Season 20 release is terrible!

I don't think the shield and crafting changes are bad, but smurfing, cheaters, and matchmaking has all gotten much worse.  The game is completely unplayable as a solo queue player anymore.  You just drop in and get killed immediately over and over again.  It is horrible.

The game gets hacked during the ALGs, and EA/Respawn releases more cosmetics, meanwhile in the store one of the items is at a 0% discount.

Yep, I've spent a good amount on this game over the years. I was hardly a whale that'd buy out every collecton event but If there was a skin I really liked for my mains I"d grab it more often than not, or randomly do a pack bundle every so often. Not anymore. Not spending a dime on this garbage untl they can at least get matchmaking in a semi playable state. Played with a friend just today. 10 matches in a row of dying to master/pred players. Switched to ranked and actually did well vs people around my skill level, wild concept. Ive seen them be obsessed with matchmaking times in the past, they need to focus on quality over quickness or at least find some balance. I'm wondering if theyre focusing on just slapping together the quickest matches possible out of the whole player retention paranoia of people logging off if they arent instantly thrown back into a match upon que.

Gave S20 some more time, and concluded the following:

- The matchmaking did get "a little bit better", but its still you + two bots VS higher ranked players and/or cheaters/smurfs. 

- Cheaters/smurfs are more rampant, (mainly due to the rank level requirement being lowered, NOT a good idea EA/Respawn, it should of been raised)

My last match, it was my team, me being Gold I, teammates are in Silver, the team that killed us was two Plat II players, and a Diamond IV, how is that fair? It isn't. Both of my teammates' banner cards showed awful stats as well, and they moved like a new player, while the enemy team had full on aimbot. It was so obvious that they were aimbotting as after they killed my team, all 3 of them started running in the same direction, where one of them pinged "enemy here" at a wall, and it was the diamond player pinging the wall.

> @WTF_Huitzo "Ranked lobbies are super easy until diamond then you get the cheater / 300ping players from a certain country that destroy everything."
- I started seeing them the moment I hit Silver IV, and it got worse when I hit Gold I

- Pubs is unplayable, people still disconnect on knock/death, and rank is pointless. Mixtape is just a playground for all the bots and cheater accounts to level up to then go into ranked. A lot of the players I saw cheating in Mixtape were in my ranked match later on in the day once they had hit level 20.

- Audio is still missing, I cannot hear anyone else running besides my legend now, shooting is a 50% you hear it, 50% you don't, any grenade not thrown by me, has zero audio, etc. the list goes on.

- This one is to the legend armor and perks. I actually like this. There could be some new ones, like not giving 3 or so legends the ability to see grenades through walls and things like that. I understand that Fuse needs it, and Horizon can use it for their ult, but it just doesn't feel like they have their own perk. Something that would be nice to see is helmets tied into the armor perk system, which would free up space in the loot pool. The golden helmet only reduces tact/ult recharge anyways, and not many people end up with gold helmets. As for the body armor perk that's now gone, (double healing syringes/shield cells), that and the golden helmet perk could be worked into the armor leveling or something like that. It would be a shame to let those things go away.

- Servers seem to be okay, but I'm still getting shot around corners and such, (which is most likely someone using soft aimbot). I still think the servers should be on a higher tick rate if its still on 20hz.

Would love to see more communication from EA/Respawn about these problems. I also understand that the cheater problem isn't something that can get slapped with flex seal and be resolved either. I know its an ongoing battle. Its just right now, it feels like EA/Respawn just doesn't care about the cheaters as they keep releasing recolor collection events and other cosmetics. Especially when they released a full store sale during a time when everyone was wondering if it was safe to play the game or not. (It seems safe to play and PirateSoftware basically said that there's nothing to worry about, but players should still decide if they want to play or not).