[2022] WG please please please... try to find some way to skill balance the MM

Hi!

Forgive the long wait for the reply - the entire NA has been travelling together for the last few days.

So, I've been hearing this notion for a while now. For several patches, in fact - that more games are steamrolls than before and that this must be a factor of the match-maker not factoring in player's stats. I did some digging into match metrics and found that this is simply not the case. I compared average battle time and average number of deaths per match, along with a few other things. I did not see any difference between recently and before. Those being the two most obvious metrics, I have to conclude that this is something that people are perceiving, but is not actually changed.

Before we get the "spreadsheet says it's fine" memes, keep in mind what the two results of steamrolls SHOULD be: shorter matches and fewer deaths. That should translate to lower XP all around - something I also checked.

Not the case.

Yes, of course we have folks whose job is to monitor "game health" statistics like how long battles last and how one-sided they might be. I can do that research easily myself without much effort.

Look... when people complain about "streamroll" and "one-sided" or "lopsided" matches, what they mean is: "One side loses so many ships that the game ends early and even the winning side doesn't get much XP - so it's lose / lose for everyone". This is simple. Winning so fast that even the winning team doesn't have time to get significant damage / kills and therefore everyone has a bad game.

This is easy to check with just a few metrics:

1. Average game length - (a lopsided match ends faster)

2. Average kills per game - (a steamroll results in few kills all piled on one team)

3. Average XP per match - (many one-sided matches will lower overall XP accumulation)

If a couple of these suggest that yes, matches are more often lopsided now than in previous patches - then there is something there. If 1 does not, it could still be the case that matches are lopsided. If ALL do not support the theory, then it's likely people are just more sensitive when it actually happens, not that it happens more often.