"GBL: Matchmaking should be based on your rating, not your rank"

#PokemonGO: After being placed fairly low compared to the pre-season with nearly a 70% win rate from rank 1 - 6 (went from the 3300s to the 1800s), I thought climbing would be a breeze.Well, just how wrong was I.There's an underlying issue with matchmaking that no one seems to talk about. As it is right now, the system will prioritize pairing you with someone of your same rank. Say, you're a rank 8, you'll generally be matched against other rank 8 players (might be different in less populated ranks). This sounds fair at first glance until you look at the extremes of each rank.For example, right now I'm at the high 1900s, pretty close to rank 8, but because I'm not rank 8 yet I'm almost exclusively being paired with other rank 7 players, this wouldn't be such an issue if that didn't mean most of the players I face are somewhere between 50-100 rating below me. This causes my wins to be worth significantly less and my losses to be worth much more; I've lost up to 12 points in a 2/5 set, and gained as little as 2 points in a 3/5 set, and that's just today. After winning 15/25 today I'm up just 12 rating from where I started, and that just doesn't feel right.Although it's not impossible to rank up, this whole thing makes it unnecessarily "grindy". As it is right now, the current system creates an invisible wall that makes it significantly harder to move up the higher you're within a rank. Going from 1900 to 2000 is way harder than making it to 2100 from 2000 (for example).However, if the system made it so you were matched with people of your same or similar ratings, maintaining a good win rate would pay off the same no matter where you are within a specific rank.TL;DR: Matchmaking pairing you with people on your own rank creates a bottleneck effect on the higher ends of each rank, which wouldn't happen if your rating was prioritized instead. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2U1vJEf