(09-02-2012 12:32 AM)Dawizerd Wrote: Ok, so I decided to conduct a small experiment, and it may or may not have some correlation to this issue. I'll share the results.
First my background-
At the time I started I was in masters league, 58 wins, (around 50 1v1) with 560 league points. I've had about a 80% win percentage. I consistently get paired with master league players, usually those with anywhere from 80 to 150 wins or so, I feel that I play at a solid upper tier masters level. As a rule, I don't keep many active games going, I stay at around 5-6 at any given time.
The setup-
I load up my queue with 12 games as player 1. (details about this issue have been and continue to be covered in previous threads) I then sit on those open games for two days without taking my initial turn.
The results-
After two days, I start taking my initial turns on 6 of the 12 games loaded in my queue. The matchmaking system very quickly finds players to fill the games, usually in about 2 minutes. EVERY opponent in these games is taken from gifted league or lower. In my initial 6 games started (taken from the 12 in queue) I got 2 fluffy, 2 unranked and 2 clever leaguers.
After taking my initial turns on those 6 games, I start a brand new game (NOT one of the 12 I queued up), I immediately get matched as player 2 against a master league player.
After finishing most of the initial 6 queued games, I proceed to take my first turn on the remaining 6 games. ALL of them pair me with clever and unranked players. I then start another brand new game, quickly getting paired with a master leaguer, with me as player 2.
After all those games were finished, I returned to my usual routine of starting games, and am once again getting paired with upper tier master leaguers.
Summary-
In my case, "working the queue" resulted in pairings with opponents of a vastly lower skill level, while starting games at more random intervals gave me well matched opponents. So, could some of this "skill mismatch" issue be the way the system is reacting to queue loading by the higher league players?
Having read this post, I decided to conduct an experiment of my own recently. Being a lowly Gifted rank (my fault for not having the time to play a lot of league games recently), I wanted to see how I could be matched up against tougher opponents for the 2 open games I usually have going on at a time, using Da Wizerd's method above. The thesis was this: if high ranked players were being paired against lower league players, being a lower league player myself would I stand a good chance of being paired against players above my class?
I queued 2 games, and only took my turn after 3 days. The matchmaking system took half a day to find me a match --> p1noyboypj and another top 200 player! Awesome!
Won't be doing it again though as this method requires me to have FTA against my higher-ranked opponents, and I do feel some guilt about that! Having said that, I'm still playing probably 80% of my games as P2... can't wait for the FTA fix to go through!
