Marvel Rivals matchmaking is atrocious
This is my first ever reddit post and normally I never voice my complaints, but I feel obligated to make it. For reference, I am a diamond 1/gm 3 player currently, and am debating stepping away from competitive until something changes.
I’ve played competitive shooters at a high level for years and dabbled in games such as overwatch or paladins competitively from time to time. I mostly solo or duo que with my friend, and I’ve always been a firm believer that if you truly put your best foot forward and make an attempt to improve and learn the game that you can make games MORE competitive based on your own competency. However, with marvel rivals 85% of the games (especially in plat and diamond) end in a massive stomp one way or the other.
I think this is caused by two glaring issues that I believe will dwindle the player count quickly if they aren’t fixed:
The MMR system The mmr system in this game is completely imbalanced, and allows players with a negative win rate to climb ranks pretty much up until high diamond. For instance a plat 2 player will receive 32ish mmr for a win, and only lose 22ish on a loss (regardless of performance). This allows players to climb ranks by playing the game more, and not well. There is also an issue with rank disparity mmr gains. For instance, I queued at diamond 3 with my plat 3 friend and we would be put in lobbies mostly full of plat 1 players. Upon winning my friend would gain around 40 and upon losing around 16, while I was getting less than 20 for winning and losing more than 20 when losing. After winning 11/20 matches, I had gone down a half rank while my friend had gone up a full 2 ranks. Despite my friend not being my skill level, we were nearly the same rank just by playing together. This practice almost encourages smurfing, and allows bad players to get “carried” through the ranks.
Team balancing A biproduct of reason 1 is that players end up in the wrong rank which causes massive imbalances in the team which end up in stomps. For instance, if I que up in diamond 2 there’s a good chance I get matched with plat 1s and diamond 1s who’s skill level might realistically be closer to plat 3 (or lower) because of the aforementioned MMR system. There’s a very high chance of these players being either a. massive sandbags or detriments to the team or b. unable to flex and cause massive team in-cohesiveness. This of course goes both ways as well, where one or two players can absolutely dominate the lobby.
This gameplay loop is extremely frustrating for the solo queue player, and netease needs to make a massive attempt to prevent these stomps. As many of you probably know, the back and forth games where there are counter picks and momentum shifting plays are the main appeal of competitive rivals. But with the current state of the game, those are few and far between.
Of course I can’t really speak towards the 4+ stack experience and I understand that stomps are part of the game and happen. It just feels as though the “competitive” allure is really just one big gamble every time you hit that play again button.
I would love to hear you guys’ thoughts on these issues, may the teammate lottery be ever in your favor!
(ps. too many of you think you are top dps, when in reality you are just inconsistent as f*ck)