Dear SE. fix your garbage matchmaking.

[Praesul]

Yes, it's another one of these threads, and it probably won't stop until they revert the changes they've made to matchmaking.

It is unbelievable that they thought it was a good idea to remove the tier restrictions from ranked 4v4. For those who don't know, previously, you could only be matched with players 1 tier above or below you, So for bronze it would be unranked and silver players, for silver it would be bronze and gold players, for gold it would be silver and plat, so on and so forth.

Recently they removed this restriction though, and highly experienced players are being put in the same matches as complete newbies. And it's awful, it's awful for the veterans and it's awful for the newbies, let me explain.

Imagine you're totally new to this game, or this game's pvp. You decide to give it a shot, queue up since the ilvl restriction is very low, and you realize that 8v8 (the only unrated mode) is completely dead, so you try 4v4 solo, you get into a match and omg, it's so exciting and new! You're stuck in a cage for a minute, probably to prepare, maybe ask some questions (or don't ask anything at all because maybe you're nervous?) and then off you go. You last about 20 seconds before it all goes to shit, you're dying, your party is complaining about medals, you come back, get destroyed again and then the match probably ends. Your 3 other party members are yelling obscenities at you, you've learned nothing because so much was going on and everything ended so quickly, and now you're wondering whether or not you should even try again because apparently the pvp population in this game is full of assholes.

And do you know why that happened? Because the enemy team had the gold/plat players with hundreds, sometimes even thousand of matches of experience, took note of the fact that they didn't recognize the name on the enemy team (since the pvp population is small, you of course run into familiar faces all the time!), and decided to run a train on them since they know for a fact you have no idea what you're doing as a new player.

From the veteran's perspective, matches become RNG clown fiestas where the party with the most amount of unranked players loses. In a 4v4 setting, each member has a large impact on the battle since the size of it is very small. Every little bit of damage counts, every cooldown used counts, every bit of CC is important. When one of your party members slacks off, you lose. It's especially catastrophic if you get a newbie healer, or are a newbie healer, since there's a huge amount of burden placed on you. If you get a newbie healer, it may as well be counted as an automatic loss. If BOTH parties have newbie healers, it then becomes a pvp DPS race to see which healer has the slower hands.

It's unfair to everyone involved, no one enjoys it, and on Aether queues are dying down because of it. Newbies are scared to try since emotions run high, and veterans can lose their temper and scare them off. This means less people interested in an already small pvp population. Veterans are then put into situations with more volatile RNG than before, since you can't pick your party members this was always the case in solo, but at least before you could expect some sort of competence from your party members since they'd be SIMILARLY CLOSE to your level, but this is no longer true. As far as I know, this game has no hidden MMR, it's literally based on your tier, so you can't "push through" and rise above the level of getting stuck in "feast hell", it doesn't matter what tier you are, you will always be subject to it.

I will gladly wait THOUSAND OF YEARS in queue if it means the quality of matches is much better, and I'm sure a lot of the high level players would probably agree. Newbies will never have a problem with long queue times since the majority of the playerbase is situated in the lower tiers, so they'll always have people to get matched up with anyway.

I don't think there's a single person that enjoys the change, and it's in my opinion, one of the WORST changes SE has made to pvp. Please revert them so everyone can enjoy themselves once again.

Either revert the changes, add a solo 4v4 practice mode, or require people to have a certain amount of matches played or something. It's a ranked environment, people should come prepared if you're going to mix and match people of various skill levels. No other serious competitive game matches complete newbies with top players, there's either hidden MMR at play like in League of Legends or Dota 2, or tier restriction like in Street Fighter V.