can influence competitive play dynamics.
• 18:30 - 23:30: Comparison with Other Games This chapter discusses the nuanced differences in rewards for achieving MVP (Most Valuable Player) versus SVP (Second Valuable Player) status in a game. The narrator explains that achieving MVP does not have a significant impact on loss reduction, whereas achieving SVP on a losing team drastically reduces the points lost. Therefore, the narrator suggests that if a loss seems inevitable, it might be more beneficial to aim for SVP status instead, rather than switching roles to support and trying to recover the game.
• 23:30 - 27:30: Conclusion and Recommendations The chapter discusses a previous gaming experience where adjustments were made following a game score of minus 28. After adjusting the score by 'SP,' a vast amount of data is available. A significant focus of the chapter is on rank disparity among players, highlighting its critical impact on game outcomes. Although most games have players within similar rank clusters, some outliers can exceed or fall short by around 100 points compared to the average. A specific scenario mentioned is a lower-ranked player winning a game with average statistics, resulting in a disproportionate gain compared to their teammates, averaging around five points more.

Marvel Rivals Ranked 2.0 Is a Huge Mess Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 marvel Rivals new ranked mode changes are so bad they might just kill the game Just give me a few minutes and I'm going to tell you why Hear me out Performance-based matchmaking and performance-based ranked rewards is a tried concept that has been around for almost as long as we've had competitive multiplayer games This is normally referred to as skill-based matchmaking or just matchmaking And while it's gone through a ton of different versions and iterations it can be summed up along the lines of if you're performing exceptionally well especially to get a win a little hidden number on your
• 00:30 - 01:00 profile goes up and your future games get adjusted Marvel Rivals has had SPMM in ranked and in public matches probably since its release and maybe even before that In ranked if you won a game you'd get more points but if you played exceptionally well like a one above all player in bronze then you'd be rewarded with way more points This was even true in season 1 In season 2 the weight of this value was adjusted and the weight of your individual performance was increased and it is very noticeable and I'm really happy that they did that because now I don't feel crazy when I
• 01:00 - 01:30 say that this is completely wrong If you have a standout game and win you will be rewarded noticeably more And if you have a standout game but still lose the rank loss isn't as severe Obviously on the flip side if you win without contributing enough in the eyes of the system then you gain less points And if you lose and your stats are looking bad then your rank will take a huge hit Before this patch after the patch notes had dropped a lot of people had come to me to ask what I thought about the changes I expressed my apprehension and I listed all of the flaws with these types of systems and how they really
• 01:30 - 02:00 never work out especially in hero shooters But even I didn't think it would end up being this bad And I did a ton of research and I think I have an idea of how it works and it's really really broken But before we get into that a quick shout out As usual the script and research to this video was already available to members of the other dojo And if you want to get better at Marvel Rivals attend weekly seminars group coaching and community events while improving alongside like-minded gamers check out the link in description There are still some discounted spots left So don't miss out before we raise
• 02:00 - 02:30 the price But anyways after feeling some frustration with barely getting enough points to even stay within the top 500 even with a 60 to 70% win rate and getting absolutely burned with minimal gains and insanely high losses despite having a huge impact I decided to look a little bit further In one of my previous streams I spent a few hours digging through my own stats and the stats of many other prolific players such as other pro players my own zero healing rocket account and adversely zero damage rocket account And by the way this guy is not having a good time So he's not
• 02:30 - 03:00 doing any damage and the system just keeps punishing him for it And while I can't say that I figured out exactly how the system works I am very confident that I have a solid idea of how it does And do note that all of the accounts and games we checked were in about Grandmaster to Celestial so the top 500 of all players in the world at the moment If you aren't aware at these ranks the games look very different than in bronze And a typical win would be in the 20 to 25 point range Whereas in bronze you could easily see a 50 or higher point gain on a really good win
• 03:00 - 03:30 The first thing that really stood out to me is that for whatever reason when I kept looking at all these stats was that if you get SVP on a loss you lose less points significantly less It's a massive outlier You could have barely any impact but farm enough final hits and damage or whatever gets you that SVP and get out of that game only losing about 12 to 15 or so points while your teammates might lose way over 20 or even more In fact this was such an outlier across all the games that it made it take quite a lot
