Here’s “moaning”, in context.
I’m happy to get more variety in my matches. Even though it was “good” for me, the number of Fire Bomb teams made PvP feel more like Explore. Whatever changed is probably good, and has been a long time coming.
But “Fire Bomb Farming” was a niche activity some players loved. It was easy gold, and with cheap rerolls in casual PvP was more lucrative than it would be to take whatever comes. These teams were also a relief for people in that awkward, long phase of mid-game where you can’t reliably beat the PvP teams they face.
Those people are “moaning” because they feel like this game was better before the change, and that it will not be better after the change.
The problem is we have no clue what changed, how, and precisely why. This is why I’m moaning.
Suppose the devs said, “We never liked the Fire Bomb defense or that technique of farming. That is a bad play pattern, like changing your class more than once daily. So the new algorithm works to limit how often you will be matched with this team to make it less attractive for farming.” That would still cause moaning, but we’d have an argument. “I want the game to be this way” vs. “the devs just said they don’t want that” is a valid back-and-forth with a clear winner: the devs.
As respectfully as I can state it, I believe this thread is an example of mismanaging the game’s community via secrecy and obscurity. This is a common pain point in GoW and it’s as bad any game bug: I’ve seen complaints about transparency since my first day in the game. It should be addressed broadly because clear communication disqualifies many arguments as irrational. Opaque mechanics leave us in the dark about what is “right”, so everyone argues about “how I think it works” instead of “how it works”.
We knew nothing about matchmaking before. Now all we know is “it doesn’t work like before”. That leads every person to make dozens of different conclusions, and now we’re squabbling over which of those conclusions is best. But each set of conclusions represents “how I want matchmaking to be”, which is personal and subjective.
If we knew “what matchmaking is”, or at least “matchmaking’s goals”, we could eliminate at least half of this discussion. But we don’t, and we won’t, so I expect we’ll see “Bring back old matchmaking” as a routine topic for eternity.
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