I never got the feeling that Wreck was trying to speak for me or for the community at large here. By that logic, no one could post any topics of concern anywhere on the forums ever which is obviously something that would be horrible for the community.
Anyway, there are some spectacularly bad takes in this thread now, but there are one or two related points that are interesting to me. Those being: why are there fewer active high rated players, and the related why are the newer high rated players worse than the OGs.
I'll try to tackle both at the same time since they're, imo, closely related. I feel like I've been high rated adjacent for a while now, hovering 1900-2k in both mapgen and setons, and I'm sure I'd get to about the same in 3v3 and 4v4 tmm if I actually played them. My personal top two blockers for improving are: it takes far more effort for me at this point than I'm willing to put in and even when I was more active I could barely play with top players due to my timezone. The latter is getting worse as fewer and fewer top players are active, and due to rating inflation there are arguably worse players at 2k now than in the past. Some might even argue I'm one of them
It's hard for me to say, but imo the last point is slightly overblown outside of a few niche areas. Not going to name names, but I can think of more than one person who has massive rating inflation because they have one or two troll strategies that consistently win vs the 1300s they play vs but get wrecked vs competent 1800+ rated players. This is more of a thing in burger Setons or presumably gap as well rather than mapgen though, where there are few if any high rated players keeping this in check. For example, when Yudi was active in these games this rating inflation was much less severe. Due to that last bit, I don't think I see this quite as much in more generic team games. Granted, I also haven't played in 6 months, but I'd be surprised if the average 2k in those games are very noticeably worse than 2ks from 5 years ago. It might just be rose tinted glasses for the past making it feel that way.
Back to the first point about fewer top players, I just think most 2ks are like myself - don't have the interest or drive to keep improving at this point because there's so little competition and then there are a tiny amount of people like Farms who are far above the random 2ks. Imo it's hard to improve when you're already the best in most of the lobbies that you play in unless you put in a lot of work outside of it, so those who aren't playing with the handful of top players right now are going to be pretty stuck.
How to fix this? Honestly I don't have great ideas there, only two things come to mind and both are related to 1v1 ladder, since I think the death of higher rated ladder play is a very large part of this.
- Bring back the feature from the python client that tells you when someone your rank is queuing ladder. People have been asking for this forever, and it feels like such an uncontroversial and low hanging fruit to achieve.
- Throw even more money at it. Top active ladder players get a cash prize each season if eligible. More tournaments. Even bigger LoTS prizes, though iirc last years was quite large so probably not much can be done there. Let former top players know that these prizes exist and that there's more competition. I think the ship has sailed with most of them, but who knows? This also might incentives some current ~1800+ players to improve.
Again, particularly the 2nd idea, isn't the best idea. It's just what I have off the cuff.
Hopefully my stream of consciousness rambling makes at least some amount of sense and people don't think I'm way off