Hi to all, i'm Enochh, the leader of the Ra clan
I've decided to write this letter to share with everyone my point of view about a very burdensome issue.
Many people complain of matchmaking because low-level players often find very unbalanced matches and they encounter ships full of members of the same clan or friends with high-level.
Often these high-level teams, after winning the game, instead of doing rematch, they go for 'return to crew form'.
An example. Yesterday for the first time I could get two ships full of Ra members. I found a game and immediately all opponents left. Only one player remained (whose name I won't say here), and started complaining about the problem I have explained before. He did pressure on us to split up, he pushed for that. I assured him that after that match we would have done a rematch. He could hardly believe it, but in the end we did rematch and all ended up well.
Now, a little premise.
We members of the Ra clan, always try to help the community in different ways: accepting on match lower level players and trying to teach them, we are very sociable in the lobbies, and many other things such as trying to balance the matches (I have seen other clans doing that, for example, the SREP, the DAGZ, the TT). But sometimes I think it's normal for friends, or members of the same clan, wanting to play together for various reasons, including training for the official competitions. I can understand the problem of the players because I was low level too. Everyone here has been low level. I also understand the need to try as much as possible to balance the games. But this can not become a matter of aggressive discussion every time or even become a requirement. It is not our fault if we were put in that lobby. Also the clans sometimes need to be able to practice playing together against other people. I remember that, when I was low-level, those situations helped me more than anything to learn and grow my determination to improve myself in this game.
I thought about it a lot and I came to the conclusion that one of the causes of this problem is this:
I noticed that if I participate in 3 games, I can meet players of about 20 different clans. I think that the ease with which you can create a new clan (as well as increasing the possibility of trolling clans) also contributes to the dispersion of the community. Often these clans have very few members and then often the members play alone. Or often, having all members of that clan low level, it is normal that they have higher chances to be put in an unbalanced match. I believe that it should be harder to create new clan (and remove inactive or with few members clans) to encourage new players to try to get into the most active clans. Within these clans, the low level players will be able to participate to games with more experienced members. That will increase the chance to have more balanced matches and clan versus clan matches.
Then I would suggest the developers to make it harder to create new clans because I think that this will make the community more united and furthermore enhance the education of new players from those with more experience.
I also want to encourage all members of the major clans to try to balance games as often as they can.
My greetings!
Enochh