Quote Originally Posted by Aravell View Post
While I understand the wish for a fair match, it's not a remotely likely prospect not only because of the highly-coordinated premades you mentioned, the queue needs to also get rid of the people who do the bare minimum for their roulette exp, because those people drag down teams with their 'don't care, tryhard' attitude.

The only way we could possibly get mostly fair matches is not to completely remove premades, but to introduce a hidden rating that we get matched on so everyone in the match is of roughly the same skill level. That way, premades or not, there's a lot less fodder running around and no easy BH5 for anyone.
Despite the fact I use it for leveling, I think there's an argument for reducing the roulette XP to make it less attractive to those who don't give a tinker's cuss. But while I dislike the presence of those who don't try, they have far less impact on a match because they are more likely to be evenly distributed and the net result is a wash.

The vast majority of FL players are not in a premade, which makes the presence of one extremely disruptive. You need a premade to counter one unless a miracle occurs and a bunch of randos identify and disrupt the threat. (This does occasionally happen.) And it essentially means the majority of us are playing in solo mode alongside a completely different form of PvP. This seems to me to be an unreasonable concession to ~ 5% of the FL player base.

Matchmaking is an interesting idea. It's complicated because different jobs generate different stats even when played well. One could reduce the wins credited to party queues. If four of you queue as a light party, you get 1/4 of a win. But I imagine that'd be less popular for the 5% than simply separating solo and party queueing.

Premades will still get BH5 rapidly even against semi-competent opposition IMO. It's a consequence of the powerful synergy of coordinated LBs as the skillset currently stands. When Olivia is doing her book club thing, for example, I saw all 4 of them get BH5 in 3 minutes. As I mentioned before, you can't simultaneously balance FL for solo players and light parties running certain comps, the synergies are too powerful.