New matchmaking system is a failure

[Aviars]

Many people, especially top players, see the new ranking system as a failure and rightfully so. More often than not, you can be a current top player on the leader board and somehow be INSTANTLY paired up with people who never played the game mode once in their life. Today as a Gold player I sat in a sub 1 minute que and I somehow was placed with 3 unranked players, two of which explicitly expressed they are brand new players and it was their first game ever. This is not fun to me or the players that ended up on my team because more likely than not the other team is likely to be more balanced than mine and will end up crushing us within 2 minutes in a game mode that normally last the entire 8 minutes.


The current matchmaking prioritizes unranked - silver and gold - diamond, which sounds good on paper for a established leader board. But when you completely wipe people's rank and everyone starts from scratch, it becomes far more likely that as top players start to rank up through silver and gold that they get paired with people who are unranked, causing disparity and unfairness. This creates a situation that no more how hard you may try, the people on your team aren't up to par with you and you have almost no chance to win. It isn't the new players fault, rather it's the matchmaking that places golds with players with 0 rating. In the bid to fix what a lot of people were complaining about in season 1 they created the SAME EXACT PROBLEM IN A LOWER TIER. The only difference now is that rather being platinum or diamond, we are just gold.

The only solution that makes sense to me is that they need to be far more precise will the matchmaking. They need to prioritize unranked vs unranked, bronze vs bronze and so on, it cannot just be the way it is now when a gold such as myself will get INSTANTLY qued with brand new players without the system even trying to put me with silvers first. It would be much more fun for a gold like me to be paired with people closer to me and for unranked player to be paired verse unranked players because then you actually have a fight, fights where unranked players can actually maybe learn the game rather than get crushed, and higher rated players can get the quality matches that they desire.

This is really about a sense of fairness across the board. right now the games are not fair, Gold tanks/dps get paired with unranked healers and automatically the unranked healer will just be permanently dead while a Gold healer with unranked dps can't hope to land a kill no matter how hard they try. It really just kills motivation to play not only for top players but for unranked players who want to learn but get overwhelmed in severely lopsided teams. Lopsided teams are no fun, balanced teams are.

I hope you fix this SE, otherwise the mode will ultimately just slowly die like it did last season. Remember why you made the change to matchmaking in the first place, the only difference now is that it is a problem for silver/golds rather than plats and diamonds.

[coco1851]

Did you ever consider that maybe this is for the best experience for everyone? Because my experiences show that inexperienced players would hardly ever get things done because nobody has knowledge to know what to do. In fact would promote people buying clears which I have never agreed with. Although I'm not quite sure why you feel your knowledge isn't up to par. A good teacher can help & make even the dumbest person good in fact I used to be that nub that didn't know anything my teacher taught me extremely well I'm not the nub I used to be when I started mmo's. I'm not the greatest but not nearly as bad.

[Aviars]

Did you ever consider that maybe this is for the best experience for everyone? Because my experiences show that inexperienced players would hardly ever get things done because nobody has knowledge to know what to do. In fact would promote people buying clears which I have never agreed with. Although I'm not quite sure why you feel your knowledge isn't up to par. A good teacher can help & make even the dumbest person good in fact I used to be that nub that didn't know anything my teacher taught me extremely well I'm not the nub I used to be when I started mmo's. I'm not the greatest but not nearly as bad.

I can't teach people everything within the minute they give you at the start of the game let alone when I actually have to devote my keyboard to playing rather than explain to them what to do. Also it does no good for unranked players to be paired with me when the game is one sided, they learn nothing and I leave frustrated. They would have a better time being eased into higher ranked rather than thrown into the meat grinder. That is usually how a majority of games work, however in this one, they think that a balanced and fair team is simply balancing the rating numbers regardless of rank which isn't the case at all. Would you make a 1st grader do college calculus? No you wouldn't.

[coco1851]

Would you make a 1st grader do college calculus? No you wouldn't.

Well if you can't handle it, you can't handle it. I've seen plenty of people teach/tell inexperienced players how to do such & such without making excuses & clearing whatever, but hey what do I know? For me I'd rather be with people that know what they are doing (as long as they are not being elitist, pricks) or in your words being thrown in the meat grinder. No I wouldn't, but sorry to say no mmo should be referred to as hard as a 1st grader doing calculus, lol.

[Aviars]

Well if you can't handle it, you can't handle it. I've seen plenty of people teach/tell inexperienced players how to do such & such without making excuses & clearing whatever, but hey what do I know? For me I'd rather be with people that know what they are doing (as long as they are not being elitist, pricks) or in your words being thrown in the meat grinder. No I wouldn't, but sorry to say no mmo should be referred to as hard as a 1st grader doing calculus, lol.

