Ranked Matchmaking Issues

[Serdian Knight]

Can someone explain the matchmaking parameters to me? To my understanding, your visible rank (in my case it's Swat Plat 5-6) is a direct representation of your CSR, which goes up or down based primarily on wins and losses. The system, in ranked playlists, is designed to match you against - and with - players of similar skill, which i would interpret to be mostly gold to diamond for a plat player. Why then, in 2 days of playing Swat, am I consistantly getting matched against players from Champion 1-50? Or with 3 teammates who are golds against teams of plat or better, not to mention full parties of 4 as a solo player?

 

In 2 days, I've played against 6 different, highly ranked Champions, half of those for multiple matches. I played against one for 4 matches, watching him climb to Champion 8 from the 30s range, and played a match against Champs 13, 15, and 17 with a team of 2 other plats and a diamond. It seems to me that either I am grossly misunderstanding the ranked system, or it isn't designed to provide a balanced and competitive experience to its players. I've pictures of the post-game lobby for 2 of the worst matchups.

[Unease Peanut]

Well the ranking is designed to put you up against higher ranks to improve yourself. Think of one tier above and below you.

I'm willing to bet that these Champions are boosting their lower ranked buddy or buddies. I hope you find some rest in knowing that Champions and Onyx's don't get any positive rating (they do get negative rating if they lose) when playing these kind of matches.

[Serdian Knight]

Unfortunately I know that at least one Champion was gaining from mismatched teams like this, because I played against him 3 times in a row and watched his rating increase after each one. A couple of matches later I saw him again and he'd climbed even higher. If I'd realised that this would be such a consistant problem that I would create a forum account for it, I would have taken more pictures.

[RedStarRocket91]

It's a real shame to see this sort of thing still happening - I'm desperately hoping they bring in a rank reset soon, and allow players to rank down from leagues, as right now it feels like player skills often don't have anything to do with their actual ranking. Especially since these kind of mismatches seem to be happening so frequently - unless the population drop-off is even worse than we think (which is quite possible), there's very little point in a matchmaking system if it's going to give this kind of lopsided game, or for these people to be in separate divisions if their skills really are supposed to be similar.

 

I'm also desperately hoping that we eventually move over to individual player rankings, rather than this team-based nonsense - less incentive for people to boost their friends through the ranks like this, and less of a problem when you get saddled with poor teammates...