
Originally Posted by
Yakumo
I've been playing since the closed beta, and for FFA certainly the matching has never been better.
Players don't know where they are in their tier and if they're near the bottom then they are likely to be destroyed by someone right at the top, this is unavoidable, there is no way to have a tier of just clones of you.
The beta systems with dynamic ranked servers just didn't work as every game rapidly became a top tier came as slightly higher skilled players joined in and the level of the server went up eventually opening it up to the highest tier, so high players joined actually seeing it listed as being at their level, and then the players on the server are unhappy as they saw it listed as their level when they joined, which was a much lower level.
The separations are quite large. tier 1 (locked out) and then of the remainder split 25% - 50% - 25%. But without such broad tiers far fewer games would show as available to people. And it should me on average people get more game time with people roughly near their own level than the creeping-server-apocalypse it was before.
It's certainly more fair than quake3 that simply had no tiers at all. a tier3 player will never be in a game with a tier4 player unless they joined a server or two up.
It's certainly significantly better for higher tier players, I don't get offered games that turn out to have players I would expect not to be in the top 25% any more.
The improvements I would like to see would be more information in game, a server tier reminder colour in the scoreboard, player tier icons for the players and a current average displayed without having to manually hack it into the display yourself with hud editing.
This way people know what's going on.
I've had people raging at me for 'tierslumming' and told in no uncertain (or clean mouthed) terms to leave servers marked top tier with a current sv_Skillrating of 93-99 (it's out of 100).