Thanks for the feedback, lots of good stuff here!

1. TIERS - Even though Tier IV is very big, we still match teams against each other based on MMR. So while a team of five Golds and a team of five Irons might both be Tier IV, they won't typically end up in the same bracket (unless it's the end of the night and we're closing things out). That being said, Tier IV is definitely too big right now and we're going to move things around to make it smaller.

2. 3RD PLACE MATCH - Been getting this feedback a lot and we agree. Can't say when just yet, but it's on our backlog of things to add!

3. BREAK BETWEEN MATCHES - This is a tough one. When you come out of a long, intense game, I totally get that feeling of needing a break. But typically, your opponents have been waiting for a while for your game to end, and are kind of having the opposite experience. I think we can try out a longer scouting period for rounds 2 and 3 potentially, but we risk giving teams that have fast games too much downtime, since we block you from playing other games while you're in Clash.

Thanks again, glad you enjoyed it, and looking forward to making it work well for everyone else too!

It is definitely MMR - Rank doesn't always match MMR 100%, especially when you're talking about the difference between a 1 and a 2 in the same Tier.

Also, Clash does use some separate methods for finding smurfs, so it's possible one of these players is triggering one of those adjustments.

Yes, we try to match based on team MMR - so low Tier IV teams and high Tier IV teams generally won't match up, unless we're at the end of the night and just have to make whatever brackets we can. But yeah, Tier IV has gotten a little too large so this feels very confusing.

We want Clash to be playable for all skill levels, so we're really trying to not throw Iron teams to the wolves :D

We wait for a full round to complete so that we don't generate more waiting later on. Let's say you're crushing it, win your first game in 15 minutes. So do your opponents, so you play the next game like 25 minutes after the bracket started, and you win again in 15 minutes. You would be done with all but finals in ~40 minutes.

MEANWHILE, on the other side of the bracket, folks are taking a more typical 35 minutes to complete a game. It'll take then ~80 minutes to reach the final - meaning you'd be all hyped for your final match, then wait 40 minutes for an opponent.

We think it's a better experience to have multiple smaller waits than a single gigantic one. Especially because we may experiment with longer brackets in the future, where this would be even worse.

We have tried that in the past, and found that it ended up having the opposite effect, where those teams with a single high ranking player were hugely overmatched and basically unable to play.

That said, we're going to keep tuning our matchmaking, and we may not be weighing a single high ranked player heavily enough yet. We're definitely going to keep tuning a lot of Clash matchmaking for a while, since it's a pretty different dynamic from our more established matchmaking methods!

It's on our wishlist - the way spectator works right now, we can't force you to leave spectator once your next match is ready, so it would be very easy for someone to be spectating a match and accidentally miss their next game. But now that Clash is looking more stable (knock on wood), we can start getting into a lot of those kinds of improvements

We had a configuration error with the banners - they should be out now. Sorry for the delay!