I have to agree with Snib and Enny. There is a problem with matchmaking. And you can feel this, specifically if you try to solo it. Kraimax is being covered by squads and so am I, so we do not feel it. We have the power to change the course of the game, but if you are by yourself, there is not much that you can do, other than be at the mercy of the MM to be put on a decent team. But because your ratings (which I still think it’s just DSR) are a bit better, you are the one that gets to carry their team, and will probably be forever put against us, and other better squads.
So yes, MM is not at it’s best for solo players, actually it’s quite a big issue. An ideal MM would make everyone’s win ratios close or above 1.0, but we all know that is not the case in SCon, and neither we want that, because we believe that as a group of 4, we have the chance to win the game over more often than just half of the time (if we consider ourselves a good player).
The real issue behind this might actually be really simple, that we allready talk about all the time: lack of players, tiers and squad inequality.
I have studied how MM works in other games, and there is not a single game without MM problems that exists (even if it does, players will always complain because it’s hard to accept defeat), but SCon has some underlining problems that make current MM which is not a bad concept of itself, not work properly.
First there are tiers and game modes, so we have allready split playerbase by more than 5 groups just based on ship rank battles. Remember when they wanted to mix the tiers so bad? Well, that was because it made an easier job for the MM to group and balance out players with different skill ratins and squads. The problem is in the design of the game. The problem is in the tiers. Would there be no tiers to split players apart, we would only use players statistics and experience to balance out the games, and the pool of selectable players would be much, much higher. There would also be no occasions of “bad players in T5 in and SQ” because you would never see them in your game, since they are way out of your skill league. But right now, because of such low player base spread across all those tiers, you are forced to play with anything that MM can get - if you get a game at all, that is.
And than there are squads. Latest MM is having a good try to balance them out but it’s still a problem. And reason again is lack of players to select from. You cannot balance a game with squads across more than 5 groups of ranked games at any given time with ~1000 player pool. For this MM to work properly, you would need a 1000 player pool all in the same tier (counting not everyone queing in the game, some of them in hangar/pve/battle already), that means a total of 5000 players active for all tiers, to have this MM work. And 5000 is not a big number for a f2p lobby based game like this, it’s actually quite average. With bigger numbers, or if there would be no tiers, this MM would work, and would also balance out the squads properly. Right now only solution is to put squads against squads only (and that is what they are trying to do), but this cannot work properly. You don’t have the playerbase.
So there you have it.
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Lack of players
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Blended and split across many tiers
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Inability to balance the squads because of #1, that is connected to #2.
As long as there are tiers in this game, this problem is not fixable. The small playerbase makes it impossible for MM to work properly in a tier based environment, so the actualy business model with tiers is not appropriate for this situation. Would they have averaging 5000 pool player base, with 1000 per tier, this would work. But until than, it cannot. Should they have chosen to put everyone in the same group and other progression/monetasation methods than splitting playerbase in 5 tiers, they could work with this nubmers. But this way, this cannot be done.
So my only solution to you guys in this paradox scenario would be to squad up, and adapt to the system. It’s the only way to beat the system, and it’s the only way that a corporation like ours is being successfull, because I have noticed this problem from start. There are other games with MM, where it’s actually beneficial and sometimes even easier if you don’t squad up and play in solo queues (because if your whole team sucks, you will be put against stronger teams). One of the similiar games I play has a solo queue ratio of 88% (even the devs were shocked by this), and players don’t have as big an issue as here (yet they are still tweaking it).
So again, while I agree with your concerns, I don’t think there is much else that can be done to make it fair, than to squad up yourself and try to beat the odds. You have a good chance of this if you are a good player, since you are allready being put against stronger squads to “carry” your team. But with this MM, it is hardly fair, and you have little chance to win, unfortunately. If you consider yourself a good player, you must squad up. Or be forced to carry bad teams eternally until we get the playerbase for this.