The devs spend more energy trying to extract every dollar they can out of the existing players, instead of trying to bring new players into the game.
What’s worse is, if you don’t pay they stack the matches so the non paying players are on one team and the clans and paying players are the other. I have 200 gigs of videos of what my win loss looks like when I pay, and when I don’t, and what the match make up looks like.
This is why scores are so lopsided, and why bots are mvp’s.
This is why people leave, the more money they try to squeeze out of everyone the less they make, because more people leave.
I know there are lots of conspiracy theories about how the matchmaker works, but I think a more credible explanations for the things we see are just that it’s a small game with a small playerbase, and the devs are working with limited resources.
Looking at how much they struggle to do the basic stuff, does it really seem believable that they would have a super complicated matchmaker designed to frustrate players? Does that actually seem like something they are even capable of putting in place?
Yes. They construct brawls openly using these dubious mechanics all of the time. Even the current ROM brawl is a good example of increasingly focused and powerful bots, just for an example.
Come on Doc, we both know that increasing intensity of bot waves is livery different from the kinds of matchmaking shenanigans being talked about here.
Increasing AI difficulty was part of the earliest video games, and is just not the same thing.
I know you firmly believe the matchmaker is deliberately making things hard for you, but I’ve yet to see any real evidence of that. There are just too many logic holes for that to be true.
The de-ranking by power-score is so obvious, I’m not sure what evidence would convince you. That’s just a routine mechanic, I think most observant players are well aware of, including XO_guy123, despite him being able to overcome it.
For another example, they used increased fragility as a brawl brawl mechanic, right before they changed the damage model to structure parts.
Point is, it’s not so complicated they can’t create these schemes, as you suggest. They actually do use these mechanics openly, but call it a brawl when they do. Do they use them covertly in PVP? IDK, but it’s not like it’s beyond their tech to do so, because they do it openly, but they re-brand it as a brawl “feature” when they do.
The de-ranking is predictable and obvious though. IDK how anybody could argue that doesn’t happen. It’s been demonstrated ad nauseum. Anybody (at least on PC) can go watch it happen, supposing you can play at a level that triggers the mechanism. Mediocrity isn’t enough to trigger it. You need to really start bullying players, then you can watch your rank plummet to the bottom of every match roster. It’s routine and predictable, and hardly a secret.
What I’m referring to is how the matchmaker makes sure you’re the most under powered player in a match after winning. The more winning you do and the more brutally you do it the further under your power-score goes.
Same goes for loosing. If you loose harshly the matchmaker will fortify your relative power-score vs the other players, to give you a more competitive stance.
I don’t think you have fully thought through what would be involved to implement that in PVP.
For one thing, a winning match shouldn’t matter much, compared to individual performance. But regardless of which metric this hypothetical mechanism uses, it’s immediately disproven by the losing and winning streaks we all encounter.
I regularly have losing streaks that seem to go on forever, which according to you should trigger easier matches for me, but that doesn’t seem to happen. Similarly, I can have winning streaks that go forever. Both are more easily explained by who is online at the time, and how many of them are in groups.
Now I used to believe there was a mechanism like this, and only stopped believing it after I tried to find real evidence and failed.
That is what a winning streak will look like for me, until I start loosing. If I’m doing well with a build, I will get placed at the bottom.
It’s frustrating to know that for a win I will have to carry my team in an art build with up to a several thousand point disadvantage in power-score. This isn’t mysterious or debatable. It’s the routine.
Players who use a more META build, or just have better “skills” will see more dynamic example of this, but I’m using kid-gloves when I play by always adding too much fluff to my builds and not using a hard META.
This mechanism does not guarantee team wins. This is not the 50/50 win ratio thing. That’s not what’s going on. That’s not what I’m implying. Your team can still loose despite your (dis)advantage or your build’s dominance, and mine (as a lone random) usually does…like we did in this screenshot, despite me killing nearly everybody.
If you can show a pattern across multiple consecutive matches I would be more inclined to believe.
But I have tried various ways of proving it existed, and was never able to. I could choose a non-competitive build, and choose to play badly, and nothing I did would get me to the top of the PS range. Similarly, some days I’ll be winning every match and racking up the MVPs, and I’m still getting placed at the high end of the PS range.
Since a mechanism like this would be automated, there shouldn’t be so many exceptions.
What I suspect you are seeing is more to do with the phenomenon of when you start looking for something you see it everywhere. Pick a favourite number, and you notice it all over the place. The number isn’t actually coming up more often, but you are noticing it more because you are looking for it.
The exceptions are due to the fact that the game is partly organic (you and them), and it’s functionality is reliant on a proper pool of players to choose from. It gets increasingly wonky in disparity as the player population becomes more dismal. This is demonstrated more profoundly in Clan Confrontation and Patrols, I think, where the player populations are even more constrained by the amount of available participants.
But whatever. I’m just saying it’s stupid to think these mechanics are unbelievable, since they tend to incorporate them in brawls openly.
Hm I just thinkt ehir matchmaker isn’t that great… I think sometimes it feels like those things are happening but in reality it’s just that the matchmaking kinda sucks.
I’m very much used to playing 9K and having 13K opponents… I only think it’s unfair when they become 15K+ nowadays. So with that becoming the norm it’s hard to really see the matchmaking as being against me for any particular reason, it happens so often in general.
I played with some newer people before heading away for the Holidays and most matches we were 9k and the enmy was 11-13k and they would always comment on it and how the enmy were way higher, yet my friend and I never thought anything of it.
But I do often find that 9k players with better (or meta) builds do better than a lot of 13-15k players
When I do play up there (10K+) I am surprised at how bad the players are. I always expect to get pwnd by experts, then don’t, and am surprised. They rely on their gear to do most of it for them, as is typical of all power-scores, but at 10K+ they sure have some powerful gear.
I think it’s harder to deal with the melee META at 5K, frankly, because you have a more limited inventory of gear to choose from to defend yourself from it…which is probably why that META doesn’t really exist above 9K.
IDK. I’m no master gamer, but I can smell BS from a mile away, and this game is BS rich.
The lower powerscores are all about efficiency but at higher PS you have no real limit, so it becomes more about just tanking with an overly armoured build. This then means gameplay tends to be much slower and forgiving than at other powerscores.
The builds turn slower usually and tend to handicap themselves when they create such limited angles on their overly spaced V armour builds… couples with that slowness means anything with a bit of speed can usualy run circles around them. They hope to have a nice large open space where they can see everything that’s happening because otherwise they’re too slow to react to a surprise.
Sure I’ll take that challenge up in explaining it lol… They (Devs) mentioned that it had to do with the console store policies. I haven’t found anything conclusive while looking at the developer store info say or not, but the docs are long and I might have missed it too.
The issue basically was over how expediently they could update things the in-game store. Each change has to be validated by the console store. The work around was convert to virtual currency then have the user make their faster changing in-game market place.
Gold can’t function as that virtual currency as one of the things you can by in the in-game market place is gold plus it comes with the packs.
So I generally do believe that portion but I also do think they also took advantage of some bad marketing advice on making sure costs don’t equate and getting users to have to have a little more left over in their accounts after a purchase too.
