> Seems like you somehow feel entitled to winning.

Well, yes. If you spend hours and hours playing the game, I can imagine that at some point you feel like you should be getting better than most people.

This was definitely true for dedicated servers anyway.

> If you spend hours and hours playing the game, I can imagine that at some point you feel like you should be getting better than most people.

I'm sure they feel the same way.

So, with the old system. If you sucked you knew you sucked and it was okay. Now there’s no feedback. You can suck and convince yourself you’re awesome, and everyone who is awesome still thinks they suck, except the top 5-10 players in the world.

I personally like matchmaking, but I get it. Sometimes I want to play people who are way, way better than me and “suck”. Like I used to.

The vast majority of people who rant against fair matchmaking systems, unfortunately, are not like you - they instead want to consistently play against people that are far worse than them, so they can repeatedly stomp the games and convince themselves that they're awesome.

The situation that you described is so incredibly uncommon that publishers will never specifically address it. This isn't good, but the general (instead of specific) approach of "getting rid of skill-based matchmaking" has so many more downsides that that's going going to happen either (and it would be very bad).

If I was a publisher I’d address it by making a micro transaction to temporarily add a boost to your MMR. So players can pay money to play better opponents.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work in any games where you play on a team, because then everyone else on your team is playing with a lower-skilled player, which makes the game much harder (and usually less fun) for them.

The only way you could implement this feature in a fair way (for both teams) is if you allowed an "MMR boost" when your entire team is a single party. And that would be fair! I'd support that feature, even if I never use it.

That doesn't make sense, in modern match making systems you see your rank and/or rating points, you get higher, perfectly fine feedback. No one convinces themselves that they are great when they are can see that they are in the bottom division..

The idea is very weird to me.

So basically you are complaining that you don’t get to connect and smash opponents weaker than you and instead are faced with even competition?

Unless you derive an unhealthy pleasure in bullying people who pose no challenge to you, that’s seem like a net improvement. Facing no opposition is just plain boring.

Honestly, my already fairly low opinion of the average online video game player is not really being improved by our current discussion.

You should play competitively so you can understand the problem first hand.

Otherwise, you're just doing what the previous generation did mocking people with their 'nintendos' because the problem is not relatable.

The few times I played Mario Kart or Splatoon online recently seemed very fair to me.

I have little interest in "serious" competitive video games. Most of them are not very fun to me. Plus, to put it bluntly, everytime I tried, they were shockful of abusive idiots regardless of the proefficiency level. Still, I don't remember finding the matchmaking particularly painful.

These are not the level of gaming that most people here are talking about.

No, my problem is not being faced with even competition. My problem is being always faced with even competition.

In the past you’d know you were getting better because you’d start winning more often than losing. Conversely, you’d know you needed to get better when you were still mostly losing. This was all in games with a completely level playing field, so the only differentiator was skill (for me those games are tiberian sun, gta 2, warcraft 3 or unreal tournament).

This was, fun? I’d look up to the people that could defeat me.

Then the new generation of games, where you literally got advantages as you played more (Call of Duty MW2) things became crazy, because you’d need to play against people that had wildly different advantages. Matchmaking often isn’t very impressive, and you get matched with people much stronger than you.

Now, you just boot up the game, drop a few hundred 100’s of dollars, and start whacking noobs.

They are better than most people. Just not against most people they play against. Chess players also lose 50% of their games unless they're at the absolute top.

Usually there are ways to play besides the ladder, if you can find players willing to lose much more than 50% of their games against you. But for understandable reasons, those are hard to find. So people make new accounts and start at the bottom of the ladder again instead. (In many games, the publisher makes money off that, so they don't fight it too strenuously).

most multiplayer games are not 1v1.

Overwatch 2 (for me, at least) seems to be achieving a 50% win rate by alternating between matches where my team wins with no effort and matches where my team can't even get out the spawn room.

Which is obviously a bad way to achieve a 50% WR. It isn't the case that every matchmaking system that achieves a 50% WR is good (you can easily imagine cases where it's not, e.g. alternating matching you against very good and very bad opponents), but it is the case that a good matchmaking system much converge towards a 50% WR for the vast majority of players.

well, match making in team games is an extremely finicky beast

That's an argument for making the skill-based matchmaking better. It's not an argument for removing it entirely - that makes the problem far worse.

(alternatively, in extremely snowbally games like League of Legends, that's an argument for fixing the game balance such that wins and losses feel less like stomps)

> It means you are always facing a fair challenge. You'd think that, but no.

From my experience in overwatch, the system tends to favor win and loss streaks instead. You'll get 4-5 wins in a row, where the enemy team had no chance. Then 4-5 losses where your team was hopelessly outclassed. Maybe you'll get a couple of games that are close and feel fair. But not many.