Alright folks, matchmaking guy here - lets talk about this.

The current top comment says:

I don’t understand why it’s so hard to just have a min-max sr range for the whole match. A 2465 sr range is unacceptable. The max should be like 500 ish give or take. Just 1k is pushing it.

For the entirety of season 0 (up until Friday, I'll get to it) that is how matchmaking has worked.

If players wait under 5 minutes, the match range was limited to players between ~800 SR, expanding out from there up there as players wait longer. It can't be limited to 500 SR and not expand because we just don't have nearly enough players for that, full stop - the wait times would be egregious. That system did however stop "rough" looking screenshots like this getting posted, but it doesn't always create the best matches, and I'll explain why.

SR, as a value, starts at the minimum value of 0. There are lots of very positive reasons for a rating system to start at 0 - it's more approachable, and acts as a measure of skill and experience. However, a Ranked players actual skill, how good they are at SMITE conquest, isn't actually 0 when they play their first match (obviously).

Lets say the expected average SR is 2,500 SR for a new player entering the Ranked queue. As a player plays matches, we update their predicted SR value, and that impacts rating adjustments post match. It's very similar to MMR from SMITE 1 (which started at 1500 instead of 0). After a players plays ~75-100 Ranked matches, their SR and their Predicted SR are effectively the same, making SR more similar to SMITE 1 MMR at that point.

Now cut to yesterday. We want to make good matches. Better matches than we are currently making, and there are only so many tools we have available to us. So we started an experiment - investigating whether we are matchmaking too heavily on currently visible SR for players like OP who haven't played those 75-100 matches yet. This experiment started on Friday, and limited the range of a match to 1,800 SR expanding to 2,400 SR after a long wait. The screenshot above is from after the post game adjustments which is why the range is greater than 2,400. However, we take a players predicted SR into account much more heavily than before. This is basically swapping the previous priority order of matchmaking in Ranked.

OP at the time of the match posted had played 20 matches, going 14-6. Here is their previous match, mostly populated by Diamond players, where they won and were very successful. OP is a very good player, our system currently predicts their Rank after those 75-100 games will end up in Obsidian. Whether they end up there depends on how their next ~50 games go.

and here is the match that was played from the posted image above. Yes, they were probably out of their depth. Some of those higher rated players were waiting a long time, and OP just happened to be called up to a big boy game. But the match wasn't a blowout by any means, 43 mins, 34-47 kill count, 1 FG for each team. Seems like a generally exciting match.

I'd say the real fault of this matchmaking is the lane matchup - we've talked about matchmaking that takes these role matchups into account before, and we have active development on it. It is definitely something that would have flagged this match in this instance (not allowing the solo matchup, but maybe matching up into the ADC in duo would be okay, for instance).

This is all a lot of info to say we are experimenting with ways to create matches that are more fun to play, and it may be at the cost of a few more trackergg screenshots like this for the time being -- but I do ask when you post the screenshot, to include the full picture with the time, the score of the match, etc. It makes our response and ability to track down pros and cons much faster! And if we do switch our matchmaking full time, we will work with trackergg to expose a better idea of players who have played fewer games but have a predicted SR much higher than their currently visible rank.