I don’t think you understand the impact of new queues and tighter matchmaking (literally contradictory goals); framing it as something where you sacrifice a couple extra minutes per queue and end up with essentially perfectly balanced matches. That simply isn’t how it works out in reality, and that goes doubly for ranked queues. Adding new ranked queues is always an incredibly slippery slope because it fractures the playerbase and degrades the quality of all queues until one becomes the defacto only queue anyhow, because player tolerance for low quality games in ranked systems is not high. Even a game like League, with probably 10x or more the number of ranked players, has seen the impact of this. Dynamic queue has always been a shitshow because there isn’t enough of a playerbase to ensure reasonable queue times and quality games, and because the games are of lower quality it isn’t taken as seriously as a ranked mode and all the issues feed into one another and spin out of control. I am all for the matchmaking wait time being raised to five minutes, but I do not think it’s going to have the impact you think it will. All those really poorly made matches provide an incredible amount of pressure relief on the system, and if you force only matches within even tighter perimeters (especially with like requiring one support per team) the queue times will absolutely skyrocket. The premade queues, though, I think shouldn’t be put in. Or I should say, you can’t balance the game around both soloQ and premades, and the game doesn’t have a large enough PvP population to support both. I don’t personally care which one it is but the devs should pick one and stick with it, and since soloQ is already in that just feels like the choice they would go with. What the PvP in this game actually needs is two-fold: the aesthetic ranking system needs to be made less elitist and the mechanics and UI need to be clearer.
With regards to the aesthetic ranks, having like 80-90% of your players be “bronze” is so crazily dumb, and I don’t know what the other ranking systems are like in Korea (though I hear their version of LA no longer uses this system so I imagine this isn’t a common standard or anything), but in the West it’s almost like gaslighting the players. The specific brackets change but we heavily associate bronze with being bad, silver with being ok, gold with being decent, and then everything above that being various degrees of good. Overwatch is more normalized with gold being the middle of the bell curve, and League is less normalized with silver being the middle of the bell curve, but they’re in the same general ball park. I don’t know exactly what the percentages are since they made the 100 MMR bump last month but before that it was like 88-90% of players in bronze, meaning that being in silver would be the equivalent of being plat in League.
This is bad for a lot of reasons. Obviously it’s highly discouraging for players to be branded with a rank that they see as essentially a mark of shame, especially for players who aren’t… actually bronze. Someone who is ok a video games and usually hovers around mid silver to low gold is going to feel a lot of dissonance when they see that in Lost Ark they’re at like 1230-1300 MMR and deep in bronze territory. It’s going to feel bad, and they’re going to feel even worse when they’re struggling to improve and even breaking barely into silver is 200 MMR off. Except they shouldn’t feel bad: they’re playing just as well as ever and to break into silver here would mean they’d have to be better at Lost Ark than they were at any other game they’ve played. And then for people who are actually bronze, skill-wise – even if they’re ok with that as a starting point because it reflects their perception of their own skill – it’s going to feel really bad when they get so little visual feedback on their journey to being better. There is going to be a wild difference in skill between someone who is 1100 and someone who is 1400 MMR, but they’re both bronze and they both get precisely the same end-of-season rewards.
In a more general sense having the system skewed as it is is poor design because it doesn’t achieve its ostensible goal of marking off different skill levels. In any game there are significant differences between the 30th percentile and the 50th, and the 70th after that. Treating them all the same is simply incorrect. Moreover, especially in a system that is percentage-based, it’s even worse because there must always be a worst player. If you removed everyone under diamond from the system and forced everyone above diamond to play a new round of placements, the worst current diamond player would be the new bronze 250 MMR player. The more niche a game becomes the less reflective the aesthetic rankings become of meaningful skill levels, and starting it off already incredibly elitist exacerbates this issue. It hurts no one to give the “bad” players their own series of ranks to progress through with their own rewards, since the ranks above them still exist and still give better and more prestigious awards.
Next, the game just needs to be more clearly laid out, period. The tiered CC and CC immunity system makes for compelling gameplay, but it simply isn’t explained well. The localization here needs to be absolute peak priority and the game in general needs a tutorial added that explains and teaches the PvP mecahnics and UI elements at least a little bit. The PvP in LA is already incredibly punishing to new players and that shouldn’t be made even worse because of a poor UX experience. There needs to be like icons associated with each stagger tier, and each immunity CC tier, and every ability needs to be labeled with them. Then the classes need to be much easier to pick out at a glance from the name cards. This is a smaller thing but again, more clarity please. A lot of the icons are samey and none are color coded.
To sum up, I would move the aesthetic ranking system more left along the bell curve to match a system like League’s at least, in addition to (or at least) giving players their percentile standing in addition to their absolute standing (not knowing how many players are on the ladderboard total makes an absolute standing kind of meaningless), and I would make the UX much better and clearer in addition to adding a set of PvP tutorials. If you do these things the game will still be fairly arcane to get into, but it will drive away far fewer players.
Edit: I would also add in one final thing in the form of class-specific MMRs. There’s only so much you can learn from doing normals before further development requires you move to ranked, but there’s also a large gap between that point and wherever you are on your main in all likelihood. This leaves new classes you’re learning in a kind of limbo where you have to tank your peak rating and troll games to get better training on them, or just never truly bring them up to speed. The primary downside would be that it would inflate the ladder numbers but I don’t think that’s a huge deal overall. You could also have a class you didn’t care about and troll games, which I would see as a legitimate argument against it, but I also personally would take that over being forced to unintentionally troll games by playing a class you aren’t good enough on at your main’s Elo.
Edit2: Can’t believe I forgot to mention this but another wacky and awful consequence of the ranking distributions is that the system starts you off at 1500, except that’s not the middle of the bell curve. 1500 and silver actually being reasonably high up the ladder means that not only are 80% of players going to end up in bronze, but 95% of that group is going to go on a pretty sizeable losing spree to start off their ranked experience after having been dropped into 1500 MMR games. This feels bad for the new players and also feels bad for the people actually supposed to be in that Elo range randomly getting someone that doesn’t belong there and is on their way down. This is going to happen no matter where they’re put, but starting them in the top 20% of the ladder means 80% of players are going to start off out of their depth, versus starting them off at the 50th percentile meaning it’s at least a coin flip instead of overwhelmingly the case. It also means the players out of their depth are way out of their depth. A 50th percentile player being dropped into an 80th percentile game is a much larger gap than a 40th percentile player being dropped into a 50th percentile game.