@blackyps said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:
It seems to me the root problem is a lack of activity in the highest bracket. Not sure if there is a good technical solution
This is not entirely true. It seems to be generally true that there's a high rating discrepancy at top level.
aoe2: 450 rating difference between #1 and #100 https://www.aoezone.net/deladder/?ladderid=3
aoe4: 400 rating difference between #1 and #43 https://aoe4world.com/leaderboard/rm_1v1
sc2: 1400 rating difference between #1 and #100 (7.4k vs 6k) https://nonapa.com/ladder?4&season=52®ion=2&mode=1
The examples are all 1v1 since teamgames are broken/dead in those games, but there's a similar trend in team based ladders too.
Yes having more players helps a little bit, but in general the top few players will still have issues finding games, because of the huge rating discrepancy.
In my case there's been 3 hours and 15 minutes since my last tmm game (rating 2316). It is pretty much prime time: 18-21 finnish time (1-2 hours earlier for most of europe). During this time there's been numerous games with many 1700-1900 players which I didn't get into (often the system matched them with 1200-1400s instead).





I don't know exactly how the system currently works, but I'd like to see players that have been in queue for a long time get some kind of extra priority if it doesn't do that already. Or strengthen it if it does exist. Alternatively there could be some system to favor higher rating players as it seems that generally most players prefer playing with higher rated players (1700 would rather play with a 2000 than a 1400). If those games in above pictures were custom games I doubt I would have any trouble getting into the lobby.
In its current state it's pretty unfeasible for higher rating players to play tmm, which only exacerbates the problem (making it even harder for high rating players to get games since there's fewer of them searching).