[2022] WG expects about 10 posts a day about team balance

The issue of "Team balance" has been addressed repeatedly. Not agreeing with our answer does not mean we're ignoring it.
The MM is RANDOM. It does not take player skill into account. People counter by pointing out that a division of unicums can be matched against a division of new players. This is true - and it does not change the fact that the match-maker only attempts to match divisions of 2 against divisions of 2, or divs of 3 against divs of 3. It does not take player skill into account.

You're not factoring in that hundreds of thousands of games are played per day.

A 3-man div of unicums is going to affect a match more significantly than a 3-man div of new players. I don't think you're suggesting that we remove divisions, are you?
Matchmaker does not factor in player-skill. Full stop.

If this thread is simply going to be a re-hash of tired tropes I'm going to shut it down. The game is not out to get you. Sometimes you have better players on your team and sometimes they're on the other team. It's easy to cherry-pick, but over time the games are evened by the nature of being random.

End of story.

I'd tell everyone except you
I'm kidding. Look, we've said it over and over again that the MM does not factor in player skill. People have matches that are blowouts and that's frustrating win or lose. It's frustrating to ME, too! The simple fact is that the match-maker is neither designed nor intended to take player skill into account and that's that.

The best way you can affect your Win-Rate and prevent blow-outs is to work on YOU. The better you play, the more effectively you can affect the game. Blow-outs will still happen, but over time and many games you will see a difference.

That's not true in the slightest.

Matchmaker does not factor in anything other then:

Ship Type


Ship Nation


Ship Tier

The Matchmaker doesn't know what winning or losing means. It's just a system for grouping the players that queue. As players queue of their own accord, it takes a smattering of what's available. Matchmaker is purely Random to allow for the more replayability and variety in our game.

I've responded to you previously.

Bottom/Top Tier games played is covered under "Ship Tier" as a thing the Matchmaker pays attention to.

Divisions are noted by the matchmaker in terms of a "maximum of 1 Division Difference per side", so I suppose I can reference that. However, the grabbing of those divisions is still providing from the random assortment of players that happened to queue at that time.

Your point doesn't alter that the matchmaker is still picking from a Random assortment of whoever happened to queue at that moment.

You can queue alone or with friends, and that can and likely does directly impact the win rate of your team. However, the matchmaking that happens is still just a collection of people all stuffed into a match. The collection process... is random.

You may need to expand on this point with some form of picture or flow-chart because I'm not seeing where you're going with this.

-

A Random Battle needs 24 players.

The matchmaker receives a player to match, sifts them into corresponding buckets and then looks for 23 other players. If the original player was in a Div, then the Matchmaker looks for another 22 or 21 other players.

The Matchmaker is only able to choose from the random string of players that are living, human beings and happen to click the Battle button in ships that fall within the Type and Tier (and potentially division requirements, but an imbalance of 1 div per side is allowed meaning a solo div could exist in a game with no opposite div) requirements. The smattering of people that hit the Battle button is random and uncoordinated (outside of clans or groups of people trying to sync-drop anyway) and so the Matchmaker grabs a random assortment of whatever shows up and fits the bill.

When there are enough players for a game or a queue dump, a game happens.

-

I'm not seeing the higher-order whatever that stops that from being Random. Further, I don't see why it would matter as the Matchmaker does not care if you win or lose, it simply gathers an assortment of players and puts them into a match.