It's self-fulfilling. There is an endless torrent of new players populating matches with veteran pilots. If it's true that there aren't enough veterans searching for games to make good matches, it's because new players are losing interest after being suffocated and extinguished by the veterans they were mismatched against.
It does feel like that. Maybe larger teams would help balance them out, allowing for a better mix of new pilots and veterans. It is called Squadrons after all. Which should be really 12 or 24 per side. Now I think that would be great! Add full size Cap ships, maybe even more than one each side too, and I'd be over the moon (ah.. thats no moon.... its has a trench... oh boy ...now we're talking!!)
Matchmaking in this game fails to deliver the slightest feel of balance in 90+% of the matches from day one. Most games are terribly one-sided, no matter what. Just today every dogfight match I had the "pleasure" to play I got plagued with "teammates" worse than the AI fighters in fleet battle. 0 fun. On the other hand, after finally finishing my ranking matches for this operation I started my first hero IV battle, expecting some though fight- but no. We steamrolled over our opponents and won without having to defend even once.
Tomorrow might be the complete opposite again, but I doubt any match will feel even close to balanced.
One thing to make things better: if people go in premade,(often easily spotted by clan tags), they should only be able to fight against other teams with the same amount of premade players. 2-3 coordinated ppl fighting 5 randoms is usually a free win for them and 100% frustrating for the rest (and no, the "you need to communicate" argument doesn't work here. Voice comm with random strangers never brought any good to any game ever, I (and I presume many, esp. adults, others too) will refuse to use that "feature" for eternity.).
I just left yet another extremely disappointing Fleet Battles session. Myself and two others (plus two randoms) against opposing teams.
I really don't *want* to quit playing this game. The single-player campaign is awesome! The Fleet Battles vs. AI was fun for a while, until you get good enough to beat it every single time. (There need to be harder modes here.) But it is getting so frustrating losing constantly in multiplayer that I'm unfortunately not sure it is worth it anymore. When you can manage to get into those close-call matches, the game is fantastic, but that is becoming less and less frequent as time goes by. More often these days, I see us up against these Level 200+ players with no hope of even enjoying the match. Getting repeatedly trounced is no fun at all, and doesn't give you any chance to improve. (You don't get better at any game by being repeatedly outmatched so badly you can't even see what you did wrong.) At this point, I can't in good conscience recommend this game to any new players. Can you imagine being a new player jumping into that situation?
I keep seeing this argument floating around that a player's Level doesn't mean anything. I don't feel that this is an entirely accurate assessment. The player's Level is not a direct representation of skill. While this is strictly true, it is also misleading. The Level *is* a reflection of the amount of time spent playing the game. That time spent does yield increases in skill. Will two Level 40 players perform at exactly the same proficiency? No, of course not. But, you can bet they each have roughly the same time logged in the game, and can easily out-fly someone of half their Level. I have also seen people claiming to run across Level 200 players who suck, but I have *never* seen that.
I am an adult, with a job and other commitments, so I can't play more than one night (at most two) each week. My "progress" has therefore been correspondingly slow. I'm fine with that. But, my gaming time is limited, and I can't afford to spend it getting needlessly frustrated by a game that makes absolutely no attempt to skill-match teams. Without some alteration--some *attempt*--to balance out teams in Fleet Battles, I don't see how I can continue playing in the long run.
Please don't misinterpret my intention here. I'm not looking for excuses, nor am I railing against the game in blind rage. I enjoy playing the game when it actually presents our team with a challenging (but not horribly overkill) opposing team. I also feel bad on the ultra-rare instances where our team vastly overmatches the other, because I know they are frustrated by it.
I hope that these message boards are actually monitored by people at EA, and that they will recognize and make some attempt to resolve this very real problem. How about limiting the player Levels to within 50 of one another? Or totaling Levels on each side and putting some cap on the disparity? Or comparing K/D ratios to make sure they are comparable between teams? If nothing is done, the ultimate outcome is pretty clear: there will be no one playing except these elite teams, with no room for new or returning players to enjoy the game. It will die.
If anyone else is frustrated by the matchmaking, you are definitely not alone.
Thank you for your time. (And the opportunity to vent a little--hopefully in a constructive way!)
Just played a dogfight where our team was 49, 32, 4, 10 and 32.
The other team was 11, 28, 1, 9 and 1.
We won 30-4. That couldn't have been fun for the other guys.
Fix this!
This is my average game. I still have fun but frustration is rising.
I can't even think to play anything else than interceptor otherwise who else would kill enemy players? But still it's not enough.
Often times when teams are so imbalanced the enemy goes from attack to 50% of the flag ship straight, without change in attack/defense phase. Very humiliating.
Okay, so Update 4.0 this morning (Saturday 12th December) in Australia. On PS4, with cross play enabled, and have spent 40mins trying to find a game, but getting timeout error messages every 10mins...still! Fracking fixed nothing still! See all my previous posts over last 7 weeks. This should NOT be happening!
Yesterday, I managed to play one single quick match dogfight early evening...the first game I was able to get in weeks. Then not able to get another game all night....in either quick match, dog-fight, or fleet battles....what the actual frack? Prior to update 1.3 I was getting almost zero wait time. Was able to play people all over the world with zero lag or issues. They supposedly tweeked server settings that did nothing but completely frack it up for me. How has this not been addressed yet? WTF are the programmers/developers doing? I have new ships & cosmetics I can look at but can’t fly! Frustrated beyond belief.
So, NO absolutely NOT Game of the Year....tweeks have absolutely FUBARed this game, and I have never felt so much disappointment, anger and frustration at a gaming company as I do now for EA! All I want to do is play.
8 weeks now of Error 1066 and unable to play games online...are they kidding? Ever since Update 1.3 (Mandalorian update) I can’t play. In Mildura Australia, NBN connected with speeds of 70Mbs, on PS4 with cross play enabled. See pics attached and my previous posts in this thread! Support is non-existant!
As of a hour or so ago there was a update on PC at least and now matchmaking is working again and both dogfight and fleet battles I did I was matched with higher level players in my range...I'm level 60 we had mostly 20 and higher up to level 99
Thats good to know hoping the xbox version will recieve the same update soon
See attached pics
Just played a few games this morning and the matchmaking was all over the place in all of them.
