Matchmaking Issues
I'm having issues with the matchmaking in M:tG Arena and while I am doubtful this will have a material impact on the game, I wanted to at least put something on record.
The tl;dr of it is that my experience with the matchmaking in arena has been so frustrating that I am considering uninstalling the game. I consider myself an average player - not great, but competent - and I admit I enjoy unoptimal decks. That being said, the rate of wins to losses I have been seeing in Arena really makes me doubt that there is any sort of attempt at balancing match-ups. I'm not expecting 50/50 win/loss rates, but evenings where I suffer through 10+ losses in a row makes me, as I said before, wonder how much effort there is in the matchmaking system. And sure, system might be designed more to balance over a longer period of time than one night or so, but that doesn't make it so it isn't not fun (awkward sentence). And I'd still doubt that the numbers show a better win/loss rater over a long period of time.
I mean, ideally, you'd want even the worst of players with starter quality decks to have an experience that doesn't turn them off, make them feel like they're feeding wins to other players.
There's so little transparency to the matchmaking system that it's hard to ignore those thoughts you get like "I'm getting fed to more active accounts" or "I'm not playing a queue important enough to having its matchmaking refined".
And I'm well aware I may not really be the sort of player they want. Despite picking up my first cards back in '95 or so, the fact that I don't regularly spend real currency in the in-game store, I don't play a lot of Draft or Sealed, I don't like meta decks and muddle about making my own vibes based decks - it may just be I'm not the sort of player M:tG Arena wants to expend effort in keeping. And look, if that's the decision, that's the decision. But I can't imagine it's healthy for the game as a whole to have a tranche of players that are heading for the door because the game doesn't provide them much outside of constant losses.
Do I have any suggestions? No, not really - but then I'm not a dev. I'm describing what has been making Arena a poor experience for me, and I hope that if someone was to "deal with this", in whatever way you want to interpret that, they'd be able to do so better than I could.
Anyway. Like I said above, I'm not expecting this to have any impact, but in the least if I'm going to walk away I want to share my reasoning why.