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World of Tanks Ranked Battles: A good mode or a source of stress?

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Ranked Battles second test has come to an end, and Wargaming has their results out and what they believe it will be the best for its future.

Ranked Battles – My personal experience

Ranked Battles wasn’t what I hope it would be. For me, Ranked Battles was a mega pressure mode and also a high source of stress. If a player doesn’t start playing them as soon as the season starts, it will become almost impossible for them to progress through the ranks, even if you are a good player. I’m not an amazing player, but even for me was almost impossible to progress from Rank 2.

Due to my limited time, I only have an hour or so, and not every day, to try to get as many Ranked Battles as I could. But after a while, I just gave up. Why? Because I couldn’t progress, I got stuck at Rank 2 because, while I was doing good on my battles, my team was constantly losing the battles.

Chevrons

Increasing chevrons to get to the next Rank is a positive change, it makes the grind a bit longer and more rewarding, but the fact that you don’t get any chevron if you are on the losing team, creates situations like mine, where players will get stuck even if they play really well but their teams keep losing the battle.

Ranked Battles are supposed to be about individual skill, and I can understand the fact Wargaming wants to get some sort of teamplay sense in the mode, but what the point for a player to give all he has to win the battle if his team can’t win and he’s only getting rewarded with not losing a chevron? The current system tested on Season 2 doesn’t reward individual skill at all, in fact, makes the individual skill irrelevant because you are stuck with how good your team is or not to win the battle.

I had a time where I did well eight battles in a row but never won a single battle. Once I finally got a win, I wasn’t so good and I didn’t make it to the Top 10 to get a chevron. Or in some cases, the teams were so bad, we would lose battles in 2 minutes and I managed to lose enough chevrons to lower my rank back to Rank 1.

The whole Ranked Battle experience felt like I was constantly getting matched with very poor skill players, who don’t know how to play at Tier X at all, and I only managed to progress when I was lucky that these players, would play to enough decent level, allowing me and a couple of other players to carry them and win the battle.

What needs improving?

Ranked Battles need to focus more on individual skill and matching players of the same skill. I strongly believe Wargaming could use the new Personal Ranking system to match players, instead of matching them based on the Rank they currently are. I wouldn’t mind being matched with players already in Rank 5 if I knew my team was made with players of similar skill as mine on the Personal Ranking system.

By doing this, Wargaming would be able to tune the Matchmaker to a skilled base system, allowing lower skill players to play against players of the same skill too, making it simpler for them to progress through the ranks.

Of course, I don’t expect Wargaming to make it easy for everyone, and that everyone will make it to Rank 5, but this would enable a greater number of players to do so and players would feel more rewarded.

Another improvement needed is the duration of the Prime Time, because, for casual players who don’t have much time to play, they might need to play at later hours than others. Making Ranked Battles prime time last another hour or two, would allow players like me to participate more often.

And the final change for me would be: make it possible for the losing team to win chevrons again. There is no bigger frustration for a player than giving their best and not progress in between ranks because they get stuck with teams that constantly lose.

That was my Ranked Battles experience and my suggestions on how to improve them. How was your experience? Did you enjoy them, or not? Do you think Ranked Battles have a future, or is Wargaming investing on a doomed mode? Leave your thoughts in the comment section.

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15,466 thoughts on “World of Tanks Ranked Battles: A good mode or a source of stress?

  1. “Of course, I don’t expect Wargaming to make it easy for everyone, and that everyone will make it to Rank 5, but this would enable a greater number of players to do so”

    But is that really necessary? I believe WG is tracking percentage of players that reaches individual ranks constantly – and if enough percent of players (that they were aiming for) reached the rank, they will be content with it. What exactly is the right “greater number of players” to you? 20 %? 50 %? 100 %? 🙂

    In my opinion no matter what you do, there will still be discontented players that got stuck at early ranks. And if you give enough people high ranks easily (easier?), the good players will be angry instead, that you give rewards out too easily and their skill and efforts don’t count for anything.

  2. IMHO, ranked battles is a fluke. Green teams behave worse than red teams in random, just because of the pressure of winning/not losing chevrons. I feel like the chevron system makes the gameplay so very different from randoms (in a bad way). In the first season I ended first stage in gold league (just to prove to myself I could do it xp), but I just stopped playing after that because I didn’t want to spend so much time (I got behind on my series-schedule so badly that week) and credits into a game mode that only brings you stress (about winning, chevrons, your team, …). I would suggest an other kind of progressing concept that is so much based on how many games you play, more rewards even for lower tier achievements and a 0 credits earned/expended policy on ranked battles (except missions and rewards for credits). Otherwise this will die out rather soon I think.

