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*The crowd moans*
I know, I know! We've all had it with these OP this, OP that threads. I have too! But whatever, it has been weighing at me greatly, lately.
If there is anything that makes me grit my teeth before I fire up the game--anything at all lately, it is the Matchmaker.
Russ has done a fantastic job with the Inner Sphere quirks. Granted, there are some that leave room to be desired--and some contentious ones, but, for the most part, they are a welcome addition to the game and remove some of the balance issues between Clan and Inner Sphere robots.
I also enjoy the renewed interest from the development team in listening to us and steering the game in a direction that we'd like to see it go. This is amazing. Keep it up. A year ago the number one thing that made me cringe was balance. These days weapon balance is probably in the best state it has been since at least shortly after fall of 2012. I still miss my oldschool SRMs, but, well, I can't complain because I'm seeing far more diversity now than in the past. There's still a meta of sorts, there always will be, but at least I'm seeing more than hill humping and jumping slinging PPCs everywhere.
With that said, the matchmaker is OP. Why is it OP? The whole Elo thing, frankly, does not belong in a team based game like this. The way the matchmaker works currently is that it does its best to make sure your Win/Loss ratio is as close to 1.0 as possible. When you win too much and your Elo rises (during those few matches you win that you were supposed to lose), it punishes you by putting you on a team doomed to fail. Now I know PGI insists the spread is pretty narrow--but they are missing an important point... Which has been beaten like a dead horse but whatever, I'll say it again...
You can't put a couple high Elo players on a team and expect them to carry ten really bad players versus a team full of average to above average players.
It doesn't work. It leads to angst, frustration and irritation in the playerbase. Do people really wonder why we have 12-0, 12-2, 12-3 stomps so often? It is because of this Elo mess of attempting to punish the players that do well and reward the players that do bad by giving them easier games.
It sucks!
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth repeatedly when I try to play, being forced to lose/carry/whatever. I'd much rather see Elo removed entirely and players thrown in randomly. The good players would probably see their win/loss increase substantially and the bad players would see theirs plummet.
"Oh, but Blastman, that would discourage people from playing!"
That depends, really. It depends on who you want playing the game. Because how it stands right now the better players want to play less because it is so painful to be punished for doing well at the game. If you want to encourage lesser players to play, keep doing it. You'll just push away the players that are less casual.
Maybe that's what the goal is? I don't know. But it would be refreshing to see everyone have an equal shot at a win, every single drop, without meddling of the matchmaker behind the scenes.
So my number one improvement to the game at the moment would be removal of Elo calculations for the sake of the PUG queue. That's where I play mostly, lately so after a few months of it, I can finally comment objectively about how I feel with it. I don't like it.
Shouldn't the goal for everyone in life be to better one's self? The only way you know you need to improve is to be shown your faults, flaws and failures. If you try to prevent people from failing... they never know their problems and weaknesses, right? From my point of view, the matchmaker doing just that right now--trying to prevent people from failing. It breeds bad things by trying to artificially equalize everything.
Edited by Mister Blastman, 12 November 2014 - 09:52 AM.
without the High Elo Class.
