Season 19 ranked matchmaking makes me delulu

Season 19 brings so many welcome changes including the three strikes LTM (lots of fun btw). Conduit feels good but not too OP, and respawning with some of your old kit is a nice change as well. All great things, kudos to Respawn for the hard work there.

But matchmaking. It is beyond me how my team of me (solo queue currently Gold 1), a Silver 1 player, and a Diamond player can all be queued against a Pred 3 stack. And in most games that I've played in upper Gold, it has been this way - where my team is usually fodder for current Masters/Pred players depending on how quickly they get to us. I understand that less than 10% of the playerbase is Gold+ at the time of writing this, so perhaps the variance of rank becomes larger to ensure reasonable queue times. That said, it's ridiculous that it is Season 19 and Silver players can still face Pred 3-stacks in the same ranked lobby.

Couple the above with the fact that ranked still feels like a grind. Since the shift to 1000 LP ranks and excluding the season where 1/3 of the playerbase ended up in Masters, ranking up has felt less of a feat and more of a time-sink. If Respawn is going to continue having such poorly matchmade games + make it take this long to climb to X rank for most players, I don't see the downward trend of active players reversing anytime soon as people look for more balanced, fulfilling ranked experiences.