REMOVE ALL CHAT + other improvements to ranked
TL;DR: All chat is nothing but a platform for trolls, a means for team mates to get distracted, or for team mates to accidentally share private information about the current fight.
Remove all chat. There is undeniably no reason to have all chat in a team player vs. player game. It has literally no benefits, but many reasons it ruins the game. It allows salty players to become distracted by typing out insults. It allows trolls a platform to irritate you. Even in a peaceful game where there is no negativity going on, it still opens the potential for players to become distracted while replying to their enemies.
Some might say "well you can just turn all chat off for yourself". But this does not solve the problem. You would still be on a team with other players who potentially (and most likely) will have all chat enabled. This means that you might still have to deal with a salty team mate stopping to insult the enemy and wasting time by doing so. Or a team mate who is getting frustrated by a troll on the enemy team and becomes distracted reading their comments and replying to them. Or even team mates having peaceful conversations becoming distracted and getting killed or not preforming to the best of their abilities. Another problem I've seen a lot is when your team accidentally types out vital private information about the game play that assists the enemy by disclosing a plan or detail.
Furthermore, I would argue that even for people who do not want all chat, it is required to have it enabled since it exists. Because that way at least you can see what is going on and will then have the opportunity to defuse a negative situation. So for people like me who do not want all chat to exist, we are forced to enable it, so we have a full understanding of what is going on and have the potential to calm our team mates down, ex.
Lastly, since we have an opportunity to speak with our enemy after the match (like in most other team based pvp games) we have even less of a reason for it to exist in game. We would still be able to communicate to our enemy that we had a troll or afk so that they could help in reporting them, we could still discuss plays, congratulate each other ex. I fully believe that if all chat was removed from ranked play, lots more people would enjoy the game and it would help to balance and quell trolling.
make lateral progression easier.
We have 5 leagues with 5 divisions each. Yet an overwhelming majority of players sit in the bottom 2 leagues. Obviously this means that the system is completely flawed. Bronze is a cesspool of wacky insane imbalance. You have trolls, smurfs, newbies and sometimes genuinely terrible players all clumped together. Solo que becomes nothing but a game of chance and luck for 95% of the players in bronze and silver.
I just think it would be fun to have proof of my skill. I think that after almost two years of playing this game with 800+ games in ranked this year alone I deserve to be placed higher than B5 from provisionals. I don't want to cheat and make a smurf to trick the system, I want to use my main.
Find a way to make smurfing less common
I don't know how this could be done. But undeniably the game is ruined when extremely experienced platinum and diamond players join solo que on smurfs and massively tip the scales. They allow bad players to get lucky and progress where they don't belong, and they take away deserved wins from decent players that should be moving up.
Make solo que ACTUALLY SOLO QUE. where every single team member is by themselves and not with a friend. In my opinion, if you don't have a full team of friends to make a ranked group together, you shouldn't be allowed to do ranked with them at all. This creates games where you get two friends who don't communicate with their team mates and throw games.
