5/6 stacks going against 6 random players.

(rederoin) #1

Why does this happen? How is it even anything close to fair & Balanced matchmaking?

(GatoCommodore) #2

@rederoin said:
Why does this happen? How is it even anything close to fair & Balanced matchmaking?

in ranked or in pub?

(Press E) #3

I don’t know why honestly. It’s something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. DB usually tries to match premade teams with more skilled random opponents or other premades, but the game’s population just isn’t big enough.
Even as it is, you’ll often see solo queue high level players thrown in with low level ones. But when an entire team is made up of skilled players, it gets a lot harder to find a balanced match in a reasonable amount of time.

I’m really not sure why DB doesn’t just split up premades across both sides tbh. Fighting as a team is great in a competitive tournament or something, and it’s fun to fight with your friends sometimes, but it really just does more damage than it does good. Not like there’s anything wrong with fighting your friends either.

@GatoCommodore said:

@rederoin said:
Why does this happen? How is it even anything close to fair & Balanced matchmaking?

in ranked or in pub?

“5/6” implies in both ranked and CMM.

(LifeupOmega) #4

Cause y’all wanted to queue with friends in pubs.

(FalC_16) #5

Tl;dr Coz low population. Hope 1.0 will bring at least 10k players ^^

(D'@athi) #6

Wake up…

([ *O.C.B.* ] Wildcard) #7

@STARRYSOCK said:
I don’t know why honestly. It’s something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. DB usually tries to match premade teams with more skilled random opponents or other premades, but the game’s population just isn’t big enough.
Even as it is, you’ll often see solo queue high level players thrown in with low level ones. But when an entire team is made up of skilled players, it gets a lot harder to find a balanced match in a reasonable amount of time.

I’m really not sure why DB doesn’t just split up premades across both sides tbh. Fighting as a team is great in a competitive tournament or something, and it’s fun to fight with your friends sometimes, but it really just does more damage than it does good. Not like there’s anything wrong with fighting your friends either.

@GatoCommodore said:

@rederoin said:
Why does this happen? How is it even anything close to fair & Balanced matchmaking?

in ranked or in pub?

“5/6” implies in both ranked and CMM.

When the gap between the varied skill levels across the games population is too great, which has been a known factor here for a while, the system is unable to find truly balanced matches at all times; this is especially the case with only a small portion using these matchmaking systems at a given time. When it can’t find a suitable match it eventually starts throwing together whatever it can find to at least have a match start up. Separating the members of a Premade across both teams defeats the whole purpose of entering the queue together in the first place; the population size generally playing Ranked and CMM is also far too small to keep them facing only other Premades, at the moment, as well. This ultimately leads to the results we currently see and experience at present.

That aside if you solo queue in either matchmaking system you’ve already agreed to put up with whatever imbalanced nonsense or useless teammates you may, or may not, receive. “Going it alone” in a team-based game should already imply a high risk, it’s mostly up to chance whether you get a good or bad match at that point and is tantamount to gambling the outcome; you’re basically playing the lottery and hoping you have the winning number. Whether it should or shouldn’t be that way is subjective and an entirely different “can of worms” on its own, one I have no interest in opening. Most team-based games make any attempts at taking the “lone wolf” route risky, so as to encourage working as a group; the underlying concept of how going alone in these systems equates to taking a gamble fits into this design, and quite neatly as well.

On a related note, since you mentioned a 6v6 format which is specific to CMM, there’s a reason most veterans avoid CMM like the plague; the system itself is, at best, a joke. It functions on the same algorithm as Ranked but has an even smaller population to work with; it is primarily played by newer players, some of whom I’ve seen get lost in spawn when placed in the match before. The shuffle system in the standard servers is also laughable; it fails to function most of the time due to the same problem of a high spread among the skill ranges in the community, and is often just abused by salty players in the last few mins of a match. On more than a few occasions I’ve seen it simply switch the defenders with the attackers while keeping the same exact teams; a few of these instances actually occurred within the past two weeks.

In any event, balance is a tricky subject that is not nearly as black-and-white as most will claim; you will never be able to fully satisfy every player with regards to the matter, as some of it boils down to improving and adjusting your play-style so that you can effectively handle a given game mechanic. No one likes being told they aren’t good enough, that’s only natural, and the typical reaction is to complain about it and to cast blame anywhere else but on oneself. Not to say this is the case here, though you shouldn’t expect balance in a casual setting where literally “anything goes” to begin with, however my point still stands.

P.S. If you feel this strongly about it then make a post that offers actual constructive feedback, as opposed to just another complaint amongst the virtual landfill of similar posts that exist on these forums; if all else fails just avoid those game modes for the time being, while maintaining a watchful eye over their current state.

