Ranked Grievances - Suggestions on how to Make Ranked sPvP Fun and Rewarding

I'll start by saying i'm not one to complain. I've never made forum posts or reddit posts to complain about gamemodes, features, updates etc even when everyone wasn't exactly jumping on that lootbox bandwagon, and I won't be all too surprised if this gets removed. I really enjoy Guild Wars 2 and my favorite part and the only part I can really enjoy post endgame is PvP/WvW. SPvP in particular happens to be my personal favorite, and that's what brings me to complain now. It's been deteriorating for a while and I believe in this current season it's peaked in toxicity, manipulation, and general unfunness to play. I see people complain about this all the time, so I assume the issue has been brought to the attention of the developers and the team related to PvP balance, but given the silence and unchanged state of Ranked for over the past year, I guess I can only add to the growing amount of voices shouting into the responseless void, begging for change. I'll gladly do that, as I love the game and PvP; Unranked especially remains my favorite part of Gw2 and I want nothing more than for it to grow and evolve and see new people start playing it. All that being said the following is a mixture of mostly opinion, criticism, and loose fact from a disgruntled veteran player. I'm not forcing my views on anyone, just merely hoping to bring more attention to some of these issues in that hopes that the collective complaining from the small PvP player population will warrant some change.I'll split this post into two parts. The first will be discussing(what I believe) to be the fundamentally broken parts of Ranked, and the matchmaker in general. The second will be more of a meta discussion as, much like Ranked; that's more broken and not fun than it's ever been before."FUN"DAMENTALS-The biggest and most unforgivable problem is the seemingly random way rank points are added/subtracted. It seems to do things the Overwatch way: where regardless of your personal performance and how close the match is you are almost always guaranteed to lose more than you'd earn from a win. Everyone who's played Ranked understands this. You're rewarded maybe 9-14 points for a win and you are deducted 14-18 for a loss. It creates an endless cycle of one step forward, two steps back where it's nearly impassable to climb out of your current rank, and makes dropping down to lower ranks much easier.To make matters worse, it punishes winstreaks so hard; that if you accumulate two wins in a row, and finally start climbing; that dream is quickly crushed, and you find yourself matched with much lower ranked players to compensate for your winstreak. This could be the deciding factor in the loss you're about to receive as with greater rank disparity comes more unpredictable matches. A loss in that position means you'll lose more, BUT in that case it's acceptable that the matchmaker has forced you into a carry role, and in all honesty the matchmaker isn't too wrong to be doing this. If you're winning game after game then you SHOULD to be matched with higher enemies and lower teammates, but what it gets completely and utterly wrong is that the rank gain remains unchanged. If you're rolling and carrying you shouldn't be getting +9 for a win at that point. You should be gaining around +18 and so on, because whether it's luck or skill you're performing much better than your current rank, subverting even the matchmaker's expectations.Aside from winstreaks being improved to give more rank, on the opposite end I believe losing streaks should be punished with additional rank loss. Games like Paladins do this, where if you're consistently performing below other players at or around your rank, you are dropped quite harshly. This hurts boosted players, balances the rewards for winstreaks, and puts climbing at a much more steady pace.In general rank gain/loss needs to take in personal performance as well. Let's say you aren't streaking, and you're winning a few games, then losing that same amount back and forth(as many players often do.) As it stands now you are guaranteed to lose rank in that situation. You cannot climb, and you will drop; even though such a performance would indicate a player is exactly where they should be in terms of rank. If they aren't playing well enough to carry, but aren't playing bad enough to be loosing many games in a row; then they should stay where they are, and not be punished for it, because it shows they're right where they should be in rank. So in theory the fix to this is +10 for a win, -10 for a loss; although, the game should recognize how well you did in that win and loss and change your gain based on that. Did you lose, but you had every top stat while your team afked in spawn saying "gg?" Then you shouldn't lose double what you'd get from a win, your performance should warrant that you lose less compared to your team, who did nothing; got nothing, and therefore should lose more. Same could be applied to winning. Were you carried? Or did you carry? The better you perform the more