Casual 1v1 with two diffrent maps, the standard map the ranked mode uses OR the casual map of the day. Could be country specific or other themes. Would be nice to duel on other things then the world map all the time

Would be a huge help in player development between ranks

Yes please. I really wanna practise without fear of loosing my ranked matches.

Adding a Casual Mode is definetly a good idea. Personally I never had issues with queue times in this game (maximum 20s). Probably the higher your rank is, the longer the queue times are. But from my experience, in most games, high rated players are not intersted in playing unranked anyway.

Maybe the ranked mode itself in bronze, silver, gold should be changed a bit, becuase the current "casual mode" starts after the 20 weekly games. I think only the first 20 games of the week mattering and all others only affecting your rating has quite a couple issues.

First in bronze, silver, gold it only determines, what opponents you get and not how much points you gain. Therefore the best possible way to climb would be to lock in for 20 games, then deboost your account for the rest of the week, so you get weaker opponents. And have 20 easy games for next week. (You can't lose weekly points)

Also it happens to me in gold 3, that after the 20 games I get matched against master players. If I win, I steal them 10-30 rating (in master+ it matters), while I am hurting myself by winning, because I'll get stronger opponents in the following week.

The easiest fix in my opinion, would be

1) To add an unranked mode for poeple, who want to play for fun.

2) To get rid of the weekly point system, make rating count at all ranks and let players play more than 20 ranked games per week.

For me (I was going to suggest this myself) the main benefit isn't even for playing casual games, nor for myself. It just would improve the experience in so many different ways.

I'm significantly better at moving, so ever playing NM or NMPZ rated duels would make no sense - unless/until I get the option to practice unrated enough that I won't be slaughtered by equally rated opponents. Playing NM rated now would just drop my rating, and be unfair to anyone I faced when I get the elo back up in moving games. IMO, this is too close to sandbagging for me to be comfortable with it.

As for increased queue timers, I considered this and think the best UX implementation is not to have a fully separate menu, but instead to be able to queue for both/either the same way we can queue for multiple of moving/NM/NMPZ at once. If you don't care about rating, queue both simultaneously for less waiting. It might well lead to shorter wait times on average, since fewer people will "sit on" their rating for division purposes and instead queue unrated - leading to more simultaneous players.

This should make it easy to implement too, as it only takes adding an extra toggle that, if activated, multiplies rating changes by 0.

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Totally agree

For a casual player who also plays ranked games, this would be useful.

The current system encourages you to avoid playing during weekends if your current ranking is near your personal best and you are above the Gold level.

In Gold and below, only the first 20 games (or so) matter, so you can keep playing because your ranking is irrelevant for level changes. You have that casual duels mode for the rest of the week. But if you are in Master II or higher, you may want to avoid playing if your current ranking is good enough. There is no way to keep playing duels without the risk of demotion.

Why so? I can regularly reach ranking 950-1000 and that is enough to stay in Master II. If you fall below 850, there is a high risk that you will be demoted to Gold I. At least twice in the last two months, I have had a long streak of duels against much better players. There were also some bad blunders against gold and silver players (and one cheater). My ranking dropped to ~750. Luckily, this happened early in the week, and I managed to get back to ~900 in time.