• 03:30 - 04:00 longer for me to piece together the rest of the puzzle Funny enough on the opposite side of the spectrum getting an MVP doesn't seem to have that much of an impact or a very minimal one Certainly not to the tune of getting a 30 to 40% loss reduction That's for sure Having the best stats on a losing team and getting SVP is such a huge difference in your lost points that honestly mathematically it might be more worth it to go for that SVP if you think it's a loss rather than trying to flex to a support or something else and start healing and trying to salvage the game I
• 04:00 - 04:30 mean I did it in that one game one time and was hit with a minus 28 After adjusting by SP that leaves us with a lot of data The second largest impact to your games before we dive into the performance seem to be rank disparity Now this seems obvious but it is important to mention Most games seem to have players within the same cluster of ranks but with the occasional outliers of up to about 100 points more or 100 points less than the average of those games A low-ranked player who won the game with average stats would end up gaining significantly more than their teammates to the tune of about five
• 04:30 - 05:00 points or so for the same performance Adversely a player with over a 100 points above the average would gain five or so points less for that same performance assuming there wasn't some weird performance stuff going on in the background And if they lost they would take a massive rank nuke which sometimes cost them all the way up to minus 30 points Now obviously most games in the world most games with a rank system do work like this It's pretty much standard and it isn't the point of the video but again it was another huge thing that got in the way of actually trying to figure out how the gains seem to work And now that we look past the SUPs and look past
• 05:00 - 05:30 the rank disparity we can start seeing the other trends when it comes to the ranked gains and losses First and foremost everything seems to have an impact to your gains It might have different amounts of impact but in short the higher your stat numbers are the better It doesn't seem to matter whether your stats are junk stats as in for example dealing damage when you shouldn't that would just feed support ultimates for no reason or shooting straight into an enemy support ultimate to pad your own damage Now I couldn't prove that this made no difference but I couldn't see anything suggesting that
• 05:30 - 06:00 getting absurdly high amounts of damage actually punishes you In fact in this game where we absolutely stomped this team their Moonnight got the most damage in the entire game because he's a moon knight He didn't really do anything else except just get a lot of damage So it was practically junk damage and he only lost 12 points After going through a ton of games it seems that the stat that most heavily impacts your rank gains is your final hits When I sorted the players on each team by final hits it more or less seemed to align with the rank rewards But there were some outliers that were a lot more noticeable
• 06:00 - 06:30 if they were playing other roles or there were heavy disparities For example second to your final hits your KDA seems to carry a lot of weight other than sorting by final hits Sorting by KDA showed a clear correlation between your amount of kills and assists ratioed against your deaths I've had healers with 50 KDA and zero final hits with great gains and I've had a Wolverine that's went four and five and lost 29 points despite being almost 200 points lower than the rest of the lobby Obviously the latter is a mix of final hits and the KDA but that's the point It is still connected somehow Something
• 06:30 - 07:00 else that seems connected but more loosely is your healing and your damage blocked Even though these can be junk stats just as easily as they can be valuable stats since they count towards MVP and we saw what could be pointed towards mineral gains they are worth bringing up I also saw that doing a lot of damage seems to lead to a higher chance of getting MVP or just getting more ranked points no matter whether you were a dualist support or tank But I couldn't really establish where it fits in this whole puzzle other than that it does have an impact Finally even though this one is impossible to prove there is a chance that your gains are also
• 07:00 - 07:30 impacted by hidden stats things like time on point or interrupting enemy ultimates things like that I'd argue that it looks like getting SOP MP does seem to lead to more gains and doing things that normally would get you IRA seem to be correlated with those gains as well but since I don't have access to these hidden stats this part is impossible to prove other than by just going by vibes What I couldn't determine was whether your stats are compared to a global average your rank and whether it is based on your hero or your role The logical way would be comparing your stats to your specific hero in your specific rank But I didn't see any
