Better Matchmaking should come with choices, while not allowing protobears to go stomping noobs.

My suggestion is an SP Tier/Meta Gear based system where you play in matches at or above your Tier Bracket of SP/Gear lvl:

Tiers:
Academy
500k - 2mil SP, MLT Gear
High Sec
500k - 4 mil SP, MLT, and Standard Gear
Low Sec
500k - 6 mil, SP MLT, Standard, and Advanced Gear
Null Sec
500k SP and up ANY/ALL Gear

In the Battle Finder would be 4 Instant battle Tabs. (Academy, High Sec, Low Sec, Null Sec.)

Notice that players could willingly join a higher tier, but restrict higher tier players from going back to lower tiers and pubstomping. This would place all players into more competitive matches.

As for squads:

If you are in a squad you must play in the tier corresponding to the highest SP/Gear ranking player in the squad.

This matchmaking system would only apply to instant battles. If you fight in PC or FW be prepared.

Thoughts?

I don't like this idea at all.

The idea of excluding your playerbase from eachother will not work with so few players. You're also going to end up in a situation where people quit once they hit 4 or 6 million SP as they are placed into tiers with only the few high SP players online at the time and will get wrecked.

We need gear separated matching options not sklll point separated matching options

I agree, the separation is more about gear than SP.

A Standard HMG does 18 base damage a Boundless does 19.8 this is a 10% damage increase from Standard to Proto

Weapon Proficiency gives 15% more damage

SP give 5% damage advantage

=================================

MLT Heavy Dropsuit has 405 Shields and 304 Armor for a total of 709 HP

Amarr Heavy Frame ak.0 has 405 Shields and 405 Armor for a total of 810

Difference of 101 HP MLT to Proto

=================================

MLT Heavy Dropsuit has 405 Shield 304 Armor for a total of 709

MLT Heavy Dropsuit with Shield + Armor Upgrades at LVL 5 has 506 Shield and 380 Armor for a total of 880 HP

Difference of 171

SP gives 70 HP advantage

First thing... people need to get out of militia fits... seriously. Its garbage gear and I still don't understand everyone's hard on for it.

Second... you are technically correct that armor/shield upgrades and electronics/engineering will give some players an advantage. But its a ton better than the proto vs mlt gear disparity we currently have, and in reality its only the difference between 1-2 more bullets.. you would hardly notice the core skill hp increase. It sounds bad on paper, but in practice it would always be skill > gear.

Third.. You absolutely cannot exclude players from eachother like you're proposing.

Could you imagine how bad it could get for people over 6m SP?

You're literally saying that the moment you hit 6m SP you will always be forced to play in null sec proto matches against people with ever increasing SP counts. I gaurantee that in a few months all you would see from people is QQ about how this game wasted their time and gave them the finger the moment they hit 6m SP and were FORCED to play against people with 15-20-30-40-etc million SP.

Also... you'll find this mass exodus of players above 6m SP who dont want to play the same 16 try hards game after game... and you'll end up in a situation where null sec matches become the same ~100 people playing constantly. I know this game has ~5000 players in it (so they say) but i am already facing the same groups game after game when I queue for a match... could you imagine how bad it would be if there were only a couple hundred that you could match with, ever? Over all game modes? Now way.

What you're also proposing is that we have 16 separate lobbies for IB... 16!! We can't hardly keep matchmaking going with 4... and you want to add 12 more lobbies? Half those lobbies probably wouldn't even get filled late at night.

What you're proposing would kill this game, hands down.

You're not accounting for modules, and new players can get 3 levels of armor and shield upgrades relatively quick to close that disparity.

Well maybe my idea isn't perfect or the best, but simply basing matches on gear alone isn't enough because SP gives more of an actual advantage vs gear alone.

The SP disparity only becomes more of a problem when you increase in Meta gear. At least until you reach a point where players are close to the same amount of SP invested in the supportive skills mentioned above.

Isn't that the point of this game though? The RPG aspect of SP = power. You will become more and more powerful over time.

But you can't force the playerbase to segregate... period. You're idea might work if there were hundreds of thousands of players playing this game, and each lobby was filled to the brim with players at all times, but there aren't that many... there won't be that many for many many years, if at all.

Nobody will ever be evenly matched... there will always be a wide spetrum of skill disparity in any fps game.

Gear disparity right now is bad, mostly because the difference between standard gear with standard modules and no passives and proto gear proto modules and full passives is too great.

However, limiting it to normalizing just gear disparity would fix 90% of the problems here. yes there will always be SP disparity but that can be overcome with skill. And SP disparity will not be that apparent compared to skill disparity.