The community has made a big deal about the matchmaking. Ever since they made the change to the current system in NHL 25 it's been a regular bone of contention with players ( including myself ) bringing up all of the same points you're making.
EA obviously feels differently. For them the priority is that teams find a match-up quickly even if it doesn't result in a game being played.
The reason most commonly given is that the player base is too small to support more granular matchmaking. I feel like the current matchmaking system is just going to make the situation worse by chasing new and lower skilled players away over time. Sending these players immediately into a meat grinder against elite teams is not the way to retain players. There can be a benefit to playing teams better than yours to see how they play and learn from it, but that only works to an extent. Once the skill gap gets too big, the losing team isn't learning how to get better, they're just getting beat down and I don't see how that helps grow the player base.
But EA isn't wrong on this one. The player base isn't big enough, I've been in lobbies where I can't find a 6's game for a good 10, 15 mins sometimes and just give up finding one, and a lot of the times it's on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Imagine if matchmaking went skill based, it would be even longer. I do think one problem is people who should really be playing clubs squad up in drop ins and just beat up on randoms thrown together on a team, but not sure how you fix that issue.
To be fair you're talking about drop-ins ( or at least it sounds like it ) while OP and myself are talking about club games. I can't speak about the population for drop-ins as I haven't played any significant number of drop-in games in over a decade ( mostly because drop-in games were some of the most toxic, frustrating gaming experiences of my life which might explain a lower player count there ). But as for clubs, in all the years I've played ( since 09 ) the only times my club found it difficult to find games would be in the dog days of summer, and even then we'd find games relatively quickly.
I do agree that drop-ins should be for individuals looking for games and not organized teams looking to beat up on a bunch of disorganized randoms.
I worry EA is in a spiral of declining player count. Low player count leads to uneven matches ( in both number of players and skill level ) which further frustrates players driving them away lowering the player count even more.
Ah, yeah. I play both club and drops. Club is harder to matchmake I feel, the only time games are more fair is usually around playoff time when you match up against other clubs around your skill level. On the other side, I've also played club games where we should have absolutely wiped the floor against the team we played against and didn't for some reason (me and my club teammates have our theories)
Sadly, that isn't fully the case. There is cause and effect here. You can't grow a player base with a broke matchmaking format, in-turn you can't fix matchmaking cause the player base for exactly the same reason. This has been a cycle for a few years easily, players who want to jump in and try it out, learn the game or anything along that lines gets in at low level and needs to face top tier players in their first match or second one, puts a bad image of the game on them. They may keep trying off and on but just complain that its not good and say how other sports games have better matchmaking + gameplay and in the end decide to go back to what works.
I saw this first hand in NHL 25 where I had a team of players wanting to get into it but after trying and seeing how the game is + the lack of matchmaking moved back to games like NBA or FC seeing they have a strong base for gameplay and competitiveness.
EA is absolutely wrong about this one. Playing Elite players who have chemistry is ZERO fun. It's not even hockey playing against players in different skill brackets.
Community ManagerI don't believe we said it was fun going up against teams with a significantly higher skill level. The issue with adding rank to matchmaking would mean some very long times to find a match.
Exactly like I said EA_Aljo would say longer wait times.. let's be honest here .. this issue has never been passed on to ea .. its been mentioned multiple times .. with only a reply longer wait times to find game as I mentioned he would in a previous reply above in this thread.
Community Manager
