The New Matchmaking System

I get that all the old school players want to have matchmaking to play the same maps they've played for the last 20 years, but this wasn't the right way to go about doing it.

First off, for people that liked the map pool before the update that matchmaking has just been completely killed. Having access to a decent variety of maps without any of them being too far from the standard start added some variation from only being able to find non-stop Arabia games. Some of the maps aren't to everyone's taste, which is why having a ban system would have been fine with those maps, but for some reason we've just done a complete 180 and scrapped all of that instead of going for a more middle of the road approach.

The second thing is that the new maps in the pool really leave me scratching my head. I get that game modes like Black Forest, Arena and Nomad are classic favourites, but modes like Nomad and Steppe specifically are basically a completely different game that shouldn't be in the same queue in the same way Deathmatch isn't. Also, as much as I like messing around with mega random I feel like that surely has no place in a matchmaking queue.

The ban system is also not great as the map pool is now too small for the potential number of players playing them, which has majorly skewed the system to only really work if you play 1v1. The biggest thing that sticks out for me here is Black Forest which people classically play 4v4, but if you want to queue for this you don't get any bans so have a 1 in 8 shot of getting the map. This means you may as well just make a lobby still, so why even bother having it in the map pool?

The banning also has the problem that if you queue with a friend for say 2v2, you don't each get a ban, you only get 1 ban between the two of you. I'm not sure if this is actually intended or not, but it means that if you do play 2v2 ,which I do with a friend quite a lot, you only get to ban 1 of the maps when personally I don't really want to play at least half the ones there.

The new matchmaking is only really good if you are decently skilled at most of the currently very varied map types remembering that the system takes your same rating whether you play Black Forest, Arena, Nomad, etc. From my experience most players don't fit this category and usually specialise in one more than most others. To me it just feels like the system has tried to cater to a lot of different groups of players, but simultaneously not really helped any of them. For me this update has majorly missed the mark when it comes to the matchmaking and I almost feel like it isn't even worth using anymore.