Hey Guys,
So let me talk on hiding the levels and let me be frank.
They're wrong and they make players wrong.
The number one weakness of our matchmaking system, the thing that hurts balance the most, is players leaving. Levels also match matches appear unfair that aren't. Being 45 doesn't make you good at the game, being 37, 22, or 11 doesn't make you good at the game, but since they were the only information people had so they used them. When a player leaves a match it forces the matchmaker to scramble and grab whatever player it can to fill the slot oftentimes at the expense of balance.
I am sure many of you know that rating and level do not correlate and many mid range players are much higher rated than their high level counter parts, but many players don't know this. They take that number and look at it as gospel for the balance of the match, which it very much is not.
Yes we will be making leaderboards with the correct information and they are on their way. In the meantime though, we don't want bad information to spoil matches.
We talked about removing it all together except for some key points:
-Players like showing off level
-It is still good to see if you have a low level on your ship
As for greenhorn vs vet:
Greenhorns don't leave matches. Stats-wise it's the higher level player that will ditch the match more often than not. Their level isn't hidden from their crew though so even if they're a level the captain is not comfortable with he will know and can plan accordingly.
As a general perspective:
1.3.7 and before we got emails weekly on imbalanced matches, second pilots joining mid game, games taking 20 minutes to start, and tens of other issues that we tried to tackle here.
There are three pillars to any match system flexibility, speed, and balance.
Match list is max flexibility with 0 balance and 0 speed.
We tried to make a matchmaker and keeping many of the legacy elements from the match list like friend join, no penalty leaving, rematch, and custom games tried to give the quickest, most balanced, experience while retaining as much flexibility as possible.
We did this so vets would get faster better games, we did this so newbies would get faster better games.