  3. I think that problem are not chevron as much as number of players – author even mention that he feels like no matter what he does matter significantly – small number of players per team would, imho, help with this problem. Skill of each player has more value. Problem at what number end individual tanks and starts mob – I think 3v3 is too few, 5v5 maybe, 7v7 would be my choice, 10v10 is alredy close to 15.
    Second thing is time – I also found that its hard to keep with time window since I had time mainly like hour before (in between I came from work and my GF came) and than half or hour at the end/after – ending that I barely played twice a week. Prolonging “main hours” like one hour on both sides might help as well and maybe make it two weeks instead of one – chevron system should ensure that everybody gets stuck on his skill level even given infinite time.
    Making it like personal rating/wn8 league would would be bad – for few years I (jokingly) say that I should run bot program for few weeks just to lower my xvm camo and I think that its really imaginable to see some ppl wreck randoms for week(s) in row just to get into the “easy group”.

  4. Actually its not, because I was able to do 3k/4k battles easily without using Premium Ammo. My main issue was the lack of good players in my team so we could win.

  5. finally someone who thinks the same way as me^^
    7 vs. 7 would be a great improvement for the Gamemode,as Playerskill would be way more important than it is right now and gaining/losing chevrons wouldn`t depend on Luck as much as it does now ,also WG could promote WGL by doing that(unless of course the rumors are true and WG wants to ruin E-sport/WGL by making it 15 vs. 15)

    Regarding your second Point WG just has to find a way to reward good players instead of luck and endless grinds

    and yeah doing a skill based mm by WG rating/Wn8 etc. is a bad idea,especially since WG would have to give better players more rewards,which then again would piss off the bad/average Players and if they would not give good players more rewards People as you already said would just try to lower their “XVM Camo”.

    All in all i have to say,i am completly disappointed with ranked battles mode,all i wished for was a good competetive mode for Players that don`t have the time(or just dont want) to play WGL like all the other games like Cs.GO,LOL,DOTA etc. have.But instead we got a wate all your time to get some bonds mode.

    Also if you watch the video in the Article above,WG isnt even trying to design a real ranked mode,no they just want to please all the mediocore players,the highest Rank (in this case Rank V) should be hard to obtain,like it is in literally every other online Game.

    but i guess WG can`t change the mode like that anymore since by doing that only good Players would get bonds,which would just make good Players even better by giving them unfair advantages :/

  6. Do you think giving more chevrons to the best winning players (best gets 3, 2-5 get 2) could offset the team losing streaks? For average players it would not change much but for the good/great/lucky players it would let them climb in a less random fashion.

  7. Not by giving more chevrons, but but allowing for example top 2 to get a chevron and the next 3 to not lose a chevron. Other 10 would lose it. Also they need to check their XP formula, because I saw players with 3k damage and 1 kill, getting less base XP when comparing to other players who did 0 damage, but blocked 2k… I don’t understand why blocking damage would count so much for the base XP.

  8. hey hark I just wanted to say I agree with you 100 percent. skill based mm is when you have players of the same skill compete for a top prize in each level. but as always wargaming fails to do what it said it would. The current system is not skill based mm. Not even close.

  9. I think if they remove the ‘lose a chevron’ system but make it much more difficult to gain a chevron, it may work. For example, only reward the top 3 players (perhaps on each team) with a chevron. That should mean the top players go up the ranks quicker, whereas medium/low skilled players take longer and may reach a point where they are not able to progress because they are against players who consistently outperform them. This could lead to a skilled based outcome.

    I also like the idea of a smaller team.

  10. I’ve encountered more teamkilling in the 2nd season of Ranked than in my whole WoT career in random battles… Too much stress leads to edgy players.

    The XP system was borked beyond belief, people who did less in the battle constantly got placed above me on the team list, often resulting in me being in 11th place…

    It’s either your team being too good, and taking all your damage and kills, or the team being too bad, where they all die before you can even deal over 1000 damage. As unbelievable as that may seem, it happened.

    My only tier 10 was the T110E4, so I was very dependant on my team’s flow in battle, if for example I went to the flank with too many players, I was too slow to get to the fight before they mow the lawn so to speak, and if I went on a flank with just a few members, sure I’d get some actual damage but we’d quickly get overrun because whaddya know, the enemy decided to lemmingrush that flank, which resulted in a loss more often than not, placing me below the top 5 on the losing team…

  11. “There remains a m***ive conflict of interests in trying to establish skill in a team-based mode that has no communication. Not only does it take far too long for each player to actually settle into the appropriate rank, the process of ranking based heavily on win-rate is no more skill based than the randoms. Besides this, having to play exclusively at tier 10 is a m***ive credit investment. Trying to reimburse players with credit boosters is really just asking them to burn yet more time on credit grinding elsewhere. If it really came down to it, they could just sell bonds for credits and cut out the middle-man.

    The simplest and easiest improvement will be removing win-rate from the equation and scoring all 30 players in one group rather than as two separate teams. The experience penalty for not spotting your own targets already acts as a deterrent to redline sniping, but the ratio of experience earned by spotter/shooter can be shifted even further in favor of the spotter to encourage aggression.?” This is the best concept I’ve heard so far

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