• 07:30 - 08:00 consistency between different heroes with the same stats nor the same heroes with most of the same stats when you compare between different games So it is really hard to tell from an outside looking in It will be very difficult to get a clear picture of what actually matters and what doesn't other than seeing some specific outliers So this is just my theory on how it works and it supports that you always should make sure to focus on yourself in the system If you're playing a hero that has specific bands you're actually incentivized to ban your direct counters Even if they aren't actually good bands just to ensure that you do good in a
• 08:00 - 08:30 performance-based system if your stats look good then you will keep climbing And normally I would say well if you just keep winning it doesn't matter how you perform but because of how heavy performance is this patch in this system in theory you could have a way below 50% win rate maybe 30 or 40% But if you keep getting SV every game or you keep getting those stats that the algorithm really wants you to get then you're going to keep climbing because you gain that much more on a win than you do on a loss In the same vein like in my case you can have a way above 50% win rate or a 50% win rate overall but still lose or
• 08:30 - 09:00 bleed points over time because you gain that much less than you lose The issue with the system is that while yes it will help pushing smurfs out faster And yes it will make you feel better about losing when you did the most in your team These aren't really problems that needed addressing And ultimately they're just here to make you feel good Is that what competitive games are about now just making you feel good for no reason Not to mention that while the system makes Smurfs rank up faster it also makes it much easier to keep throwing games Get the performance-based laws to
• 09:00 - 09:30 drop your farber and smurf that much more easily The reality of the system is that performance-based gains can't accurately measure your impact in a game And by increasing their weight suddenly people will start playing for stats rather than trying to win People won't flex to off roles and would rather take losses while playing their best so they lose less ranked points Anyone who has been in a real life and gone outside I've done like once or twice knows that these incentive systems do not work And I guess funny enough being a gamer my perfect example is McDonald's So imagine
• 09:30 - 10:00 yourself if I'm McDonald's that is cool screens that show that your orders are being made or if they're ready to pick up Someone higher up if it's middle or higher management I wouldn't know decided they would give rewards forever has the fastest kitchen with the fastest delivery time So what do they do instead of speeding up the kitchen and ramping up production and just becoming more efficient they just tag your order as finished the second your order pops up on the screen Well it might still be I don't know 5 or 10 minutes out So now you're confused You're waiting You're wondering what's happening with your order but even go up to the counter and
• 10:00 - 10:30 ask what's happening because the screen isn't telling you And the entire point of having the system to track your order ends up being pointless The same goes for Marvel Rivals When you create a system with incentives then people will always figure out a way to game it And suddenly the incentives don't matter anymore They just made everything worse People are already playing for kills They're throwing ultimates into fights that are already won just to pad their stats and avoiding playing the objective or taking risks before they die to it because they think it will help And that's even before I release this video After this video it'll probably get a
• 10:30 - 11:00 whole lot worse before it gets better So if you want to help spread the message and make it better uh I guess share the video and hit the like button and comment your thoughts so you know we get the boost in the algorithm Because if this doesn't get fixed then the integrity of ranked is ruined And when ranked doesn't mean anything the people don't play it And when you lose your ranked grinders who are your most dedicated player base then your game is dead or at the very least it's going to start rotting from the core We've seen so many games alienating the ranked player base lately and it's always led to a downward spiral while the community
• 11:00 - 11:30 ends up dying from within Ultimately an incentive system directly leads to abuse which ruins the integrity of ranked And why would you even play ranked if it has no integrity it can in theory be designed in ways where it can't game but that would probably need thousands of points of entry and data and exceptions and rules rather than just comparing your stats to one another And it's not there now and I don't think it'll be there ever The current system literally screws over team players If I Emma try to peel my backline or I use my shield to cut off the healers Then I don't deal
• 11:30 - 12:00 damage I don't even get a high amount of damage blocked because I'm just cutting off the healers It results in kills but I don't get credit for it There's no stat for blocked healing So all of my impact that leads to winds isn't even attributed to me Taking soft space or pressuring enemies without damage also doesn't count You can't track it so they just don't I've had so many games where I have to leave the front line and stop doing damage to help my supports with the flankers And as I keep chasing the flankers or pressuring them off I can feel my rank points dropping real time because I'm not patting my stats or my damage even though I'm keeping my
