I´m fairly new to the game clocking around 100 hours. This is my first post. I wanted it to be about how great the game is and how good work you have done here. Instead, I got fed up with competitive matchmaking and have to whine about that instead.
For me the competitive game mode is easily the most interesting one. The maps in this game are amazing, but they are made to play on 5vs5. 6vs6 is a stretch and 7vs7 or 8vs8 is unplayable IMO. People tend to play more seriously and overall you get better games in competitive mode. On paper this sounds great and if you get two evenly matched teams you have 30 min of amazing gameplay which all 10 players enjoy greatly. This happens like 1/10 games at most.
Sure the player pool is not the biggest at this point so it´s hard to get perfect matchmaking all the time. But the current system is really underperforming and it definitely scares new players away from the game. If you are unranked, you should get matched against bronze and silver players and once your placement matches is done, you get placed in one of those depending on performance. Now it seems like everyone gets placed in lower silver or higher gold.
I´m gold 5 and it seems like I can´t advance from there even though I get scores around 45/25 most of my games. I get at least 1 unranked player in my team every game. Most of the time this player is performing worse than a bot. But of course the other team also have at least 1 unraked player too, so it evens out for the most part. These players are not having a good time getting scores around 2-20 or 3-30. I never yell at new people, but I had other people in my teams nonstop screaming at them on the voicecom. A players getting totally crushed and yelled at is not gonna stay in this game for a very long time. With the current matchmaking system this happens way to often and more experience players get super frustrated getting a player that played less then 10 hours in their team.
This is one problem, but definitely not the biggest one. The biggest one is that non premade teams get paired up with premade teams. Wtf are you thinking with this solution. It´s so retarded I almost quit playing this game every time it happens. There are private servers where premade team can scrim/cw with other premade teams. There is no reason to let them ruin the fun for everyone else in competitive mode. A well organized clan with voicecom just steamrolls any pug in competitive mode. Most of the time you can´t even get out of spawn. YAY so much fun.
http://i.imgur.com/cwJbe3N.png
Good job matchmaking!!!
Another thing I would like to see changed is implementation of 1 merc rule in competitive mode. It´s quite silly when you defend on Chapel using 4 skyhammers and a medic. I´m sure you thinking about this already, but it has implementation issues. I don´t know how to solve it when you have 5 new players using only borrowed merc rotation.
Suggestions:
From what I understand there is 25 ranks going from bronze 5 to elite 1. Use these to better place players according to their skill level.
Let new unranked players play against bronze and silver players to make it more enjoyable for everyone. Don´t place players to high after test period is over.
REMOVE premades from competitive mode or make a separate matchmaking system for premades. Max 2 player team should be able to enter normal competitive mode.
Maybe remove the competitive quests to stop forcing people to play competitive. Let people play competitive when they feel ready to do so instead.
Thanks for making such a great game otherwise!