Arena matchmaking

[SaleeroTwo]

I am not sure if there is a specific thread where this should be written on, I couldn't find it so I will just use this instead. The issue in specific that I want to talk about has to do with arenas and matchmaking. The reason that led me to write this in the first place is due to solo queue specifically however I am sure the same can be applicabble to other arena brackets.

Essentially, there has been something bothering me for the longest and I want to understand if I am the only one that thinks of it the same way I do. It boils down to the way that the matchmaking resolves "finding" matches for players of each and all mmr ranges. As I would assume, it's skill based therefore such things such as high mmr shouldn't play with low mmr UNLESS enough time has passed for someone with high mmr while waiting for a match that the mmr that the search is at currently, actually becomes low enough so that this high mmr player is put in a lower mmr match, sure that's fine to me since it makes sense considering this player put himself in this position.

However, the problem comes with the fact that sometimes it seems to do things that don't make any sense, for instance, let's say there have been around 2-3 2k+ mmr matches going on for the last hour or so (say this is towards the later part of the day which is usually the case for this scenario), meaning 6-9 players maybe a few more at such mmrs playing at the moment. Why is it that there are certain games I didn't even wait a whole minute for the queue to pop, saying it has found a match for me and then I join this match, play and lose, I then go to my match history and find cases such as the ones seen in these screenshots? How is this even possible? In a 2k mmr game there is a player with 1.5 mmr? 1.7 mmr player in a 2.2 mmr game? There are COUNTLESS of these examples, I could find and link screenshots here all day if I wanted to and I honestly believe this is just absolutely ridiculous, it just feels like I am swimming against the tide/the game is griefing me and I can't do anything about it other than just sit there and dodge/snipe the queue like a lot of "top" players are doing nowadays, wasting hours of my day unnecessarily, waiting for the perfect match to pop up and even then it's not 100% infallible(is this a word?).

All in all, solo queue as it is, is already incredibly annoying and adding stuff like this to the mix honestly just kills it in my honest opinion. I understand it's supposed to be a workaround to long queue times so that we don't have too many people sitting around for too long waiting for matches, but I honestly believe I would prefer that over this current, flawed system. Like, no I don't find it fun to lose 5 games in a row out of the absolute blue just because for some reason in each one of these games, it was a situation similar to the ones seen in these screenshots here, when it was just going well for me earlier, it's not fun whatsoever to just lose a game cuz some poor soul at a lower mmr, obviously not as good for some unknown reason joined a high mmr lobby and now one of the teams lost and they can't even do anything about it. If this was like a rare occurrence, sure that could be acceptable, but it's happening FAR too often to even be considered uncommon, it almost just feels like by design at this point.

Of course, not even mentioning the whole other plethora of issues that also exist in arenas such as scripting, wintrading, boosting, etc. I understand that these latter issues are harder to fix however the former should be something completely acceptable to fix. The way I see it, and you can tell me I am wrong if you feel so, but it honestly seems like we are stacking game-killing components on top of each other, making the experience as miserable as it could be possibly achieved.

Hopefully this isn't one of those threads that's drown out in the sea amongst the others or I didn't do something wrong and if that's the case I am happy to make a new topic if necessary. It's my first time writing something in here, usually I don't care that much but this issue is honestly becoming far too frustrating.

https://imgur.com/a/jvWDIiX
https://imgur.com/jfPJpqI
https://imgur.com/BifUfRy
https://imgur.com/6FGIy61

[Botanikern]

Honestly the examples you gave in the screenshots wasn't that bad, but I do agree that there sometimes are way to high of a missmatch between players mmr in soloq, but a worse problem than that is the amount of scripters and wintraders, at least lot of the wintraders has left soloq and instead wintrade in 3's, but the amount of scripters is really destroying the game.

[Ezrage]

Yeah, he's absolutely right. The matchmaking system forcing such wide MMR gaps in solo queue makes no sense and completely ruins the competitive integrity of the game. If there are enough players at high MMR, there's no reason why someone at 1.5-1.7k should ever be in a 2k+ match. It just leads to frustrating, unbalanced games where one team is essentially handicapped from the start.

The fact that "top" players are dodging and queue-sniping just to avoid this proves how flawed the system is. At this point, it feels like it's designed to be frustrating rather than fair. And like he said, this isn't even touching on the bigger issues like scripting, wintrading, and boosting, which only make the whole experience worse.

The reality is that fixing MMR spread should be a priority. It's one of the few things that could actually be adjusted to make solo queue more tolerable, but instead, it feels like the system is just stacking problems on top of each other.