• 12:00 - 12:30 supports alive They're getting ranked points from me keeping them alive but I'm losing them because I'm not patting my stats And it's also worth noting that doing a lot of damage can be good on paper but we've gone over this If all of that damage is on the tanks or into shields or whatever and you already have your ultimate and it leads to no kills with the enemy supports just farming their own ults off of that damage then you're actually throwing But according to the system you're carrying you have a lot of damage Here's another 10 rank points on us The game has been reduced to the most surface level stats and incentivizes you to do more damage to
• 12:30 - 13:00 overextend to take bad poke just so you get more points It's oversimplified the game and now bad players get extra points by shooting shields and tanks because they lack the understanding of how these games should be played And if left unchecked the game will start falling off I'm going to be extreme about this It might actually die And that's because a lot of developers make the mistake of ignoring their most dedicated players They're ranked grinders who spend hours a week or even a day playing the game to get better or get that rank They play ranked because it matters and because they want that
• 13:00 - 13:30 shiny badge If a rank loses value then they stop playing and they move on to something else that does have a good rank system Without the dedicated rank grinders making up the core player base you only have casuals The problem with casuals is that yeah there's a lot of them and they probably spend a lot of money but they always leave when something better comes along There are plenty of examples of developers ruining their own games for the rank players in favor of a more casual approach And my favorite might be the finals which we have covered a lot And in season 3 after people were criticizing the rank system to do a full overhaul because it had a
• 13:30 - 14:00 lot of issues they decided to change their main rank system from cash out which was the main mode of the entire game Really the only reason you would play the finals to terminal attack a 5v5 I believe tactical shooter style game mode It was a whole different game mode They just decided rank was something completely else In Marvel rivals terms it would be like if for one season they just randomly decided to remove the entire rank system the way we know it and the next season you had to play Doom matches or I don't know Jeff's winter splash game mode to get your rank
• 14:00 - 14:30 Understandably this didn't do very well and the game lost the majority of their competitive player base come the season 3 launch After the initial hype the game lost about 25% of its player base who then came back in season 4 when the real ranked return But the Finals is an incredibly casual game and it has a core dedicated player base So who knows how much of a drop you'd see for Marvel Revivals if you try the same stunt But one thing is for certain if you estrange your ranked players then you lose a huge chunk of your players Maybe a smaller number of them but the ones putting in
• 14:30 - 15:00 the real hours grinding the game out every day the people that would keep playing even if Overwatch releases a new patch or Tracer is wearing a bikini Now this wouldn't be that good of a video if I just ragged on the one bad system and didn't offer any alternatives would it i like Marvel Revival It's a good game but if ranked keeps going this way it'll just fall off completely once people realize how meaningless ranked is turning out to be I am honestly really early to this issue Though some pro players like Line Pro a support main and absolute banger of a player agrees with
• 15:00 - 15:30 me that it is not working properly at all I already say that the performance-based games were a problem before up the weight of them and they probably had a big impact in why ranked was so unbalanced in the previous season It's definitely much worse this time around and I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of this season it's going to be several times worse than the end of season 1.5 was My solution is really simple Reverting it just isn't enough I'm going to suggest something extreme but really simple Remove those performance-based gains entirely The only thing that should matter is whether
• 15:30 - 16:00 you win or whether you lose If you win a ton of games in a row then you could be gradually tested in higher and higher lobbies and get rewarded from the rank disparity because you're doing better in a higher rank But there's no point in making it more complicated because you can't accurately measure one's impact in any number There's so many data points and if you just miss one of them it's immediately invalid and it screws over a certain type of players that might even be carrying You could be the in-game leader in a game doing zero damage zero healing zero impact over other than
• 16:00 - 16:30 literally shot calling your team to a win and you'll lose all your points because the system doesn't measure your impact as a leader This current system and performance-based game systems are terrible Thank you for hearing me out I'll see you all next time Join Auto Dojo Peace out