[2021] Why is matchmaking putting people with 1100 mmr difference in the same lobby?

Short Answer: it shouldnt

Long Answer:

Seems you already know this, but it can happen if the queue size is really low, or it could be from somewhat rare or unintended bugs. Most of the complaints ive seen regarding this come from the early morning hours, where there are not that many people queueing. But i still like to check and make sure.

If you can provide a match ID, or a smiteguru link to the match, or anything I can look into it and confirm.

Lots of people using this thread to kinda dogpile on SMITE matchmaking, but matchmaking is pretty simple:

The Queue Pops - matchmaker takes the top 10 MMR players in the entire queue - makes that match - then balances the teams by average MMR for those 10 players only - then repeat for players 11-20, 21-30, etc.

If the top 10 happens to include a huge range of MMR (because not enough people are in the queue at that time) - the result can be these type of matches, like OP described, but this is definitely not the goal nor should it happen at normal gameplay hours.

We are taking all "bad match reports" very seriously and looking into them, and since 8.1 we have had much closer MMR ranges per match than before our ranked changes and bug fixes. If we can find any more cases of bad matches (without low population) we will definitely have them looked into and addressed asap.

so please - keep communicating with us - just give a match ID or link so I can work toward fixing it! Thanks!

6am ranked conquest is going to be low population and can result in this type of match.

Id expect more normal hours to be much better though based on the populations we are seeing for NA-West