Elo disparity in ranked#981
This is about the tenth suggestion post on this board about this, but it is a continual issue that plagues this game’s experience. If the point of having an elo is to get matches with people close to your skill level (i.e. matches where both players have a chance at winning), then permitting 200+ elo disparities simply because “they’re only one rank apart” is completely counterproductive to that goal. When I go on ranked, I don’t get matches at my skill level. What I get is a match with someone I will always bea, then a match against someon I will never beat, and then up again and down again and only sometimes someone within 100 elo of me. This is not a reasonable way to handle matchmaking and significantly impacts the player experience in a negative way.
As suggested by dozens of other people, the solution is pretty simple. Start searching within 100 elo, then if you can’t find someone for a whole minute, expand.
My suggestion to solve this problem is to simply let us choose our own preferred ELO range, you can set it up for example, let’s say 50, and if you find no matches after a certain amount of time, the system will ask you if you want to keep searching or increase the range to 100 or more, I don’t mind waiting more as long as I get fair matches.
Quality > quantity.
Guys, seriously, how is this fair to the other player?
Personally set elo or reductions aren’t that simple because then you have incongruent matchmaking rules. You would have to unmatch a match that was found if one player could reduce their own personal ranking below what the matchmaking rule is. Since matchmaking is just looking for legal matches based on time that has elasped in the search. And un-matching a match is time expensive for the player. Even if you hide it happening, you found a legal match and you have to cancel it before requesting a server and then restart the queues for both players. And with other players having different settings, this could keep happening so you could get stuck in queue forever even if you set your matchmaking settings to the most favorable option (or the timer has elapsed for a long time) because your opponents could have stricter requirements and you could loop with them behind the scenes but it would just show as searching on your screens.
The game also does have an expanding search where it starts at a lower differential and then expands to higher numbers. The problem is that each player is doing this on their client and they expand and find a match. So if one player has been searching for the max expansion time, then you could get a quick pop on your machine since the other player has been searching long enough to identify that as a legal match.
The main thing you can do is decrease the overall total spread. Which we haven’t done for multiple reasons. The first is that in many regions, you wouldn’t be able to find consistent matches if you reduced the possible matches down that far. Especially at the ends. Also 200-400 rating difference is about how big established elo systems like to place matches. Since the variance in skill and expertise results in possible upsets with big payoffs but beyond that gap is diminishing returns on expected wins. We have resets, but because we have some inflation from win-streaks, our numbers get pretty close to established elo systems by season’s end.
The other thing you can do is further restrictions on tiers. Which are congruent rules. Say Gold can only match with Gold as an example. So platinum players would never match with gold but they could match with Diamond. This is viable and we’ve discussed it before. But the main issue is that it makes the rank up from Gold to Platinum very stark because your possible match pool when in Gold would be 900-1099 and then you rank up and could find players ranked between 1100-1499 (end of diamond).
idk man as someone with a similar rank to yours, I love playing against 1400+, these are always crazy matches that feel winnable. I often play a secondary against lower gold tho.
all preferences tho!