Matchmaking is broken since the update, Screenshots Attached

[Mama Mi Mario]

Since the update, matchmaking has felt way more lopsided than normal variance. I’m not talking about close losses. I mean repeated games where 2 to 3 players on one team are clearly outmatched and end up hard-feeding. I’m dropping a few screenshots from my recent matches because it’s been a consistent pattern.

I’m not trying to blame random teammates. Everyone has bad games. The issue is how often these extreme outliers are showing up in the same lobby post-patch, and it makes matches feel decided early.

Curious if anyone else is seeing this since the update. If there was an MMR reset or queue change that explains it, I’d love to know. Otherwise it feels like team seeding is off right now.

 

[ckdude14]

Matchmaking felt off before the update as well, but its even worse now. If they silently did an MMR hard reset then this will resolve over time but I'd hope that would have been communicated.

Even before the update new and returning players were often being placed way too high in the ranked system. My assumption is that is relatively representative of their MMR. I had many friends who played the game over a year ago a few times (have less than 15 games played) that were placed in Oracle. They just get destroyed game after game because they don't even know how to play yet, eventually giving up and dropping the game.

After the patch I'm seeing more 'new' players in my games, which are around emissary level according to the match end screen. I am by no means a super great player but I have 300+ games played with a well above 50% winrate. Putting brand new players in my games against me or my opponents is a recipe for disaster on all accounts. I assume most of these 'new' players are actually returning players who never actually learned how to play, just tried it a few times way back when.

Just a suggestion:
If MMR was not reset, I'd suggest to the devs a hard reset of ranks and MMR. At least targeting players with <100 games played or something. Yes there could be some short term pains caused by this, but new and especially returning players badly need this. And the ranked distribution for players with <100 games should be heavily skewed towards the bottom 3 ranks.

I think it would at least really benefit the community if there was some messaging about this topic from the devs. There are a lot of people trying to get their friends into Deadlock right now and the uncertainty around the matchmaking, whether real or not, is impacting people's experience.