Unfair Matchmaking!

Am I alone in spotting the logical flaw here?

No I see it too, it means someone else gets a slightly easier game. :c

That 50% of people get pitted against someone slightly worse? And also, it means the rankings are a massive grind to ever get anywhere.

The matchmaking is quite hit and miss; I was up against Elodea during a set up match for example, but have since fought against a few silver and golds since then. There just aren't vast numbers of ranked players at the moment, which is a shame since the new ranked maps are actually very fun to play

That's a really stupid direction to take the discussion squishy and I think you're purposely just trying to be obtuse.

Playing against people competitively is fun. It's why people all over the world participate in various local sports games, etc. For example, I play basketball in a local team against other teams - some teams are better than us, and some teams are worse than us, and we all still have fun. What would not be fun would be playing against a team in the NBA - for them or for us.

Well in the setup matches the system really has no idea whatsoever how good or bad you might play. It basically needs to put you vs random opponents.

That's where I think some refinement could come into it; standard deviation of less than 2 sigma for setup games (as in, don't put you against the top 5% of players before you're ranked)

I'm not against an ***-whooping myself, but it can put people off if they get curb-stomped because they've unknowingly been matched against someone ranked that high so early on

true it probably is better to try to avoid players rated that high, unless the player has already won 4 of the 5 placement matches. In that case give them a hard pick

Matchmaking puts you up against higher levels in many games, though I must admit I'm referencing team based games at the moment.

I'm not trying to be dense or obtuse, I only misunderstood. I understand playing ranked is fun, though I personally like fighting against players of much higher skill than I (I don't actually play matchmaking though) because I like to learn from every failure. It's just how I've always learnt to play games as I normally end up getting a game later than most; I'm using Halo as an example again.