(Sorotia) #8

@GatoCommodore said:

@rederoin said:
Why does this happen? How is it even anything close to fair & Balanced matchmaking?

in ranked or in pub?

Does it matter? Happens in both cases either way…don’t know if I should :smiley: or :’(

(Szakalot) #9

i **never **see purposeful stacks on pubs.

Things that rek balance:

  • good player leaves after auto-shuffle
  • new good player joins, tipping the balance
  • people go afk at beginning of the map, causing 1-2-3 objectives lost in quick succession
  • people run away as soon as they hit the first wall. More people start to leave. Balance is completely screwed. Sometimes a shuffle goes through: someone doesn’t lack shuffle’s outcome. They either leave, or switch sides in case of odd player numbers. Balance is screwed up again. People leave, etc. etc. etc.

Once I was in a game, 10-15 people joined and promptly left because we are getting stomped. And so the stomp continues, cause <4v7 ain’t gonna work.

Balance in DB is extremely fragile. I blame the symmetrical spawns, and the constant frontline: any weakness is immediately exploited, people get flanked hard, and the entire team collapses.

But in those rare 5-10% cases of actually balanced teams, well we all come back and play to find those.

(bgyoshi) #10

@LifeupOmega said:
Cause y’all wanted to queue with friends in pubs.

I’d say the inability to queue with friends was the largest killer of DB back in the 2015 era. I personally had 4 or 5 friends quit over that reason alone, and they all went to OW because they could queue together. If CMM existed on beta launch, it would hands down be the most popular mode even today. Once 2016 hit and we got into the summer when the summer squash and the rampant bug fixing began, though, who knows where we’d be. But I’d put money that DB would’ve retained 10k players daily until that point if CMM was a beta launch feature.

I’m still glad it’s there. I don’t play it, but it really is just a population problem. And as much as I hate 7v7, I much prefer to drop in and drop out of matches without the need to queue when I’m playing solo.

@rederoin said:
Why does this happen? How is it even anything close to fair & Balanced matchmaking?

DB determines skill by some algorithm based on a player’s performance in the past x games. That means that low levels being carried and performing well will be considered at a higher skill than they might be. Or that a high level player on a bad run of RL emergencies/afks/bad teammates making their performance worse will be considered at a lower skill than they are.

It makes sense when you think about it; smurf accounts are quickly considered high skill, and old vets that haven’t played in awhile and are doing bad are considered lower skill.

But in the current environment where there’s so few players and ALL of the few players are very active, it just doesn’t work so well.

Personally, I’d just pair teams by ensuring that the average level of the two teams is as close as possible. Then when vote shuffle happens when teams are even in count, I would swap the top two players on the winning side with the bottom two players on the losing side. And by bottom two players, I mean the bottom two ACTIVE players. People that’ve been in the game for a minute or two, or still have 0 points from just joining, wouldn’t count. If the teams are imbalanced, though, like a 4v7, I’d simply move the top and rank 3 player over to the 4 side.

The other option is to interlace players. So the winning team’s rank 1/3/5/7 player swaps with the losing team’s 2/4/6/7 player

(Press E) #11

@Szakalot said:
i **never **see purposeful stacks on pubs.

I don’t think that’s really what OP meant. They seemed to be talking about premades with skilled players being paired against less-skilled players, intentionally or not. And well, that does happen pretty often.

But regardless, I’ve seen players try to stack things pretty often. Sure it makes sense in ranked, you’re trying to build the best team possible to secure a victory, but the same applies to pubs. Lots of people just like winning.
You see it more often with team switching to try to stack a match, but I’ve seen premades do it in CMM too.

(kopyright) #12

@STARRYSOCK said:
DB usually tries to match premade teams with more skilled random opponents

A “solution” which suffers from its own problems.

(TheManBehindTheMask) #13

RAGE clan tag aka. stack of 5 Phantoms.

(B_Montiel) #14

Damn that lobby shuffle.

Yesterday, on the AIE server, 4 freakin games in a row, with minimal numbers of players leaving between each round, we got 4 man stacked in the same team by the lobby shuffle. Against a team which was on average below level 50, while we were 3 above 100, one roughly 70, us having a blatantly higher skill than the rest of the server (I’m not boasting, I just want to show the stupidity).

Needless to say, those 4 games were awfully balanced, even though all conditions were pretty much filled to get a good game after lobby shuffle. And we had to justify why we got put 4 together…

(Outblast) #15

I once went up against 6 Auras in CMM and they all had the same name. Although at first we were getting crashed, after changing around our mercs we ended up winning the match.

(Artyrim) #16

I’m happy most of times when i meet stacked people because usually they are lower than me even though they are stacked so is not a problem but is painful when I have to face stacked cobalts >.<