Ezradekezra wrote:gergthegog wrote:Can we PLEASE get ANY and NK back in ranked. It's the only serious gamemode left and it's boring as hell without ANY or the random NE/NK
do i need to revive my petition from a year ago
Ah yes, the petition asking those requesting the return of NK for gameplay over balance reasons to jump wholesale into a full random mode. Because yes, that's exactly the problem we were highlighting (sigh).
The concerns most of us had was that the technical balancers argument was moving inevitably towards making Ranked a straight Town vs Mafia plus allied not-quite-Mafia-but-might-as-well-be NE. Fine on paper, but with the current imbalance between Maf and Town roles, the risk was that games would have a quite a high level of predictability and tend to veer sharply in favour of one side or the other by D2/3 with only Town having any viable options to recover from the losing streak if they happened to have the right roles in play (typically Escort or Transporter). In short, games would get dull and repetitive quickly. The inevitable answer would be MOAR TECHNICAL BALANCE, leading inevitably to a brick wall at which most of the existing roles would need to be completely rewritten and/or banned from Ranked, again increasing balance at the risk of even greater repetition.
Ranked has already gone far enough down that path that most of us arguing against it have conceded that the argument, for better or worse, has been lost. The request since then has really been more about having an additional game-mode added which is a hybrid of the Legacy Ranked list (with NB, NK and Any) and the balance learnings from the greater number of RTs present in more recent Ranked lists. It wouldn't have ELO, so concerns about "aarrrrgh, vampires..." would no longer apply, and would be capable of fielding the full set of roles to minimise repetitive games and outcomes. It'd likely be slightly town-sided, as Legacy Ranked was, but with a clearer starting point of balance than All Any (which, fun though it is, is something else entirely). And yes, kingmakers would be a thing from time to time. And on the plus side, anything which helped deal with the Ranked meta-strategies would also benefit this secondary mode.
But no, no...so insidious and horrifying was our perspective that we deserved only to be outcast, isn't that right Ezra?