Preface/Backstory/Completely Skippable if you're not interested in the OP

Hi all. I'm Cyanjet, I'm on this sub a bit so some may recognize me, but, as a brief background, I'm a Multi-masters Wraith main with ~25k kills who absolutely abhors playing arenas.

I'm someone who would rather no-fill into storm point than touch arenas with a 10 foot pole. However, with the new season coming up, I decided to try to change up my game by running a slightly altered sensitivity and layout. The best place to get into fights with my guns of choice to smooth out my aim was arenas, so I decided to spend a bit of my weekend to play ranked arenas for the first time in a few seasons.

After placements, I started in P2, and, by the time the new settings felt good, I was already D3 so I thought, "why not?" and just started finishing my grind...a terrible, terrible mistake.

​

Observations on the Ranked Arenas Experience

• Matchmaking is Horrendous
  • The main cause of difficulty for ranked arenas has to be its matchmaking. Especially if you're solo. The player population is low, ridiculously low even on NA East servers(my servers of choice).
  • I swear that the only reason you don't see your teammates ranked in the loading screen is because Respawn doesn't want you to know how poor Ranked Arenas matchmaking is for the sake of shorter queue times.
  • Out of my ~100 games in Ranked Arenas, most of my teammates fell under bronze, silver, or gold.
  • Due to how low the population was, I often found myself in very lopsided matches. Either I had Gold and silver teammates and fought against gold and silver teams, full plat teams, or I had silver and gold teammates against a 3 stack of Preds.
  • Truly even matchups were few and far between.
  • You can, and will, see the same teammates as either allies or enemies. I'm pretty sure by the end of my matches I could recognize the names and habits of about 20 of my teammates/enemies.
• Cheaters and Smurfs were found on the way, but not as many as you'd expect
  • I came across about 6 unique cheaters
    • When I say cheaters, I mean hard aimbot. I have no clue if a person is walling or doing recoil scripts, so I don't accuse that. If somebody is able to use a havoc cross map or if I spectate them and see bullets curving in like it's the movie, Wanted, then I suspect cheating.
    • Unfortunately, the whole, low population issue led to facing the same cheaters over, and over, and over again
    • Two cheaters I came across on Sat in a ton of games tried to make it seem like they were controller players and very loudly just kept talking about paddles and settings. When I spectated them though later on after losing to them even with pred teammates, I found this:

​

First clip was me with 2 preds getting hit hard by the guy whose aim snaps. Second is me matched on their team and having a chance to see the second on his team curving his bullets. Props to the pred team for beating them even when they toggled.

• Probably because I started the ranked grind 4 days before the split ends, I came across quite a few people who openly admitted to being on smurfs to help their friends to get to their goal rank in arenas.
  • one funny occasion that comes to mind was a pair of gold and silver ranked players who got paired with me when we were up against a masters 3 stack (I believe I was D3 at the time). When I acted surprised that they were gold and said that matchmaking was stupid for putting us up against current masters one of them acted indignant and said he was an arena pred on his smurf to play with his gf (which actually turned out to be true even if we still got absolutely floored, I ended up facing them later on and have a tip associated with them).
• The Mozambique is King
  • If you face preds, you know what to expect. Round 1: white mozam, Round 2 Purple mozam.
• Ranked Arenas Players Have been overwhelmingly more toxic than BR in my experience
  • I've had my share of terrible BR teammates this season (I duo queue BR to masters every split), but good lord the amount of people with huge egos or lecturing I've had from players who have 1/5 of my damage in a match is maddening.
  • The "wait until you're dead to turn on your mic then berate your team" mentality is not exclusive to BR unfortunately.
  • There have been plenty of teammates I've had who are friendly and communicative, but bad experiences linger longer than good ones.
• The system as a predetermined Rank it expects you to be at and doles out AP depending on how close you are to that rank.
  • I was gaining 100 in Ranked until about D3 when I started to slow down. D3 averaged about 80, d2 averaged around 50, then D1 went from 30->20 towards the end.
    • this could be due to my BR rank being masters by the time I started ranked arenas
    • I had never fully climbed Arenas up until this point
  • People that i was speaking to in my matches were telling me that they had been hard capped at 12 in plat.
    • When asked, their highest BR rank was Plat as well

Tips on How You Can Rank Up

• Prepare to lose
  • Matchmaking in Arenas is unfair. To a ridiculous extent. Some matches may be easy while others are going to be completely stacked against you.
    • truly fair matches are few and far between
  • You're going to have to accept that there are going to be plenty of matches where you're just not going to win and look to the fair or easier matches to recover what you lose.
• Learn the Mozambique
  • Reads patch notes... well this point is useless now
  • If hammerpoints ever come back, prepare to deal with mozambiques again, but for now, it's better to learn bubble fighting and shotgun rushes if I remember correctly.
    • Any people who were grinding prior to hammerpoint's reintroduction please correct me if I'm wrong here.
• Communicate effectively (and a quick guide on how to communicate)
  • This may sound like me saying that the sky is blue, but hear me out here.
  • Priorities before you start shooting
    • communicating with your team how you're going to push and where the location of the enemies are is paramount.
    • if the enemies are split, let your team know that (and it's usually a good idea to try to collapse on the lone flanker)
  • When you're shooting.
    • Let your teammates know who you damaged and how much.
    • They're 1 shot is a terrible callout unless they are actually sub 50 hp. Especially if I can call you on your BS since there was no callout by the system that you even cracked their shield. After this journey through arenas I refuse to react to that call with how many times I've rushed in only to see the person barely tickled after their shield cracked with his teammate right behind him
    • If you're not sure, give an approximate or what gun the guy you were shooting at was using: Ex) the guy with the charge rifle hit 140 or the guy chasing you was hit 50 on flesh so your teammate can turn around
  • if you do it correctly, ideally your enemies will accuse you of cheating
    • the guy accusing me is the arena pred on his smurf that I mentioned before (yes I'm petty)
    • The matchup was the pred smurf, a gold lifeline, and a current diamond horizon vs myself(d3 at the time, and my gold silver teammates
• Solo queueing is really only viable until you reach diamond
  • With how inconsistent matchmaking is, once you reach diamond level you really should search out at least 1 teammate to join you in your struggle. It will minimize the RNG of whether you get a fair matchup or a completely lopsided one
  • I regret not grouping up with a few of the people who invited me just to say that I solo queued to Arena Masters because it was headache inducing
  • you can solo to masters, but it's mind numbing
• Know when to stop for the session.
  • The population of ranked arenas is pitifully small. So you know that any matchup you have now, you will probably see again in 3-4 matches. If you see a pred 3 stack or a cheater, chances are you'll see them again pretty soon.
  • To avoid a cheater or a high rank 3 stack, just call it a night or do a different mode for the rest of your session and try again tomorrow.