A huge huge part of the problem is the matches that are getting served up.
A lot of people are only looking at this on the surface level, and on the surface level it just looks like a nerf at endgame. In reality, it is a cascade failure of the constituent parts - disparity of player strengths being highlighted by matchmaking that serves by criteria that are largely irrelevant to the player; because matchmaking doesn’t care about potential payouts and instead go by stuff like PvP rank and player level, where scores, and thus payouts, can vary wildly. Meanwhile, payouts are the biggest thing a player would care about (possibly next to avoiding a certain team for some people) and they are even prominently displayed down the interface, making it also seem intentional that this is something the players are designed to notice, so you can’t really blame them for that either.
At first, I thought it was because there weren’t enough max endgame defenses to go around and serve people with near maxed score potential - after all, you can field a team of significantly lower than your max possible score (eg., firebombs with no hero), but much data gathering of payouts approaching max possible score and what kind of battles, as well as testing on lower level accounts where I am semi-frequently (and nonsensically) served with defense team scores in this range, I’m ready to call machmaking the primary culprit at this point as to why things are so different than pre-patch. If maxed score players got consistently matched with defense teams within 500 points of the highest score team they could field with some degree of regularity, payouts would range in the 1600 to 2k+ range with PvP points over 50 and about 95% of these complaints would disappear.
Heres an example.
After a full week of playing PvP and being at T1 on Sunday, I should not still be seeing a matchmaking screen like this:
When I can field a team with this much score:
I’m only getting crappy rewards on my three trophy because I’m getting served crappy score defense teams. And because of the way matchmaking works, this can last an entire play session. Also, the higher I get toward the point where it is nearly impossible to press my score higher (where level is the only thing left that will increase it at all, and only 1 point every few levels). This compounds with the fact that I seem to be in these “bad” matchmaking pools more often on my higher level accounts, while my lower level accounts that cant even muster 10k score are fighting defense teams with 13.5k score semi-frequently. This is made worse by the fact that the lower level accounts payouts(both gold and PvP points) cap out when I face a team in the high 11k score range, meaning I get nothing extra for beating a team another 2,000 points higher and it would have been far better to serve that team to someone else.
Being roughly 400 points below what the max achievable team score is, I get “good” matches when my opponents are within a few hundred points of my max possible score, like so:
Even this one isn’t so bad (for MSP 13.2k, needs to be 400 points higher on average for MSP 13.6k)
But it is a crapshoot to get these kinds of spreads post-patch
The issue is that pre-patch, “close to max” score covered a far more numerous range of people that would get picked by the various matchmaking criteria and serve you up consistent (lukewarm, but at least consistent) rewards. But even through greater rewards are technically possible for everyone because of the score changes, the general reception for endgamers has been overwhelmingly negative. This is because the number of battles where you get served a lower score opponent have dramatically gone up at endgame, because criteria like player level and how far they made it in PvP this week are almost entirely irrelevant for what makes up the score differential at endgame (score from level is within a few points for everyone post 1000, PvP progress doesn’t affect your score at all), and score determines your payout. Basically, mathcmaking criteria have not kept up with the score formula and it is glaringly obvious when you keep getting three trophy battles versus opponents considered “much weaker”, which is very frustrating when it happens over, and over, and over, which is what people are reacting to here. If you want people to have a PvP experience at endgame that doesn’t make them feel like they are consistently getting “lower rewards” or “penalized for progress”, these matchmaking criteria are no longer sufficient.
Sometimes, it is worth addressing something that is clearly broken with the simplest possible fix rather than wait for it to grate on everyone’s nerves while looking into the perfect possible solution. We need look no further than how long it took for the 50 gem class change fee to get dropped for that. If matchmaking is addressed in the short term, we keep a system that is still “mostly fair” and brings max endgamer payouts back to the “10-20% lower than middle of the pack” range like prepatch, while still properly rewarding actually fighting stronger teams. Then work toward that “holistic long term solution” if necessary. I’m sure whatever that solution would be is likely to benefit from having matchmaking more accurately tuned to relative player strength.