It's not hard to play solo, people just chose to team up because they know it gives them a tremendous advantage. As I've said before I play 90% solo and I have an over 80% win percentage in TDM and 60% in Ranked. My skill is usually enough to carry the team. If I play with just one party member, the win % is probably something like 95% in TDM (unscientific, obviously).
That's my point--if everyone had to deal with the same variables (inconsistent teammates, lack of synergy/communication) then it would balance out, and more games would be competitive overall. But with the current setup a full party, basically no matter the skill, will win at least 70% of the time. And the better ones will win 85%+ of the time.
It SHOULD be difficult to win consistently. Theoretically every match should end 40-39 if the game is matching teammates properly. But with parties involved, it throws everything off and the people who are most adversely affected are those who cannot or do not join a party.
Thank you. These teams that steamroll ranked in U4 would see MUCH worse results if they had to do it solo. Solo is the utmost test of skill because you are affected by all variables (your teammates and the enemy team) ALL the time. If you play with a good party, you know you have the advantage 85-90% of the time. It's not competitive. I've been in parties where one player alone has determined the outcome of the game (I'm talking 25-30 downs/KOs). I've also watched streams on Twitch where literally the top five players on the Ranked Leaderboard are playing together and they literally never lose. Put them into a solo game and it's a markedly different story. They're still better than the average player, but they're not winning 99.2% of their games. It's a joke.
The 5-10% of the time when a party full of elite players runs into an actual challenge (meaning they run into a similar beefed-up party) is like a bump in the road as opposed to a true test of skill. As soon as that match is over they will go back to steamrolling teams for the next 15-20 matches.
Not intending to be rude man but do you or the other poster even play at or near master rank? Most of the matches I find are parties. Also, winning 60% of the time while solo sounds like a hard time to me. If you're good and your not currently placed within the correct bracket you should be winning a lot more frequently, but of course, the variability of team mates and such makes that hard.
The biggest issue with the matchmaking is that you can drop out. So what we see in ranked is that while we will find stacked parties 80-90% of the time, these parties often drop out of the matchmaking in the hopes that they can find an easier game. We would often see this more than 5 times in row, at which point the matchmaking gives up and starts 'searching for players'. This needs to be fixed.
But as for splitting the queues, that's neat that League are trying something, but games like Halo, Rainbow Six, Gears of War, Call of Duty are not, and League itself has also had seven years of dynamic queuing. You originally offered the impression that practically every other ranked experience is offering better, but the reality is that they're not.
Ultimately if we're talking real competition, real esports, the best players are not discerned from one another on any of these online ranking systems and for the most part these ranking systems are designed with the practical constraints of the game, relative to the games competitive validity in mind. Uncharted 4 is not an esport and never will be, so why would Naughty Dog (or the developers of any of these games without a huge esports scene) split up a relatively small community, undergo additional development work, pushing for a system that's ultimately less practical and convenient for its player base.
At master rank on Uncharted 4, I play with a party of between 3 and 5 people, and we regularly see the same players, as if the game only has 10 or so teams queuing at any one time. If you split the playists between solo and parties where would parties of 2, 3 and 4 play? In the 5 man playlist where they'd get stomped by 5 mans? How would the 4 man playlists find an extra player? Heck, I have sat on the menus of this game for over 10 minutes trying to find a game at Diamond and Master ranks, how would anyone find a game if we begin dividing the player pool?
At the end of the day Naughtydog have no intentions to shape Uncharted 4 into the next big e-sport, so it doesn't make sense to focus a system so heavily on competitive validity at the cost of practicality. Look at the scoreboards in ranked, look at the players at the top of the leaderboards, for the most part the ranking system is doing an at least, reasonable job of rewarding the better players. If you're playing solo you're likely to have a harder time, yes, but ultimately that's the nature of the game, and the resolution to that, isn't worth the practical expense.
As I say, what many parties were intentionally doing to boost their rank in season 2, was matchmaking until they found solo queuers, and backing out if they found a party. I believe Naughtydog have spoken about resolving this, what I would recommend is waiting until they issue a fix for this issue, and then seeing if you have a better experience. Either way, as someone that hops between ranked console modes of various games, I'm not accepting the argument that Uncharted is the worst, or that everything is better elsewhere. League and DotA, which have had similar issues for numerous years, have player bases that are many folds larger than Uncharted 4's, lending these games to more flexible solutions while more comparable experiences like Rainbow Six, Halo, Gears of War and Call of Duty have experienced similar issues to what we face on Uncharted 4.
