Despite i see this exchange more or less as a theoretical view on things we should acknowledge that nobody can actually prove his pov. But if you see how many scientists try to prove that there is something callled “dark matter” - without having any actual evidence - there seems to be a consensus that dark matter might exist as it fills some holes in other theories.
If my hypothesis is that wt uses his own form of ELO system this would imply that players were somehow “ranked”. A proof for a player ranking can be given indirectly: The order of players in the lobbies right after spawn.
You can easily verify this by yourself - play some decent games in a row and your name will be displayed higher on the scoreboard right after spawn. This fact alone should convince you that i might be on the right track.
The rather poor result of trying to balance players (just assuming that it exists) might be a result of gaijin’s approach to minimize queue times - so they prefer short queue times instead of balanced matches (as imho their current ranking is dysfunctional) - or there is currently just a lack of experienced players and “the show must go on”.
But as a player who plays for fun only, the result is rather disappointing. And actually idc if something might look fine on average. Fun & challenge in a perfect mix strengthens the player commitment - but fun & challenge has for everybody a different meaning - that’s why you see a lot of guys sealclubbing at rank I & II with 30.000 matches.
The MM in its current form is simply crap - same as game-set up, 16 vs 16, map design or dysfunctional player skill evaluation.
Long term players have usually realized, that his game requires to find some workarounds in order to have a decent mix of fun & challenge whilst playing. Otherwise playing would be useless, at least for me.
Why? Because the MM is unable to create fights on equal terms regarding player skill involved.
My workarounds when playing wt
If you are only interested in WW2 air combat the BR setting policy of gaijin and lobby setup with hordes of undertiered premium planes (Wyverns, XP-50) forces you find the right balance.
-
If you fly an op or simply very strong plane around BR 4.0 you can beat your mostly less experienced opponent way too easy, no challenge, no fun.
-
If you fly a less stronger plane in order to have a challenge (so compensating your experience advantage with lower performance) you can have fun and a challenge.
-
But - you run sooner or later in matches were you find equally skilled pilots in op planes which are able to nullify all of your individual strengths and outperform you in all other aspects.
-
So in order to have fun & a challenge you have to use rather mediocre planes because you face usually less experienced/skilled pilots - but you are screwed if experienced pilots fly those planes. That can’t be right.
That is one reason why some experienced players in Air RB do a standard “quick lobby check” right after spawn - they check the enemy team by looking at their vehicle stats (not player level, not positioning) in order to identify the most dangerous opponents in order to predict their used planes and to gain at least a positional advantage if they fly superior aircraft.
As a result of those “checks” (if your do them long enough) you see patterns regarding positioning of the players on the scoreboard right after spawn and you get a good feeling how the match will develop.
Usually you can predict the outcome of most matches just by checking the enemy team and after a look at the plane choices of your own team - and sometimes just by their names.
Example of game decision by MM due to unbalanced lobbies:
Just open this replay, and check the vehicle statistics of the players (small 7 vs 7 match on Pacific map) direct after the spawn, no necessity to watch the match.
The JP team won just by the lobby set up - a hell of US rookies vs JP veteran players - including a well known stat optimizer (20:1 k/d in a rank II Ki-44). There was never a realistic chance for the US team to win - even with our B7A2 bot (with a rather cheap bot script) and a tanker in a helpless Ki-49 bomber the outcome was predetermined by the lobby set up.
All i had to do was baiting their highest guy up (cloud match) for another B7A2 and to kill their last player with a high speed zoom attack from below as the clouds are reducing the marker range significantly.
And exactly these kind of unbalanced lobbies you have to face if you have ongoing win strikes. Not always so clear visible as in my example, but extremely often. That your full uptier ratio increases significantly within ongoing win strikes might be a coincidence, but both factors come way too often into play than to be just the result of a (“coin floipping”) random event.
So even if my own experiences are not important for the overall picture (just due the low sample size) the presented evidence brought me and many others to the point that the MM has many functions that might be not really helpful as described multiple times in this thread.
If you read the statements of this fellow player:
again and see the overall tenor of this thread “too many loss strikes” you might rethink your own assumptions regarding what might be included in the MM - not change them, just think about them.
Claiming that the MM works fine on average is imho on the same level as setting BRs based on average results is fine - technically correct, but not helpful for players without a Joe Bauers profile (“Idiocracy”).