"This leads to frustration, lower retention, and a growing perception that Apex just isn’t fun unless you’re already cracked."
This has already led to all of the above. The population crash we're in right now is, I would wager, largely due to all the problems you laid out. And I'll take it further. Respawn's atrocious matchmaking has been a huge driver of the smurfing problem, and very likely a factor in the cheating epidemic as well. One, after all, begets the other.
In their defense: the population decline was probably inevitable and can only make a bad matchmaking situation worse. That's partly on them, but also largely just a fact of gaming life. I will also give them a huge nod for showing the pubs lobby make up prior to the start of the match AND for allowing a player to leave the match immediately rather than sit through legend selection. I'm not sure how many people are using this information to pick and choose their matches, but I'm using it aggressively and the quality of my matches has gone up materially by doing nothing other than quitting matches with a 50% or more skill range.
At the end of the day, if you want better matches then you have to use the tools the dev has started providing. No, it shouldn't work this way. But at least it can work if the individual player is willing to actively beat matchmaking into submission.
I will also give them a huge nod for showing the pubs lobby make up prior to the start of the match AND for allowing a player to leave the match immediately rather than sit through legend selection.
it would be nice if they had dots across the bar so you could see the real distribution rather than the extents of distribution.
