The dissatisfying thing about SBMM is lack of feedback
I think I've found why the SBMM has put me off a bit.
Currently there is no feedback about why you got paired with the people who just stomped you and I get stomped a lot. I sweat for 1 hook even most games now and get maybe one "balanced" match an evening where I felt I was well matched against my opponents.
The thing is I don't know why...
Under the old system, you had visible ranks, it wasn't a measure of skill but it gave a rough indication. I only got into the reds once and I never really belonged there, but when I got stomped I could see 3 reds and a purple and have some feedback about why that was hard.
Even if it has no real bearing on outcome it still gives some kind of yardstick to measure your games from. At the moment I have no yard stick only bad games and no real feedback as to why.
Comments
That's kind of the point. Can't criticise a system if you can't proooove it's broken. By keeping things hidden they just have to say "it's working" or "it's balanced, you just can't see it" and there's not much you can do to argue it.
Only way how to tell power-level is by stalking player's profiles for hour played, which is even worse indicator than rank used to be.
I think it should be linked with grades, but they are probably not going to show us. Then we would be able to tell, how fair it was by grades.
Grades are useless atm and make this game even worse experience then SBMM imo.