Terrible Matchmaking
As someone who is new to the game trying to learn, this has to be one of the worst experiences ever. Ive played almost 10 matches and have yet to have 1 game that felt even remotely competitive. Does skill based matchmaking exist in this game? It absolutely doesn’t feel like it. Nothing makes me want to keep playing less than not getting a single attack off in a 30 min card game because the opponents could beat me blindfolded without an actual deck.
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I’ve only played standard mode to avoid exactly what has happened to me so far, can’t imagine how much worse competitive has to be.
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@StereoMatrixMan I had exact same problem with matchmaking.
At the very beginning when I start playing PTCG Live I won one match after completing tutorial, and then I had terrible gameplay experience. At some point, after about 30 games played, I had twice as much lost games than victories in stats. It was however partly my own fault, as at the beginning I've made some changes to starter decks without proper knowledge about what cards are necessary for the deck to be viable to play.
I went back to default starter decks and learned their strategy here:
That improved the situation and I started to even out the win/loose ratio. The matchmaking is far from optimal though.
I still sometimes face impossible to defeat opponents, not because they had type advantage or because I had unlucky draw and unfortunately shuffled deck. They were impossible to defeat because they had better Pokémon cards in their close to meta deck against which the starter deck is just futile attempt to play anything.
I was never expecting skill based matchmaking for casual play, but some deck evaluation number based on cards you have in there should be accounted for when searching for game, to avoid situation where new players face significantly experienced opponent who play since beta version of PTCG Live, and imported lot of stuff from PTCG Online that got converted to lot of credits.
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I got curious and decided to try ranked mode.
While I never had high expectations for climbing the ladder since I have only starter decks and one battle deck for 600 crystals, it was far worse than what I've expected.
It took me almost twenty matches played in order to win five of them and climb from togepi rank to cleffa.
On top of that, I won three out of those five only because opponent was inactive for too long. Rest of those matches player was against opponents with deck build around Blastoise VMAX, Chien-Pao ex, Tyranitar ex, Glimmora ex, fire type 151 Charizard ex and numerous other cards you can get only for crystals or tons of credits.
My question is why there is so many players with such strong deck in quick league? BTW there is nothing quick about that. I spent almost entire day on ranked mode just to win five matches.
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@TechHog In comparison to what?
They are not strong deck in comparison to ranked meta, or they are not strong even against starter deck?
Because they seemed to have good advantage against what I was playing, and the matches were rather frustrating. Sometimes I couldn't knock out single Pokémon card, because they knew the deck strategy and played actively to prevent me to do anything from the very beginning, while I was struggling to figure out how to counter them since I'm not much familiar with anything besides starter decks.
That itself is reasonable if you face more experienced opponent in ranked play, it's just not something I would expect at Togepi rank in Quick League, Especially since it's not first week of the season anymore, thus experienced players with good performing deck should already be in higher league.
It certainly didn't feel like start of the journey to reach the 1st rank up, and even noticed that some opponents the RMM placed me against were already Snubbull rank in Poké League. That does not seems like fair matchmaking.
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Hello Trainer, Thank you for your feedback! Please let us know if you have any other suggestions.
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Yea sure, I could get even if the first week of every month was "don't play ranked while the top tier decks rank up", that would still be... honestly bad game design if experienced players are telling you just not to play the main game mode. Casual exists, but as a new player it was strongly suggested I try ranked.
The fact that in the final week of the ranking, casual players are feeling still outranked by experienced players that appear to be at the same place in the ladder as them means the ranking and matchmaking system simply just doesn't work. Sure it's not as monetized as the last version, but if you're a new player and learn that there's no time you can play ranked and not to expect to be hosed will just lead to less and less player, and new player engagement.
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