Whatever the case, Im frustratingly disappointed at the splatfest (and splatoon in general) as a whole.
Concerning today's splatfest, the matchmaking that offered full of promise just made things worse. The moment Nintendo thought of adding the equivalent of a power ranking to determine matchmaking just buried this game six feet under. Everything was black and white.
That coupled with the fact that the matches themselves were such a mess because players were unsynchronized the whole time. For the majority of the time that I've made the effort of going back into this game today, all I get were those attrocious lag spike along with that *connection unstable* alert.
And the craziest thing about this is that never since the start of March did I have such shamelessly unbalanced matchmaking for the game in general up until now.
Matchmaking in this update is so radical that it always end up with below average players to get stuck with below average players, while the crazy-monster good players gets stuck with the crazy-monster good players.
Since then I've always been on the short end of the stick. The matches; whether it's turf war or ranked, has always been lost in such a one-sided way that it's totally not funny anymore. And I've at this point lost any remaining interest about the game.
So my question to you guys remains: Has anyone out there also have this matchmaking issue for the past weeks?
My experience seemed so obvious to me in such an outrageous way that I can't be possibly making all of this up, because this **** would be so whack.
This, this, this, so much this! :)
I'm a little late to this thread, having my own rant on the same topic in another thread, but It's nice to see someone uninfluenced by some of our ranting here in the past notice the same exact trends. Fresh blood to the chronic complainer's circle is always welcome :P
The splatfest itself was atrocious, as Ranked is usually atrocious, and I'm of mixed minds on how matchmaking in ranked has been affected. I agree that ever since that patch some things about ranked matchmaking seem worse, but I can't qualtify it because the problems you mention are exactly what I've ALWAYS experienced. So far I seem to get less continuous losing streaks that drop me 2 ranks at a time, but I also seem to move ahead less as well, often ending exactly where I start, whether I'm playing B+ or A+. I suspect S and S+ players have a better experience since it's locked to a single rank now for matchmaking, but the A's are still all grouped and the B's are still all grouped. It's better without B+'s and S's in A matches, but only slightly as A+'s are still often S's that got dropped, and A-'s are still often B+'s that got lucky. And Aflat never seems to actually fight Aflats. Every lobby I see is a mix of - and +. It does feel different, and somewhat worse, but mostly I think you're finally getting slapped with exactly the same problems some of us had with the old system as well. I've had the short end of the stick for MONTHS. Some of us have very, very long threads dedicated to trying to figure out what happens to some people and not others. The trouble with the splatfest ranking system is simply that it took the already massively broken ranked ranking system and imported it wholesale into splatfest. The idea sounded great because the idea of ranked sounds great, but the implementation is lacking.
But your situation of always having below average players on your team against crazy good players on the other team is how the majority of my matchmaking (in ranked) has always been :( Which is why I've dedicated so much effort on the forum to
whining discussing it ;)
To answer your question, I've seen it a lot longer than the past few weeks, and while it does feel different in the past few weeks, I can't say it's worse or better...the (bad) end result seems to be the same but it's somehow more frustrating in how it gets there (or doesn't get there in the case of ranked....) And of note, not everyone is affected this way. You'll get the people that tell you "you get ranked where you belong" etc. But these people don't seem to have been grouped in this weird matchmaking nightmare some of us get grouped into.
The matchmaking was, simple put, plain terrible in the latest Splatfest. You don't balance a team by putting a bunch of good/more experienced players with newer players in the same team. That just doesn't work well. Instead, you balance a team by putting 4 players of similar level against 4 players of similar level. Come on, Nintendo, I assume it isn't the easiest thing in the world, but making a good matchmaking can't be rocket science.
That's exactly one of the two or three possibilities of what's going on that I've come down to in trying to figure it out. This Splatfest opened a big window into the problem of what's been wrong in ranked all the time. The biggest possibility seems to be exactly what you said: It's trying to match two teams of equal average value by sticking in players that average out to close to the right result. So an 1600, 1400, and two 1000's on one team would be close enough to 1300 to put against 4 1300's. So an S, and A-something and two bad C-somethings would be the same as a mix of A-somethings and B-somethings according to the system. That's definitely a huge part of the problem.
The other half is why are some players ALWAYS given the split good/bad players while the opponents seem to be the generally good players (and in the case of my splatfest the numerically advantaged team, to boot with the higher average score?) I can only assume that something (not the visible number) that tracks our player stats inflates some of us accidentally based on play styles. So if, behind the scenes, I really play like a 7.2, something gets messed up in the metrics and calculates me as a 9 due to something in my playstyle, and therefore puts me against opponents with a similar 9 rating because it falsely thinks I balance them out.
If it were JUST that it assembles teams based on the averages to get "equal" teams, it would benefit us roughly equally as often as it harms us. But for some of us, it's disproportionate and almost always harms us and rarely helps us. I can only assume it's because it thinks we're equal players that balance out those super players for some reason. This ties in with the popular thinking that "alts always get matched against alts anyway" - which I did experience in raising my alt. Either most of the C's and B's are just alts, or it was pairing me up with the alts specifically (and correctly.) meaning in the A's it somehow is getting tricked and gives me a similar "difficulty value" as the S+ alts and matches me against them.
