I understand the thought behind match making penalties, but there has to be a better way to try and fix the problem. Most uber players have agreed with me. Here is the problem. People are avoiding playing people in their league in fear of losing their position on the ladder. If they instead play people of worse skill, they will meet their 1 match a week minimum and win, this is needed to keep their spot. Thus they leave the match and face a match making penalty. They do not care about this penalty, because they have an entire week to get that one game in vs a guaranteed inferior opponent thus keeping their spot on the ladder. This does not fix the problem it was intended to fix but instead creates another one. Speaking as a crappy gold player. I enjoy playing people of my skill level. I enjoy playing gold players. I am willing to play platinum players and silver players as they are but 1 league up and 1 league down. I do not enjoy playing bronze players or uber players as they are 2 leagues away from me in skill. I will either smash the opponent or the opponent will smash me. My solution. I simply leave the match before the game starts to avoid the cluster **** rapeage that will follow. Especially if my game time is limited that day. I desire close competitive matches, this is why I play the ladder. When i do this I face huge match making penalties. 5 min 15 min then an hour. This builds up very quickly when you dont want to smash or get smashed by that same person in que that is no where near your skill level. Solution: Match making penalties should be applied in huge amounts when avoiding a player of your skill level. if I as a gold player bowes out to another silver/gold/plat they should face a penalty of a week in length. If an uber bows out to another uber the same thing applies ect. ect. If a bronze bows out to a gold, in order to play another bronze or silver player, so be it. If a gold bows out to an uber to play a gold plat or silver so be it. The ladder is created to make close enjoyable nail biting games between similar skilled opponents. It is not created for trolls. I understand the desire to punish those abusing the system, but this is not the way to go about it. Do not punish people for seeking equal level competition. ( when I say most uber players agree I mean they don't mind me leaving as they don't enjoy repeatedly squashing me. They state they would rather play the uber players avoiding them. 4 have even traded match making penalties with me leaving. Allowing me to play other ppl of my level creating fun meaningful enjoyable games both of which I've lost and won. To those players trading penalties with me and those I've faced in equal battle I say thank you.) Judicator
I would say this is more of an issue with lack of players rather than match making penalty and I don't think there is much that can be done about that. One thing you can do is find equally skilled players in pa chat or some other place and play custom games with them, though this is more avoiding the problem than addressing it.
The ladder itself is kinda flawed. I shouldn't be uber anymore if I don't play yet if I play one game I'm still In the top ten. That's just weird @Quitch wrote a good article about it.
