Per-Character Ranked MMR#1024

Bumping #307 and #884. I know it’s been asked for again and again, but with the For Fun patch coming up and some big casual features completed, I want to bring this back to light for a future patch.

Per-character Ranked MMR is my top most wanted feature for game.

I imagine it’s a lot of work on the frontend+backend to implement per-character MMR. As a very heavy Ranked player I think it would be a phenomenal addition so I don’t have to go spin up an alt to see where my secondaries land. Also it’d be fun for content-creation reasons. This has been nearly uninamous from every player I’ve talked to.

The counterpoint to this feature has been the allowance of counterpicking. Paraphrasing here, but from what I’ve heard/read, “counterpicking is a core part of the competitive experience”, “per-character MMR would need to have counterpicking disabled”. Is Rivals 1’s ranked experience that bad? Why not copy that system and allow swapping to characters with lower MMR? I don’t have the stats, but I would assume that a good majority of players aren’t counterpicking their opponents in ranked except at the highest level.

(Edit: If counterpicking with characters must remain as is, then maybe there’s a solution with picking a roster of characters before you queue. Matchmaking could use the highest MMR from all the characters you’ve selected, which you’re then locked into during a set.)

A lot of players have been circumventing the current account-wide MMR by creating a Steam Family with their own alt accounts. Top streamers have admitted to this live.

I’m fairly certain the number of players who would play more Ranked with this feature would outnumber those who want counterpicking (with a higher MMR character).

I urge the dev team to reconsider/prioritize this. If this is a feature that is being considered but is just a lower priority at the moment, I would love to hear that is the case.

EDIT
Some counterarguments I’ve heard from a couple of people but I don’t think warrant not implementing per-character MMR:

• R2 has too small of a playerbase to support it.

I disagree. I don’t think playerbase size matters. A smaller playerbase may have a larger MMR disparity between players playing new characters, but this is already the case. If anything, this will encourage more players to play ranked matches with new characters, increasing the overall ranked player pool.

• High/Top ranked players will just use per-character MMR to smurf on newer or lower level players.

This already happens, and is an unavoidable issue without IP/MAC Address bans. Instead of incentivizing players to find workarounds via Steam Family sharing or multiple copies of the game, instead we should encourage these players to use their main Steam account and enjoy playing other characters in ranked.

To actually address the issue of pubstomping, there should be some sort of implementation of a minimum MMR, even on characters that haven’t been played before in the season. e.g. Your initial rank for an unranked character should start within 1-2 tiers or ~300 MMR of your highest ranked character. Numbers can be adjusted over time.

thanks for going in detail about this (again). I don’t want to repeat the same paragraphs like a broken record so i will keep it short: there is no downside to char based rank. even counter picking is not a real plus but can be seen either ways (as was already discussed before).
Other noticable advantages of char based rank (without any explanation, see older topics):

• shorter match setup time
• shorter queue times
• more players in the lower ranks
• more incentive to play ranked
• better matchmaking

This has been asked for since the games release. its been 1,5 years. It cannot possibly be so hard to implement. Once again this prooves to be a thing a larg part of the community wants but the devs don’t feel like prioritizing (“wE LiKe CoUnTeR pIcKs”) despite the current solution being unhealthy for the games player count.

i don’t think the current solution is unhealthy on its own. it works fine. the problem is that to learn a new character, you have to use casual(unranked), which is not ideal. Counterpicking is such an inconsequential part of the game until VERY high level, so I just fundamentally don’t agree with the concept. The number of players I have seen counterpick in a tournament are probably in the single digits or low double digits, total, over the entirety of Rivals 2 history. At a top level, the only ones that consistently counterpick based on matchup are Cakeassault, Beastly, I0n, and sometimes Stang0. It’s undeniably a part of any fighting game, and I see that, but it’s so much less in this game. Characters in this game are just fundamentally so strong that no matchups are ever unwinnable for them; even matchups like Etalus-Clairen aren’t nearly impossible. The other problem with “counterpicking” is that for players who aren’t at that very top level, it’s actively counterproductive, and they’d be better served by practicing the one character. While there is merit to a whole-elo system at a very top level, for the entirety of the playerbase below Aetherian it’s just worse. A lot of the “counterpicking” that happens right now is just people trying a new character out for a game, and when it doesn’t work, they switch back to their old character to hopefully keep some ELO. I really hope you choose to introduce character-based ranked soon. Please.