Steem Monsters Matching Algorithm Inequality

Season 2 has started off well for me. I began at the bottom of the Gold Tier and was able to work my way up through the Gold ranks to Diamond level. But then an odd thing happened. I got matched against a deck that seemed way out of my league. After I was solidly defeated, as expected, I was greeted with this screen, which confirmed my suspicions.

Sure enough, my rating is quite a bit lower than my opponent. As far as I knew, the system was supposed to match you against similarly rated opponents. Thinking this must be a fluke or a bug in the code, I tried again, with similar results. Soon I was seeing a pattern. Look at my last 10 battles.

7 out of 10 of these matches are completely unequal, and I had no chance of winning them. Thinking there must be a problem, I joined the Steem Monsters discord server today to look for some answers. Surprisingly, I found out that this is all on purpose, but the matching algorithm is being reworked for a future release. The issue comes in with this sentence from the Leagues overview page:

You will be matched with others with a similar rating when fighting.

I understood this to mean that I would be matched against others in my same tier. However, it turns out that this is only true up through Gold tier. Once you hit Diamond level, you are matched against opponents in Diamond tier and higher, including Champion, which is where the top tier players reside. So once you get to a rating of 2800, you could be matched against someone from 2800 all the way up to the current highest rating of 12,604. Obviously there's a gross inequality here. The good news is that it sounds like the developers recognize this, and are working on making it better.

I don't raise this issue to complain. They certainly didn't have to give away any booster packs as league rewards. As it stands now, I'm getting free booster packs for playing this game, and that's really awesome. I also don't have to play, if I don't like the mechanics involved.

I raise this issue for 2 reasons:

1. As a PSA to players: Once you hit Diamond level, advancing becomes much harder unless you have very high level cards. For me, I don't see the point in continuing to play and trying to advance higher. This is especially true if you don't have a ton of SP. Last season I burned through basically all of my RCs chasing a higher tier. This turns out to be a fool's errand.

2. I want this game to be fun, and to be successful long term. I want to want to play it. I think there's a lot of potential here, and so raising these issues as they come up is critical to keeping the development of the game and the conversation around it moving forward. This game is still in beta. It has a limited, if any, audience outside of core steem users. There's still a long way to go. If it's going to be successful, it needs to have mass appeal beyond the early adopters. I want that to happen, and ironing out the wrinkles is all part of the process.