Due to the current matchmaking, a majority of new healers are just getting utterly dominated. Most of the game they are dead and they can't handle what is coming to them. If they can't hope to live for a few seconds then how are they going to learn? They won't and are more likely to quit than spend time on the floor. Also it's great you enjoy being paired with people better than you, I highly doubt it's the same for those people though.

Also my comparison was fine, you can imagine a unranked brand new healer being placed against silver+ dps and not being able to keep themselves alive for more than a few seconds. You are just avoiding the reality of how bad it is right now.

[NoelNoel]

Did you ever consider that maybe this is for the best experience for everyone? Because my experiences show that inexperienced players would hardly ever get things done because nobody has knowledge to know what to do. In fact would promote people buying clears which I have never agreed with. Although I'm not quite sure why you feel your knowledge isn't up to par. A good teacher can help & make even the dumbest person good in fact I used to be that nub that didn't know anything my teacher taught me extremely well I'm not the nub I used to be when I started mmo's. I'm not the greatest but not nearly as bad.

What a load of casual talk. And with the underlined sentence you basically advocate for carries. It's not the best experience for everyone, this is a ranked competition, if you are no good you shouldn't be paired with players who know what they are doing and who's rank might be affected by a newbie's inexperience. I do find sad that there's no way to properly practice how to fight at high lvl in PVP. There are even PVP specifities that you couldn't find anywhere if you didn't chat with other people, which is SE's fault. But anyway no, an unranked player shouldn't be paired with a gold player, they should keep being paired with silver and bronze until they get enough practice to pull their weight. As mentionned above the 1 min thing isn't enough to teach anything, and typing during the match is dangerous.
It's amazing to see all these people who pop in PVP who don't even know they have PVP abilities, and who can't even do a decent PVE job. You're left wondering what they were expecting, or if they even looked up what a PVP match could be like. We all start somewhere, but make sure your start doesn't affect others in a ranked competition.
And no, some people never improve, thinking of a WAR on Primal who after playing many games still isn't able to pull more than 40k dmg on a 8 mins match, or a MCH who ignores crates/kits after playing for so long... To the point I stop queuing when I see these people.

[Zojha]

[...]they should keep being paired with silver and bronze [...]

They shouldn't even be paired with bronze and silvers, ideally. Elo difference between the highest and lowest player should "ideally" be single digit while people who have yet to establish a stable skill level should primarily be paired with others who have neither. We just don't get any matches to pop if we had "good" matchmaking.

The PvP population here in FFXIV is downright dysfunctionally small on the NA/EU data centers and what SE really should look into are the reasons for that. I mean, just look at the consequences of it: You can't have good matchmaking, GC restrictions prevent games rather than being a minor annoyance, Newcomers are forced to choose between ranked and a completely different mode (It's like only having Ranked Summoner's Rift and ARAM popping) and matchfixing/wintrading becomes feasible (Since the chances of being matched against each other are high).

Somebody kindly did a player poll over in the general forums and so far, less people care for PvP than for Lord of Verminion. I'd not be surprised if that was actually accurate, because that's how it feels like ingame as well. Anyway, that is the core issue that really needs addressing. Everything else really is secondary - IMO.

[coco1851]

What a load of casual talk. And with the underlined sentence you basically advocate for carries. It's not the best experience for everyone, this is a ranked competition, if you are no good you shouldn't be paired with players who know what they are doing and who's rank might be affected by a newbie's inexperience.

Well I'm not going to even comment on what you & the op's talk is, because I'll get banned for that but anyways... Just because someone teaches you something doesn't mean your carried. Way to twist my words. Carried is when you sit back do absolutely nothing while someone does the work for you, so no I don't advocate it. If there is no place to practice other than in there & the time frame is that limited according to you guys which is some of your problem then wouldn't the proper question be: can we have more than a minute to teach new players a little bit before it starts & can we have something where new people can practice?

The way this is all being said gives me the impression that: 'I'm better than you so I should not be paired with the likes of you',' screw you if you want to learn anything because I'm not willing' ,'you are a nub so go play with the other nubs'. Which is elitist attitude at its finest.

[Commander_Justitia]

@coco1851 this isn't pve where you beat a boss with some mechanics. You can tell the newbie an hour all about pvp, still, he is no match for the top players, putting the fact aside that you cant get proper gear or trait some pvp skills once you are in feast. But still he gets matched up with them. Yes feast 8vs8 is deader than the deadliest deadly dead dead but you could go frontlines to learn atleast a little about pvp, why go directly into the arena rating content ?
And I dont know what the hell you mean with "buying clears" this is a solo queue, you can't pay people to play with you and beat the other team. That just doesn't work.

And I certainly dont know what you are expecting from a content that comes with a ranking system, not all players can be No.1, there will be better players and not better players. But everyone probably started as a bad player and then learned. Just don't blame the better players that they want to play with other okay players.

[Februs]

Yes feast 8vs8 is deader than the deadliest deadly dead dead

LOL. Beautiful.