Before you comment or reply please read the following paragraph or have full knowledge of the current matchmaking system workings(read the paragraph below if you don’t).
How matchmaking actually works at this moment: The system only considers the MMR of your own teammates but not the opponents. Your opponents are selected from division/pip ratings only. This means a team of 800 MMR players can be facing a team of 2000 MMR players. Grossly uneven matchups will exist because of this is how the system is programmed. Another way of looking at this system is the system can assign the winner and loser before the game starts.
This system has a few implications:
1. For the high skilled players, as in high MMR, you might not be as good as you think if you’ve been stomping teams. Frankly your winrate should be near flawless as you probably encountered a lot of lower MMR based teams while climbing divisions and not matched up against players of similar skill as you.
2. For the lower skilled players, as in low MMR, frankly some of the losses you can’t really do much about. Even if you played your hearts out and and tried your best, but the game could be decided from the start that you are going to lose.
3. The reason of this system is based on the fact that time will sort everyone out into correct division and pip ratings. For example, over time, the 800 MMR players will stay in a lower division and will only be matched up against other 800 MMR players as all the higher MMR players will have climbed on. However will time actually do its job? Probably not! I’ll explain at the end of this post.
The 1% ruining the 99% argument:
Below is what a very high MMR player have said about this system:
Hi all. I’m Zuko. I play tempest for Best Team North Africa, which is currently invited to participate in the Challenger Cup to qualify for Pro-League.
So the goal of this new matchmaking is to make the league system more skill-based. So if you have high mmr (the game thinks ur good) you will progress faster and easier. If you have low mmr (game thinks ur bad) you might have incredible difficulty getting out of amber. How it works is you get matched with players on ur team of similar mmr. The opposing team has team mates of a similar mmr on it. However, your teams average mmr and the enemy teams mmr can be vastly different. If you are one of the players in the top 1% then you have a 99% chance to face an enemy team with lower skill than you. Likewise if you are in the bottom 50% you have a 50% chance to fight people much better than you.
The idea is that the good players will progress to higher divisions quicker and leave only the bad to average players in the lower divisions. Then the average players will advance leaving only the bad players. So as the season goes on your matches should start becoming more balanced, and divisions will actually represent skill instead of time spent playing like last season.
Here’s the issue with that. While I love the fact that I am progressing quickly as a reward for being one of the more highly skilled players, this type of matchmaking can be quite discouraging to a majority of the playerbase. If the game doesn’t already rate you as good, you will be more likely to lose and the game will think more and more that you suck. Anet’s answer to this is as time progresses matches will become better. I fear however that this new matchmaking will cause many of the new, average, and bad players to just give up before matchmaking becomes balance again. Call it quits and go home. And let’s face it, that’s bad for the game. I would ask anet if having the few really good players progress faster is worth angering and harming the gaming experience of the vast majority of the player population. Also for the unlucky people who actually are bad whether it be from being unable to commit enough time or just lacking skill, there matches will never get better as they are always going to be below average and so will always have more of a chance to face teams better than them, and will always be on a losing streak and thus quit the game.
This is the general consensus of the people who are playing PvP right now. It is simply not fun to be either full on stomping a team or be fully stomped by a team. I much prefer to have a 50/50 chance of winning the game than a system predetermining that I should win or lose. Another thing is I personally don’t enjoy stomping teams, there is no fun to be had. What fun is there to face opponents that have no chance of fighting back? Absolutely none! I’m about to hit ruby and have done a fair share of stomps and I really disliked them and felt gross after the games. The bottom line is having a system determining whether you should win or lose is simply not fair and not fun. But we still have time on our side to sort out all the divisions right?
The question of time:
There is the question of whether we actually will have enough time for this system to sort everybody out before the end of the season. So far one week in, and the divisions are very far from balancing out. At this rate, just a crude guess, it will probably take at least another 2 weeks for the players to see some improvements in match quality. However 2 weeks might not even be enough because of the issue of of high MMR players moving up at different rates. For example, comparing a high MMR player who only plays 5 games per day to an equally high MMR player who plays 50 games a day. The latter player will move up faster while the other player move up slower and stay in the lower divisions longer. Also what if a bunch of high MMR players started playing late in the season? That will cause more deviations as well. Now thinking about it, this system is fully fair and fully functional if and only if everyone that plays PvP plays for the same amount of time per day and week, and also if they all play at the exact same time. Now is that possible?
tl;dr expect really bad matchups and unfair games until the season is over
