The games are so small in t4/5 (3v3 up to about 7v7) this would be a bad idea. +1/-1 could work but removing restrictions altogether would not work. For some reason there are a lot of new players playing t4 and t5 (200 games or less) instead of progressing through t1/2/3
I disagree.
I’d like T5 - and T5 only - to be less strict about squad matchup, especially after a long wait time.
±1 could already be turned on on T4, maybe even T3 at low times, but T5 should definitely have even less restrictive play. I do really and absolutely not care about casuals in T5 and neither should anyone else. If they are “casual”, they should stay in the tiers before that. T4 and T5 should be increasingly competitive, and especially T5 should not be about “Okay I have the ship, lets play”
Atm. T5 is worse than T3, in every aspect. The R13 implants make the game a winners game, which deteriorates with bad teams, people bring less than 3 ships, even if all T5 players should have actually four slots already, you see T2’s and T3’s all the time in the hands of players who do not bring it for a challenge, but to synergize it. Even people, who write in the forums, that “all is fine!” disconnect frequently from games.
And there is some romantic notion, that T4 “is most balanced”, and was “great” for the two weeks or so, where it was populated. Hardly a timeperiod you could call enough to actually talk about balance imho, but well, lets not lose focus.
Let’s recap the past a bit in context. Death Squads were unfair, because they were fully purple and organized T5 players who were mixed into T4 games back then, and could upgrade their ships immediately after the release, because they had stockpiled resources. Since then, multiple times, the MM was changed back and forth between tier mixing. It has been finally established, that players do not want tiers mixed. But it cost us a lot of hardcore players on the way, who gave up this game, because they became tired of that.
In the early days, there was no squad restriction, and T3 was working fine with it. Actually it was thriving. However, 4-squads were restricted to premium users. As soon as this was abolished, and T5 was opened, and the death squad misery happened, squad restrictions were enforced over all tiers.
So if we listen to the past, I am not sure, what we really should listen to. T3 worked fine with squads mixed in into random games back then. T4 was abandoned, because nobody really wanted the tier mix games, and T4 was a long time mixed with T5. Finally T3 fell into darkness, as it was tier mixed yet again with T4 if you got Rank 9’s.
All these mistakes together make it really hard to really “learn from the past” imho, by simply listening to problems stated back then.
I still blame transparency. If the matchmaking would allow people to see what is going on overall in the game, if there are squads in certain techs, squadplay would be rewarded by better income etc., things, imho, would slowly get better. But all these modifications would also need to keep in mind what we really learned from those days.
Atm. T5 games are small, because a lot of players who *could* play there do not do so. There is almost no chance to get a game with full squads. Chances are, that you are more boiling by rage if you see what randoms you get, who seem not even to understand to turn on engineer modules, or bring T2 engis into the game. T5 does not retain the endgame population atm.
So this creates a feedback loop: games stay small, because nobody really enjoys the matches in T5 long enough. Squads are not built up, so many hardcore players do not even come online if they do not have friends playing, and if they come, they wait in the queue, or only come for sec con.
I think, sometimes you need to make a cut, and it hurts, but then the wound heals. Exactly because of that, I’d say, what Error stated is a good idea.
remember this is skirmish and not sector conquest. Anything more than +1/-1 would kill these tiers I think for the random majority
