Hello, Jack! We understand that matchmaking is one of the most discussed topics in our community. That's why we’re monitoring the matchmaking situation and will make changes once we’ve gathered enough game data. Thanks for bearing with us! 🤗

Alina,

I appreciate that you responded though the response doesn't really shed any insight into why that type of blatant mismatch occurs.    

For the monitoring you mention, do you rely on people like me that will come to the forum to complain and show you what the cause of my complaint is?  I think most people just complain on FB groups or Discord channels rather than come to the devs and offer information.  If people don't complain directly to you then all the backend systems you might use tell you things are fine.  

This is exactly what happened to me. My hanger is around 2300 and I was in a tournament fighting of more than 3450. I had to battle him 10 times before I realised it was counter productive and just slowing me down. He also had maxed everything.... brinkhouse maxed, carbine 12s maxed, bloody rail guns etc.  Your spot on about matchmaking and completely right about pushing players like me and yourself away. I regret spending about 150 dollars so far but see little point in spending further as I have no desire to be another whale. 

While squad power is used to help with matchmaking, it is by no means a perfect system which is why it is tweaked and monitored.

The main issue with Squad Power you may note is that you can have a 750 Power Rating Lancer and a 700 Power Rating Redox.  While the Lancer does have a higher Power Rating the Redox in certain game modes is superior because of its heavier weapon payload and damage output.

So group Squad Power (even with bots) is used but it by no means exact. It is more of an average assuming the Squad Power (Power Ratings) of all mechs are equal.  From time to time these ratings are adjusted to better reflect fairness and matchmaking.

Hopefully that explanation helps some.

Honestly,  it  doesnt  help  me  understand  running  into  a  player  that  is  double  my  hangar  squad  power.    There  should  be  some  way  to  make  sure  that  those  two  people  arent  placed  into  a  match  together ...  especially  when  both  enter  the  match  queue  solo  and  end  up  in  the  same  match  as  the  only  two  human  players.    

Think  about  a  game  like  World  of  Tanks  Blitz...  there  can  be  issues  with  that  style  of  matchmaking  also  but  since  it  does  not  allow  players  into  a  battle  with  a  spread  larger  than  +1/-1  tier  tank...  the  playing  field  is  pretty  even  by  default.    I  think  if  you  translate  what  happens  here  to  a  game  like  WOTB  it  would  be  the  equivalent of  placing  a  tier  10  tank  into  a  tier  6  matchup.    There  has  to  be  a  simple  way  to  prevent  that  from  happening.  

Again  I  will  go  back  to  saying  that  balancing  out  big  differences  of  the  human  squad  power  with  AI  is  not  the  right  answer.      The  balancing  should  first  be  done  on  the  human  players  and  then  small  differences  of  squad  power  can  be  balanced  at  the  AI  level.    

And  just  now...  1k  higher  than  me  which  is  not  horrible  but  he  was  able  to  decimate  my  AI  and  stay  away  from  me.

It  would  be  very  interesting  to  see  transparency on  the  total  team  squad  powers.

why  was  that  stat  removed  on  the  battle  report  screens?    

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Another   but  this  one  went  the  opposite  way.    HAWK  was  out  up  against  me  which  was  not  fair  to  him.    My  SP  was  double  his.    

these  posts  are  real  time  after  the  matches  so  you  should  start  to  get  an  idea  how  often  this  is  happening.    

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And  last  tournament  match  tonight.    Matchmaker  almost  screwed  me  out  of  1st  place  with  i  got  by  only  24  points.     

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So squad power was removed beause while it is a system guideline for matchmaking people were putting to much emphasis on it during the loading screne to justify wins or loses.  Squad Power is the accumulation of all assigned point values to mechs and weapons in a players hanger.

BUT, and it is a BIG one, having a high Squad Power is not inheriently a marker of a good player or even a good mech setup.

Exhibit A:  I have 3,313 SP between my 5 mechs.  Looks like a good setup at first until you realize all weapons on all the mechs are 2 energy power.  So having high SP would mean virtually nothing as I would likely get crushed by a 1,000 SP player with 1 good mech setup.

Redox - Autocannon 2s

Cheetah - RPG 2s

Lancer - Thermal Lance 2s

Arachnos - Shotgun 2s

ShadowPlasma Cannon 2s

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Thank  you.    That  was  a  deeper  explanation  of  how  squad  power  is  being  looked  at .    Would  be  nice  if  players  had  more  understanding  what  other  factors  are   looked  at  so  they  could  make  better  decisions  in  setting  up  their  hangars.

I  do  not  have  the  ability  to  see  what  the  metrics  are  in  the  game  of  humans  that  continue  to  play  and  those  that  give  up.    All  I  know  from  my  perspective  is  that  over  the  last  several  weeks  I  went  from  having  matches  with  at  least  an  average  of   4  humans  in  a  match  to  now  seeing  many  more  matches  with  ONLY  ME  and  all  AI.    My  last  7  matches  and  I  saw  a total of FOUR  humans  total.    

