Initial implementation of mixed tiered MM was terrible, after tuning it became awesome, and a lot of good pilots were really disappointed when we went back to tier lock with farming Aces and one sided matches, rather than having close one almost every single game. Just because they dont whine on forums for every single little thing they don’t understand or want different, doesnt matter they don’t exist. Majority of NASA “top” pilots back then liked final tuned mixed tier MM version, because we had close games, filled up to 12v12, shorter queue even in low population time, it was awesome. But due to the huge whining of people in full purple T3 ships not able to handle being killed by mk2 R10s we got back into matchmaking that allows for a power cap within a tier.
As an example, Maxed out purple T3s are easily competitive to mk2 R10-11, and it is much better balance wise than a mk2 R7s vs mk4 R9s, and that is what we had prior to this patch, there is a power ceiling within a tier (well there is mixed T4-5 which was mixed on wrong premises) where just a next rank that you would fight is equal or weaker due to various reasons. If they implemented not the final tuned version of mixed tiers, it is not ideal, and something to tune around, as usual.
That’s because R4/7/10 are entry points into a Tier. Those ships ARE underpowered, it’s their nature. That doesn’t mean they don’t work nor that they’re unbalanced to the game. They still have some of the best bonuses in their tier. Slot layout and active amount isn’t exactly pleasing, but man. I can guarantee you those ships were THE MOST ENJOYABLE AND FUN things to fly in the game.
The problem there is that not all tiers are created equal.
Even when we had 1-2 rank difference, I was usually flying in T2. So my R6 ships were always against R8, and I hated it.
I hated the fact that their T3 engineers could deploy remote healing stations, their T3 ECMs could totally shut me down (and at the time it was impossible to fit a module to counter that on a T2 ship) and so on. Moreover, what made it doubly frustrating was how MY team never seemed to have this stuff.
In effect, mixed tiers destroyed the T2 meta without giving T2 any new options to compensate.
There are issues with the fixed tier model, but those are in a sense easier to deal with because they are issues with the core matchmaking system, and a refusal to truly embrace the fixed tier model. If you know R7, R8 and R9 are only meant to fight each other you can balance them accordingly and you don’t need any ship to be worse than any other. However, that is clearly not what is being done, nor has it ever been done. Because of that, mixing tiers just makes the problem more pronounced; the wider the rank gap between two ships, the greater the potential imbalance, and thus the lower quality of games.
Reverting to mixed tiers is a dirty bandage over a cancerous wound. It not only shows contempt for the people who have to suffer through it, it also shows there is no interest in understanding the core issues the community has with the matchmaking system, nor any intent to fix those issues.
I loved it. I synergyzed most of my ships under that system. As long as I wasn’t facing T5 ships with T4, I was on Cloud-9!
Definitely bring back that old system. The only bit broken about that old system was that Premiums were treated 1 Rank below the max. The SOLE reason that got fixed was because of the Mauler, because everyone was seeing it in T4.
Honestly, 1-2 Rank in difference isn’t that big a deal. It gets tougher when there’s a Tier difference (ie, R5 vs R7), but even that is manageable for the R5 pilot. I still remember incredibly good matches I had while grinding my mid-Tier ships, regardless of what was present in the match. I’m pretty sure squads were somewhat broken back then, but the good times for squads came after that, anyway.
