What if the quick match and ranked queues, we’re a single queue?
Then to those who might be anxious about their rank, to provide an option to hide their rank; while they’d still matchmake based on their hidden rank.
Queue times would be shorter for all game modes. Which if more game modes are introduced, this becomes increasingly important.
Silver/ Gold / plat players would have more competitive match ups, vs being matched to someone outside their rank.
What’s the downsides?
Maybe not a bad idea.
Might actually shorten the queue-times a LOT and lower the frustration there, hence enlarge the community as players will be more likely to be searching for matches in higher numbers.
Whereas it is very much possible to also build pressure on casual players which are currently enjoying the generally more chill, less competitive quickmatch-queue.
If these people were scared off, the community could potentially suffer from that in the longer run.
I personally would love your idea though, as I’m purely playing ranked queue (1v1, but also 2v2/3v3/4v4 with friends and sometimes 2v2 with randoms) and would appreciate a larger and more diverse playerpool with shorter queue-times.
Not sure if everyone thinks that way.
That’s where I think there’s an unwarranted bias to ranked that the matches are ‘harder’. QM and ranked games share the same start & same win conditions. When you QM the hidden ELO kicks in as a quasi rank for matchmaking. So the better you get in QM, the better opponents you face in QM. Just like ranked.
Separately to combat the pro argument, ‘but I don’t want to affect my rank by playing a match!’, if you want to try some new build - go to a custom match or play absurd ai. On a similar vein, most of these pro players already have multiple accounts for this very purpose. Putting QM and ranked together, won’t lead to a change in their behavior - they’ll just use multiple accounts as they currently do. No harm / no foul.