What is the purpose of novice matches anyways since matchmaker is 'suposed' to make balanced games, hm? 
Hint: it doesn't
About the novice being novice really short thing, it's simple maths, even WITHOUT achievement bonuses:
Before the Antichri... I mean, Matchmaker came, the 'out of novice' level was 4 when lvl cap was 15
Now it's lvl 7 I think (correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm positive that it's below 10) with a lvl cap of 45. Which is around old lvl2.
I also pledged to raise the novice lvl cap 'at least' to level 10...
This is something I have posted a few times on the forum AND have written a letter to Muse about. I STRONGLY THINK NOVICE SHOULD BE AT LEAST LEVEL 15 with this new system. I used to say 10 but I'm noticing even that seems too low.
I understand that muse's philosophy is "everyone should be in matchmaking queue all the time" and kind of get it, because they believe matchmaker does a good job of, you know, matching people up. However GOI is very much a social game and if I meet a random team I enjoy playing against, I want to keep playing with them for the whole session regardless of MMR differences. Our perception of a 'fun and balanced' match is only loosely correlated with MMR.
There are 10+ page forum discussions on the fact that Muse thinks match making works a lot better than the community thinks it works. I myself have screen shot after screen shot of match making failing. At one point, when match making first came out, there was even a gallery about it. Most people have stopped posting their screen shots simply because it's the same over and over again.
https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,5019.0.html Tonight many of my friends and I were sick of waiting 10+ mins to "Find 1 more player" that I started my own lobby and invited everyone from my friends list. DIDN'T open it to queue and played like 6+ matches. Had every ship full, spectate completely filled and others still wanting in at some points. Pretty much all high level players and got to spend as much time as we wanted in lobby chatting and having a good old time like we used to be able to do. The lobby swapped sides each time, no one complaining. Each match was as close to balanced as you could get and all close games, too. The problem is that a single player or even a small group of players do not always have the blessing to have enough players on to fill all four ships so they would have no other choice but to open it to the queue and get screwed after 4 matches and get sent into crew form and at that point, if we are all honest with ourselves, lacking the ambition to re-from a lobby. In a 2 hour time we got in those 6+ matches. With the new system I usually have 30+ mins of that 2 hours waiting in crew form for that last darn player it's always looking for and only would get to play maybe 4 matches if it's a good night. At least with the old system I could see
ALL the matches available and jump in even if the match was already in play. And this helped keep lobbies flowing and people in more matches per night.
The best thing about the old system that needs to come back... NAMED LOBBIES!!!! I miss named lobbies.