you should gain, even if only in the ever-so-slightest amounts. This ensures that players being held back by their team or holding back their team are always slowly climbing, or slowly falling.The other fundamental problems with Ranked lie in the toxicity of the players, and while you could blame it on the players themselves to some extent; sPvP, and Ranked in particular seems to encourage some of this behavior. Some of the biggest problems are wintrading and idle players. Which, while hard to distinguish; they should both be punished WAAAAY more severely than they are now regardless if they're throwing for money or just for lack of caring. This is supposed to be competitive play. If someone is sitting in the spawn saying "gg" mocking their team's attempt to 4v5, that is easily recognizable in a report. Reports for Match Manipulation/Idling need to be taken far more seriously, as do the punishments for the players involved.I propose that if someone is idle/feeding they should be given a huge rank penalty; something truly substantial like -50 up to -100 as well as a temporary ban from competitive play, fit with all the decay that comes with it. Repeat offenders as in people bold enough to try this twice, should be banned for entire seasons, or ranked entirely.I must note this doesn't apply to leavers or people who get disconnected as severely; as that cannot always be helped, and the team isn't penalized in guild wars for someone leaving anyway; unlike in most games, which I really really like about Gw2 Ranked! Repeat leavers should be investigated more thoroughly though, as wintraders are much more likely to attempt this other than outright throwing. If names on both the enemy team and the person leaving keep showing up then something is probably way off. Especially if some of the enemy team happen to be top 10 on the leaderboards. If and when they're exposed, wintraders deserve permanant bans from ranked play, or at the very least the rest of the season they manipulated, because right now they stand out in abundance as a symptom of a sick and dying gamemode.People are more likely to throw and stoop to idling when they're being rewarded for doing so as well. Pips and the rewards that come with them quickly add up, and you can get a fair amount of gold and ascended shards with minimal effort. I personally think pips should only be awarded on wins. That way idle-players aren't being rewarded for ruining multiple people's experiences. It is; by all means, absolutely ridiculous that they're able to not only get away with, but profit from that.Decay and the people abusing it need to be stopped. Decay in Gw2 is the one thing that shouldn't stray so far from other competitive games. If decay is so temporary and so easily earned back, people can go extended periods without playing, and they don't get punished for it. Infact you'd actually benefit from allowing yourself to decay all season, only stepping in at certain intervals to play it away quickly, just to keep up with the leaderboard. Because it only drops your effective rating, not your actual rating; you will be matched with lower level players who actually try for their rank, and when you predictably steamroll them, you earn back all that decay and then some. Don't believe me? Go on the leaderboards a few days after the "Minimum games required" updates. You will find nearly all the top players just baaaarely meet that minimum requirement. That's because they're exploiting decay. They place high at the start of the season and exploit decay to keep their high rank. Decay should work like in every other game. It shouldn't ever encourage you not to play as a strategic move! Decay; to put it simple, should be the same as losing an actual game until you resume activity. Temporary visible ranking should not exist, it should all be streamlined as effective rating.Also, It sets on far too quick in Gw2, and the fact that there's no difference between how a bronze/silver/gold and a plat/legendary decay is absolutely absurd. Lower levels should decay much slower, after maybe two weeks without play. Higher levels after maybe a week tops, and again what they lose from decay, they should actually lose.These are just some suggestions to get rid of the toxicity. As I said earlier, it's impassable to blame Arenanet entirely when the problem lies with the players, but something should be done to ensure toxicity is discouraged. One last personal thought here before I move on: Maybe everyone wouldn't be so toxic, if people were actually happy and rewarded for their time in ranked :x Just a thought, but when you design your system to be so punishing, and to keep people feeling angry, cheated, humiliated, and ashamed; it should come at no surprise when they're all bitter and resentful of eachother... When they end up losing rank regardless of how well they perform. When every step forward is two steps back. When other players idle and give up mid-match in ranked play. And especially when the only people who come out on top are people who pay for it and/or wait for it. Yes, people are going to become