Sam M · @GODaZeD
17th Oct 2016 from TwitLonger
Rank S THOUGHTS
When Rank S Started it was supposed to make it not an ESEA Pug where you can play with a competitive environment with other good CS Players.
What it has devolved into is just a glorified ESEA Pug.
I'll address some issues and try to be as unbiased as possible, first i'll talk about general changes / issues before player removals/adds.
1. Captain Fairness - it's incredibly unfair when Stewie is team A Cap w/ first pick and gets a great first pick, and someone like Fighter/terrorize is team B Cap and gets second pick with no swag/etc. on the board, and then generally has to last pick FGB or another Rank A player who has no league experience. If team A cap is Fighter and team B Cap is Swag, team B will be stuck with last pick (FGB Generally) and then it's not even a disadvantage that it's fighter vs swag, since both teams have a couple last picks or whatever. People estimate team A might win 65-70% + Of the time, it would be interesting to know the statistic for sure. But this needs to be addressed, this is the BIGGEST issue by FAR.
We need possible solutions and the simplest way to monitor it is to take the Team A win Rate and see what it is now, and if it's really high make changes. Maybe Team a picks one, Team b picks two etc, and then give it a large enough sample size to see if it changes the team a win %, because ideally we'd want it as close to 50/50 as possible.
2. The 10 Minute Grace Period - Simply having 9 people waiting for 10 minutes on someone is annoying as fuck, make it a 5 minute grace period. You still have 10 minutes as long as your not picking the teams because of the picking period.
3. Communication - You should be required to speak BASIC callouts - I'm not talking about full blown convos, someone like machineguns or lucas communication is more than fine - but you should be required to have the ability to hold down your mic and SPEAK. If you just get killed and know someone is getting flanked and you can't hold down your mic to say "cat flank fast" it's a problem.
Adding / Removal of players.
First i want to address why it is so frustrating at times playing with certain individuals. First off, ESEA Pugs don't teach you how to play a role or spot on ANY map when it comes to a team context, almost all the Rank A added players are extremely hesitant and have no idea what their role is on a connector split to A on mirage etc.
What ends up happening is if you try and do something like this you just have the most disjointed terrible execution / timing possible - so you truly are just better off flying across the map taking aim duels everywhere when you have multiple inexperienced players in the queue.
Another big issue is that there are many many players who stopped playing rank s completely who are really good players, because they don't want to play ESEA pugs. So as you add in more and more people who really can't play the game, more and more people just stop playing.
The two most glaring removals are bogdan and FGB though, somehow FGB has been last picked in every game for the past 7 months and has never been removed. bogdan doesn't even buy smoke grenades on ct side... HE DOESNT THROW NADES DO YOU GUYS UNDERSTAND HOW UNBELIEVABLY RIDICULOUS THAT IS?
anyways, i myself have to figure out a different way to approach the games because trying to implement strategy etc is nearly impossible with the current player pool - and i don't really know how to just pug and run around cause i just die with zero impact and am not good in that environment so i guess i have to find a different way to play and contribute towards winning.