Why's matchmaking so bad in the CorePlay playlist?

Games Other Halo
1

With the recent removal of the original Team Arena playlist from Ranked and its replacement with the HCS settings, I’ve switched to the Core Play playlist in Social instead. I had played Team Arena in Ranked almost exclusively since Halo 5 launched and don’t have much experience in the Social playlists, but it has been a frustrating experience so far as games seem horribly imbalanced compared to Ranked. Do Social playlists not try to match up similarly skilled players?

Take a recent match as an example: my team badly lost a 4-vs.-3 Strongholds (of which the other team had three players the entire time–no one left or joined in progress). If matchmaking is even halfway decent, never should a four-player squad lose to a three-person squad, yet this team routed us 62-100 and massively outslayed us:

  • KD spread for us = -8, -6, -17, -7 - KD spread for them = +13, +13, +12And that game is just one of most since I switched to Social. My KD has dropped considerably since the switch (most games are around 0.4 KD now), as I’m clearly getting matched up against people way better than me (whereas ranked Team Arena always had me near a 1.0 KD). Is that just the way it is in Social? If so, why?
2

Social playlists do initially try to match based on skill, but social playlists start expanding the allowed skill gap after only 40 sec. Social playlist do focus more on low queue times and finding matches quickly, and this does end up resulting in more mismatched games. If closely match games are important to you, it’s best to stick with ranked.

3

It seems that when it has to expand to find a player it is more likely to put more high or low skilled players on the same team. As if it has the teams all set, o e person drops and it has to find one more (before the match starts), it finds someone and it puts them in the empty slot. The problem is if it was a low skilled player that dropped and they were replaced with a high skilled player. Now that team has a definite advantage. Instead of reshuffling so it is still somewhat balanced.