negative. There's nothing stopping them from being negative in general, but if people felt the slightest amount of fun and acknowledgement they'd probably be more positive.META/BALANCE CONCERNS-I said I would split this post into two major segments, but in retrospect the poorly balanced state of sPvP could be written off as fundamentally broken. Nevertheless, I feel like this topic is always far more subject to personal preferences and opinion so I feel like it should still be split, but I won't have all too much to say.The first and most prevalent issue is mesmer. It's gone from being strong, to incredibly overpowered in these last few patches. Bunker Chrono in particular is so insanely powerful and boring to fight against it's a wonder that it's been able to go this long without being emergency nuked, buried under 60 feet of concrete, and never used again. They have ludicrous survivability through blocks, perma stability, evades, blinds, condition cleanse and multiple distorts, while at the same time; they retain decent damage, high CC, and mobility. Most of this has to do with the buffs to staff and the changes to how phantasms and clones work, but regardless it's not very fun to fight at all. Mesmer; in my opinion, was at its best when you could dish out a lot of damage whether it be condi or power, but you still had to work to stay alive and kite to some extent. It's gone from being one of the hardest to play, and most respectable to those that could master, to a faceroll flavor of the month class that everyone can play with way too little thought or effort.Scourge also suffers from this problem, albeit to a lesser extent. There's been efforts to nerf Scourge's cooldowns, but that's honestly the wrong way to go about tuning them. The real solution is to stop removing the other profession's abilities to nullify and counter it. Every nerf to every condition cleanse, CC, and resistance uptime in the game hurts our ability to counter what many consider the decidedly easiest way to play the game: Condition damage/Scourge. Nearly every class in the game has lost access to one or more ways to counter condi in these last few patches, which has made it extra prevalent in all levels of play, and all the more easier to get away with than ever.My final thought here will be a plea to the balance team. They have a tendency to take something that needs to be tuned and either nuke it to oblivion, or make it exponentially more powerful than it needs to be. There needs to be some communication between them and the players so we break this cycle of classes getting hit way too hard in either direction. When something needs adjusting, even the slightest single change can dramatically alter how that profession and certain specializations play. It's really overwhelming when so many things get changed at once, and that's often how builds like the invincible chronomancer are born. Stop giving us a mile when we ask for an inch. Path of Fire has been out for nearly 8 months. When an entire expansion comes out, it's expected that there may be some imbalances, but this far along, the player base and the balance team ought to be working together to find out what needs to be fine tuned and just ever so slightly when the need arises. Not have everything shift dramatically in constant flux. The worse off this gets, the more nuke-ish nerfs need to be dropped, and it seems in doing so the more fundamental problems sPvP suffers from get ignored.Rather than completely bash there's a a handful of things I'd like to end by praising Arenanet for. One being the removal of 5 stack parties from ranked. Some people really hated that, I personally love it. They made up such a small percentage of the player base to begin with, and it's a relief to know I can solo/duo Q without having to worry about getting matched up with a premade that's easily going to roll and waste time. I do wish there wasn't a rank cap on duo Q-ing though. You should be able to play with a friend with the only limit being someone much lower rating than yourself. A lot of the balance patches go unappreciated as well. I for one am very thankful things like Auramancer ele, bunker druid, Firebrand, and spellbreaker were fixed, and in the right ways. Most of them are still viable even if some of the nerfs were a bit overkill. As I mentioned earlier in the post, I like that if someone on your team leaves or disconnects in your ranked match, you aren't punished for it. Lasty, I commemorate them for creating a gamemode fun at it's core as well, and all 9 unique and interesting professions and their respected elite specializations. They all play quite differently, and learning a build for each is always a fun experience at its core.Now pls just make Ranked that funI'd like to know what people think of such concepts, if they sound feasible or not. Any criticism I offered comes out of a place of love and care for the gamemode and the players.

please split your post up more this is actually impossible to read

Remove solo q ranked entirely, add rewards to unranked, seperate rewards from competitive game modes.