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.

[Zojha]

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.

I wouldn't consider FFXIV a "serious competitive game". The whole idea of ranked was pretty much like:"Yo dawgs, I herd you liek rankz and competitive shite.", without much thought behind whether or how it would work out. It was a mistake to dump it into a playerbase as small as this in the first place, because now people take it serious and expect things SE cannot deliver.

I dare them to implement a proper matchmaking algorithm as it is found in the most sophisticated PvP games and see just how quickly the queues die completely.

[TiaHariberux3]

Cant make a good matchmaking system and dont even do something against the wintraders who get reported frequently *facepalm*. They should have never added rewards to party q its getting ridiculous how they do nothing against people who clearly wintrade. I wonder where peoples pride is there are people who wintrade to place 1# never played any pvp before season started I would be ashamed to use those rewards if you dont know anything about pvp.

[Divinemights]

Matxhmaking system is fine. It is just unable to function as it suppose to be with a small pvp community. Unless you realize and accept this as fact, any further post on this topic is just pointless rant. Even we have reached a point where our size is bigger enough, you will just rant on something else for cause your loss.

[Kai_Lee]

You also assume players who are bronze or un-rank are all garbage and players of higher rank are all amazing. Simply not the case. Players with amazing pvp skills could be late to the feast and thus un-rank or low rank atm.

[Nalien]

Matxhmaking system is fine. It is just unable to function as it suppose to be with a small pvp community.

And the fact that it is unable to function is actively turning people away from Feast, making the community even smaller... The matchmaking system is anything but fine...

Seriously, how can you possible claim it's fine? You said it yourself, it's unable to function with this small a community... If it isn't functioning properly, that means it isn't fine... If it isn't functioning properly, then it is in fact, as the title of this thread says, garbage... Since SE cannot force people to PvP to boost the population, they should instead adjust the matchmaking system to work well with the smaller population, because as I said, the current system is actively putting people off, not attracting new interest... It is garbage... Veterans grow tired of being matched with complete beginners, beginners quit after being completely destroyed... By no stretch of the imagination is the current system good...

[TiaHariberux3]

Matxhmaking system is fine. It is just unable to function as it suppose to be with a small pvp community. Unless you realize and accept this as fact, any further post on this topic is just pointless rant. Even we have reached a point where our size is bigger enough, you will just rant on something else for cause your loss.

"fine" population isnt really the problem the thing is that you are ABLE to get matched with unranked while being diamond is just bad matchmaking. Dont say its not enough player thats not true the gold players who get a unranked healer can get a better healer if it was "fine"

[Koltik]

Mostly agree with this post, and it pretty much sums up the problem with matchmaking right now. With that said, last season was bad for high ranked as well, as if you were at the top of your tier then you were going to get stuck with the bottom of whatever was 2-tiers behind you. Most of the time the other team would be much more balanced. There is a huge difference in skill when comparing bottom-level bronze / silver / gold to mid or top level bronze / silver / gold. While the problem wasn't as glaring or bad as it is this season with brand new people, it was still pretty horrible.

Personally, I wish they'd tighten it up even further than they did in S1. Don't match people who are more than 1 tier lower than the highest rated in the match. I'd wait in queue for that, and I know many others would too. This is the opposite of what we're seeing right now with people quitting PvP or playing sparsely because of fear that they'll get brand new players.

[Koltik]

You also assume players who are bronze or un-rank are all garbage and players of higher rank are all amazing. Simply not the case. Players with amazing pvp skills could be late to the feast and thus un-rank or low rank atm.

You aren't wrong, but that is literally the 1% of low level players. 99% of unranked or bronze players are not going to be good pvpers, which we've seen time and time again. Not only that, but they won't know the little nuances of Feast that can make or break matches. These things take time and, more importantly, games played to learn.

[Praesul]

Even we have reached a point where our size is bigger enough, you will just rant on something else for cause your loss.

It has nothing to do with complaining about losses. There's no need for you to be passive-aggressive, just because you don't play feast doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
The complaint here is about the quality of matches, and newbie retention. This new matchmaking ruins both. You get garbage matches that are over in the blink of an eye, and then you get newbie players who don't want to pvp anymore after the bad experiences in solo queue because of the matchmaking.