How the fuck am I supposed to have fun with this matchmaking?
I'm a casual player, only played sporadically but been here ever since Black Prior's release. Still only in the sub 30's total mastery (spread out across a bunch heros). I swear, this game's matchmaking is more infuriating than any other I've ever played. It's the thing that annoys me the most, more than overpowered heroes, more than ganks, more than cheese strategies, more than anything in this game.
I just want to have a fun match. Load up duels? 50/50 chance I'll either find a poor bastard that just started playing and stands no chance, or a sweatlord with 50 smth mastery just on their hero who can completely destroy me. *Least* infuriating gamemode, on a good day I can fight well enough to sometimes beat the guy, it's a decent time.
Load up Dominion. I always get paired with the biggest morons imaginable. I'm talking about me holding 3v1 on point C for MINUTES ON END, only to die, look at the scores and realise the rest of the team hasn't taken a single point this entire time and most of them are actually dead. What? Is the other guy an anime protagonist? Was he also just holding the line as best he could while I was doing the same on the other point? Their team is all bundled up in one place trying to kill one VG, one or two guys would be enough to kill me, they're making a mistake, capitalise on the fucking mistake, spread out and capture points. Why the fuck are all of you existing everywhere else except the points?!
Then Brawl. I dunno what it is, but in Brawl I always find a dynamic duo: one guy who is actually fun to fight and presents a challenge, and the other who is SO ABOVE MY SKILL LEVEL I'm better off bending over and asking him to be gentle. WHAT THE FUCK, WHY IS THIS **ALWAYS** THE CASE?! It's not even a matter of winning or losing, the other guy on my team is usually a sweatlord too, I can *win* knowing I only contributed half of the rounds. And when that isn't the case it's because somehow the game decided I was gonna be that guy this time, so I get paired up with a bunch of newcomers and have to go light on them like I just got to the MMA gym on Monday and the only people there to spar with are children (that is too specific an example and only I can relate to that).
I'm posting this right after a game where my ally was around the same skill level as I, I was trying out Afeera for the first time, and my opponents were a decently skilled Juren and a MASTERY 53 AFEERA WHO COULD DO EVERYTHING I JUST LEARNED HOW TO DO, BUT 100x BETTER. Or the game right before that where I fought a decent Warden and a Shaman who probably has 5.000 hours in this game. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO AGAINST THIS?! THESE GUYS CAN READ ALL OF MY MOVES, THEY DON'T FALL FOR **ANY** OF MY FEINTS, THEY KNOW EVERYTHING MY CHARACTER CAN DO, THEY ALREADY HAVE A RESPONSE READY FOR ALL SCENARIOS AND THEY SEEM TO BE SEEING THE GAME IN SLOW MOTION WITH HOW FAST THEY SEE SHIT COMING AND HOW RARELY THEY MISS THEIR COUNTERMOVES!
I dunno, I feel like this is what makes me so angry about this game. It's easy to blame it on overpowered characters, but when I'm playing an op character myself (VG, Afeera, Virtuosa, Juren...) there's really no excuse for how often I lose and how horrible my losses are. If everything's broken nothing should he. I'm just playing against much better people and there's virtually nothing I can do about it. I have a moderate understanding of this game, I can play almost all characters well, it's just not enough to keep up with the people I'm matched against. I guess you could say it's trial by fire, but when there's thousands of hours of gameplay dividing us there's little I can learn beyond "be ready for disappointment," even when I start performing better against them they're just able to switch up their tactics that quickly and disorient me for long enough that they win before I can adapt again. I like this game, but it's fucking frustrating. And it didn't use to be like that before, I remember getting better and better and kicking more ass the more dedicated I became to mastering the gameplay. I don't know what changed.
(P.s: didn't know what to put as an image here, so I just took a screenshot of a video I thought was funny.)