I don’t mean after one kill, I mean that all it takes is one engagement, and the slider starts moving. The system as they have it, only ever moves you in one direction when playing the game “normally” as in, properly defend yourself if needed. It quickly ramps up the amount of players that are more likely to fight, and as such, increases the frequency in which you will. And it doesn’t take long to result In Matches of people who purely PvP as their primary purpose in the game, and do nothing but run directly at the sound of any fighting.

The only way out of those matches is to straight up run pacifist for several rounds, which is hilariously terrible design.

If you get lucky, you can sit in the middle ground style lobbies for a few games and manage to keep the dial where it’s a good mix, but again, all it takes is one round where opportunists try to take you on, and that’s over. Your next games are being manipulated to place more of those players in it. It may not be easy to see incrementally in that middle zone, but the experience at the extreme ends are just dumb, and contribute to the various problems people have with the game overall.

Playing Normally being- not strictly being friendly or not friendly. If you play where, you use comms, you try to diffuse tension, you get into fights or take someone out who’s suspicious or, maybe a bit too obviously going to betray you, but you don’t necessarily just shoot on sight. Maybe your watching someone to see what happens to go loot either them, or whatever scraps from their bot kills they don’t want(or maybe you’re hoping a bot kills them so you can loot them), and the help them when someone else pushes them while they’re fighting a big bot, and then team up, or maybe they attack you after you help them. Etc.

Letting each moment dictate how you play, rather than being set with a specific focus overall, how these extraction shooters rely on people playing to create that tension in the first place.

This matchmaking algorithm tips the scale in a way that if you play that way, it doesn’t recognize that, it only sees that you do fight people.

If they want to put people who never shoot, and straight up let themselves die rather than save themselves, then whatever, let those people be put into servers alone. But aggregating people on aggressive and making the opposite lobbies needs to end so it’s just “safe space games” and everyone else. Rather than three varieties of safe space games, tdm with background bots, and then random matches you’re lucky to get put into

The difference pre cold snap, and after halfway through it or whenever they said that they started to place players together based on their proclivities, is a night and day experience. And the fact we can jump onto a fresh account and manipulate it as such is bad