I’ve always split my games between ranked/unranked for a variety of reasons; warm-up games, not wanting to try-hard, wanting to pick off meta heroes, playing with friends, etc. I’d say I spend my time about 50/50 in both.

But lately the unranked matchmaking has been absolutely horrendous. I feel like they changed variables to prioritize minimizing the queue times over all other factors. I used to have to wait around 8-10 mins to find a game, but I would get matched with people mostly around my rank and experience level. Now it’s extremely common to have games with a 3-4k MMR gap, but that are popping the queue extremely quickly. In my opinion, that should only ever happen if there’s a high/low skill outlier waiting in the queue for 20+ minutes that can’t find a game.

Looking at my game history page all my ranked games are around 8 min. average to find a game and the MMR split is within a few hundred MMR. All my unranked games are sub 3 minute average queue time and the MMR gap is gigantic. Very often I have games where there are people that are double the MMR of others. I also get insta-pops or 30 second queue pops in 4-stack games, which are always terrible.

I get that there are less people playing unranked, so you are sacrificingout some of the variables being closer together. But I’m fine with waiting 5-10 minutes for a higher quality game. I would much prefer that to these instant 1-2 minute queues where I end up wasting 20-40 mins of my life with 4-stack griefers or gigantic skill disparities.

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