Worst Matchmaking ever

Hello All and especially people at Rovio,

Last week I introduced a friend to this game. I had a new account for myself also, so I was at the same level as him. We had both mk1 Shooter, low level weapons 120 damage, 600-800 health and that was it. The matchmaking is unbalanced a lot of the times, but this week it was ridiculous. See the pictures of the matches above,

2 mk1's amids 8 mk4 ships with rare and epic weapons and shields. We did 120 damage, some of them 800, so we were killed when people just by looked at us. Count the times we have to hit someone with 3000-4000 health.

Rovio, this is exactly the way to scare off new players (your customers). This is not a bit unbalanced, no this is way beyond unbalanced. If you want to keep new players in the game, then I recommend to fix this quickly. Now my friend has a mk2 ship, but the same thing: only mk3 and mk4 players against him with rares and epic.

I have contacted you before about this problem, but I have never seen it sooo bad. I really hope I could show a cool game to my friend and play it together, but I am afraid his interest won't last that long because of this.

Kind regards,
Flint

 

This is just how it is. Mark 2 fixer here, been playing for 1 week, at level 11. I have 1000 infamy and everyone else on my team is mark 5.

 

But I had only 289 and he 512 infamy and we were with 3x mk4 and 2x mk1, the other team with 5x mk4 ships. So, that is unbalanced big time. And the worst I have seen.

If it was 3x mk4 and 2x mk1 in both teams, then it was a fair fight, but not like this.

 

You're "problem" is that you're looking at this like a rational person. You think little things like having 4x your HP and 7x your damage are important. Rovio will gladly tell you that infamy is what matters. When you add up the infamies, you get a pretty fair match (LOL): 2763 vs. 2876.

The issue, of course, is that infamy measures exactly nothing at these levels (and it sounds like at any level short of the very, very top). Yet Rovio places an awful lot of weight on it. They also seem to think that the mark of your boat matters and again, I am perplexed what their thinking on that is. In most cases the boats get more HP and less speed. It's nearly a wash.

 

Sorry I accidently deleted one screenshot and the other one is not the right one.
I will change it tomorow.

The screenshot I was meant to show was from a battle from3x mk4 and 2x mk1 ships against 5x mk4 ships.

 

Hi TheAntiSnipe,

That is a good idea!

I didn't have a screenshot of the battle where it was:
3x mk4 and 2x mk1 against 5x mk4.

I thought I had, but the screenshots from the other two show what I meant also. And it did not happen once, it happened all the time.

Regards
Flint

 

Just curious, how often are you playing against other mk1 ships? Maybe the new player pool isn't that big.

 

Or.... they could just go ahead and address the core problem. I'm pretty much against them throwing more bandages on the issue. That isn't working and there's no way it ever can. Humans are inventive. If you give them an incentive system they will seek to maximize it.

I don't need a kiddie pool. I just need the higher levels to think it's ridiculous to try to grind on boars in the newbie starting area (WoW reference). You'll note that high levels don't do that in WoW. The reason they don't is obvious. Although they can certainly slaughter those boars in mass quantities, the rewards aren't even close to what they could get just fighting at or maybe a bit below their level.

 

I'm unclear why this is an issue. If you have a Mark 20 trillion that is honestly fighting as hard as they can and 100 infamy is the max they can attain then they belong in the noob area. Clearly they cannot hit the broad side of a barn with a sniper cannon at close range.

But that isn't really the situation I see. If you want my guess the vast majority of tankers are not "seal clubbers" That is to say, their motivation is not to pick off easy foes with their uber-weaponry. They are there for the same reason I am... to min/max the reward system. Remove that motivation and what you have left is the genuine trolls. I suspect there are few of those and it'd be a lot easier to address that problem once you decoupled it from the incentives problem.

Let me put this back into WoW terms since an awful lot of people are familiar with it. If WoW suddenly made the boars in the noob zone drop 20 gold instead of 1 copper I'd assume that those areas would immediately be flooded with high level players mowing down boars at all hours of day and night. Heck, slaughter a thousand boars and you've got a free month of play and doing that would be trivially easy. Sure, there are and always will be some genuine griefers and that needs to be addressed also. But by far the bigger problem would be the hoard of non-griefers just trying to make some much needed gold.

For the record, I have fought M4's with at least two legendaries in an M2. Generally I'm not annoyed at them. Usually I'm laughing at them. True incompetence is not a problem. Manufactured incompetence is.

 

It is so frustrating the matchmaking.

Now we had 3 speeders against us and in our team none. Almost impossible to win. Then the other team have 2 Fixers, which fixed themselves and others so fast, that we could not sink any of them.

Also in this matter the system has to become more balanced!

 

First of all thank you for your reply.

I posted just 2 screenshots, but I do mind if we face a team which is too weak. Although I believe you face more teams which are way stronger, than the other way around.

My problem is that you shouldn't face mk4 or mk5 ships when you have a mk1 ship.That is what I do complain about, I don't mind losing if the others are just better. But I do mind losing if I have uncommon weapons at level 10 and my opponents have level 30 rare or epics.

Beside that I also report floaters in the unfriends team, so I do care about a fair fight.

 

Call this bad matchmaking (for both teams)

 

In most of these cases the "bad matchmaking" perception is

1: Due to fleeting. Fleeting is always matched at the higher infamy, which is what the original post reflects.
2: MK of boat. In the second example the MK6 @ 538 infamy was probably over 2k at one point and is being matched higher because of that to avoid the seal clubbing issue.

For the record, I'm more of an infamy purist... so like SnappleBC said, maybe the MK6 really isn't that good, and the 538 or 1507 infamy numbers are accurate for matchmaking, but that's being heavily manipulated based on the matchmaking algorithm. Players are assuming the infamy number itself is correct at any point in time and judging matchmaking on that itself, but IMO that's completely false. Personally, I bounce up and down in a 500 infamy range, so as far as I'm concerned any time you add up a side you have no idea how close it really is... could be off by 2500 infamy PER SIDE, in my experience. I've offered many suggestions for this problem... but the Devs seem more interested in keeping it convoluted and complicated.