Something  is  wrong  as  the  game  does  not  seem  to  be  encouraging  players  to  stick  it  out.    I  think  its  the  hyper  aggressive  tactics  used  to  push  sales.    Players  do  not  like  it.  

The  image  shows  my  last  group  of  matches.    Humans  are  circled  in  yellow...  all  others  are  AI.    Not  so  good  for  a  muliplayer  game.

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There are many players like myself that want the game to succeed and the general consesus among us is that the sales methods are too aggressive and chasing casual spenders away.  

Another  indicator  players  are  dropping  out  of  the  game

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Realizing  now  that  matchmaking  Is  based  more  on  XP  rather  than  squad  power.    In  a  previous  thread  a  mod  here  stated  differently.    So  the  game  allows  players  to  essentially  buy  their  wins  if  they  so  choose  to  buy  all  those  mechs  and  weapkns  early  on.    

at  least  now  its  clear  why  matchmaking  appears  utterly  broken  sometimes.    

out.

Hello! We monitor both in-game and in the communities. Of course, we need some time to collect enough data and then analyze it. Thanks for bearing with us!

Not  bearing  with  it  any  longer.    Deleted  the  game  tonight.    I  like  competitive  games  where  players  are  placed  into  matchmaking  on  equal footing.    This  game  clearly  gives  big  spenders  an  advantage  Because  they  are  placed  against  others  of  similar  account  XP  rather  than  against  players  with  similar  hangar  squad  power.    Some  of  these  players  have   15k  less  account  xp  but  because  they  paid  a  lot  of  money  for  early  access...  they  get  hangars  equal  to  150k  account  XP  but  they  play  people  at  50k  XP.   

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 the  devs  are  clearly  only  interested  in  making  the  whales  happy.  

On top of this, 

It really does just feel like the Dev's and Community admins are completely ignoring the issue. There is a very very hard discrepency in what they are saying, vs. the real game play experience.

At this rate, the game will legitimatly start snowballing down hill.

https://plarium.com/en/games/

The entire Plarium library is just high quality looking games, all packed with P2W mechanics.

Because, honestly, I've actaully played most of them. A chunk of them are reskins of eachother, and... again. all of them are packed with some level of P2W or Pay2Advance.

The complaints have existed long long before most patches were worked out, 

Their choosing to ignore negative community feedback, because they can, and some poor suckers will keep spending money, because they litearlly do not have any self control.

Its a shame honestly,

Mech Arena could have been a seriously good game, they could have had it ported to the Switch. They could have made it a Stream Worth PvP Arena game. It could have been WORTH streaming on Twitch. 

But because its very very clear what the companies priorities are; Milk people for money as much as possible before the game collapese. Not making a good game. 

I wish they could take the competitive aspects of the game seriously and realize that you can still make money without chasing away people that aren't just raining money down to improve their chances of winning.  I spend money as I stated here and in some other threads but I am not spending stupid amounts like whales spend.

Tournament mode is where my main distaste for this matchmaking eminates.  I want to enter a tournament match and know that everyone else is entering the match on roughtly equal footing so the win/loss comes down to the decisions made during the match rather than the credit card bills racked up prior to the match for maxed out mechs/weapons.  Until they fix that... the game will not be viewed as a comptetitive one for me but rather one for person willing to dump hundreds/thousands into their account.  

I'm getting impatient. What sort of data are you looking for? How much of it do you need? Can you at least try something different? How is it you have time to do all sorts of thing like add a whole new event type and bring new weapons into the game. How is it you get enough data on crate rush within a week?

You had a hacker problem and you acted on it within a week. You've had a pay to win problem as long as the game has been out, and you've done squat. Just how much longer do we have to wait? I really want to know, because I'm tired of this. I can't keep playing. And now you've got a specialization spree for a-coins that depends a weapon that's locked behind $70 USD if you didn't happen to get lucky in the first crate rush. How am I to know you're even going to change the matchmaking system, or that plarium cares to, with this sort of blatant pay to win?

Let me put it this way. Most money I spent in this game was after you took action against hackers. Plarium isn't getting a cent from me as long as matchmaking is skewed.

I'm tired of words. I want action.

What  needs  to  be  realized  is  Plarium  is  making  thousands  of  dollars  off  the  whale  accounts.    They  would  rather  hit  the  big  fish  as  hard  as  they  can  and  offer  them  preferrential  matchmaking  to  entice  more  spending  instead  of casting  a  wide  net  and  filling  it  up  with  massive  numbers  of  active  players.

these  four  players  have  likely  combined  for  $5k  in  spending  to  get  the  hangars  they  have.    Look  at  their  account  XP.    They  are  running  hangars  equal  to  150k  XP  but  the  matchmaker  puts  them  in  with  players  between  30k  to  60k.    A  cake  walk  for  the  big  spender.    

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Hi! I hear you, thanks for sharing. We've actually run a few tests on our matchmaking. So far, we haven't found an ideal option. We're still experimenting. I do hope we'll find it soon, though.