Nah, I’m not letting this thread die! I would love to have ±0 matchmaking. Having a squad preset for each tier would be nice and my Sherman 105 won’t have to face king tigers every match 
at BR III (before they moved my baby) being up tiered to IV wasn’t the end of the world (still hated it) but you definitely feel it in the IV to V step.
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Great, finally someone is willing to step forward and discuss this issue objectively. Why can’t players engage in match battles at the same BR? That would be more balanced and also more friendly to new players. Weapons and vehicles from different BRs could also provide a better experience. Don’t always use the excuse that we don’t have enough players. If the number of players in a match doesn’t reach 10V10 (in most cases, AI is still used to make up the numbers), and the number of players on both sides is roughly the same, isn’t adding AI to the remaining slots a better choice?
Why are the players of this game losing a large number now? It’s because the experience is very poor. The current balance is extremely unfriendly to new players, and old players often have a bad experience due to the unbalanced matching mechanism. We can accept slow game content updates, but we do not accept a very uncomfortable gaming experience.
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With ALL of the posts regarding this issue, including myself, it is more then apparent that this is the issue devs need to focus on. I know that many on here are against it because it will affect queue times and various other reason, but implementing this system will benefit both the player base and the company going forward.
- By isolating BRs, it will help retain newer players as the won’t feel like they are getting steam rolled while figuring out their feeting in low BRs.
- It will prevent Gaijin from continually having to rebalance weapons as a result of uptiering and downtiering to keep things competitive…I think most remember the Japanese fiasco for rebalancing against the Soviets…and I think everyone can admit there are weapons that could be rebalanced as a result…FNAB-43 anyone?
- For those that want more historical accuracy, this allows like matched equipment to meet on the battlefield more…like the campaign system intended.
- This will give purpose to a lot of TT equipment and BP and event rewards without being in fear of uptiering.
- This will actually help Gaijin sell more Premium squads…there are a lot at BR1 snd 4 that get overlooked because of potential uptiering.
- Matches will be more competitive as there won’t be an advantage to oneside because of tiering…therefore improving gameplay.
@MajorMcDonalds is this something that can be presented to the powers that be? If Gaijin actually wants to listen to the community, this one is definitely near top of the list and is discussed frequently on the forums. It’s beneficial to both sides…just needs to be considered and implemented right. It was great listening to the community for introducing jeeps…with a little tweaking I think they can be worthy and get the communities narrative to change on them…a good start is bumping the crew to 4. I love the introduction of jeeps and want them to thrive. I think this game can position itself well for the future with a few key community addressments like this.
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about the “increasing queue times will destroy the game” excuse some make for not having an even BR matchmaking and keep stomping newbs, i talk from a personal position but my queues are usually between 30 secs to 1 min, with the odd instant queues and 1.5 mins very rarely. say, 1 min queue average cutting on the big side, being generous…
if we take 1/4 of players from each queue to make a new queue, talking in averages, is people really not willing to give 1/4 of a minute queue time, meaning 15 seconds more of queue, for a much better and balanced gaming experience? cmon, is 15 seconds extra going to kill the game? specially if we try the 1 month main server test ±0… we need solid data, not personal anecdotes!
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The problem is, we can’t see any real data beyond player numbers and match stats — everyone’s just grabbing a different part of the elephant and insisting they’re right. so nobody here is really “wrong” in their judgment.
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The international server did have far more players than the Chinese one, but the players are from all around the world on different time zone that will play the game on different time.
Also I doubt the popularity of the Chinese server is that high. I saw claim on the Chinese forum saying that it is full of bots.
https://tieba.baidu.com/p/11035905209?fr=frs
https://tieba.baidu.com/p/11030667084?fr=frs
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The Chinese server does have BR tiers, but with so few real players and so many AI, the so-called “±0” matchmaking there is garbage quality. The Chinese server still has uptiering too — though the old-timers getting drafted don’t really care. The root problem on the Chinese server is simply “too few people,” which leads to AI backfill and lopsided real-player counts (1v2, 1v5) — it has little to do with the matchmaking system itself.
But I don’t think you’ve seen this part, because it’s something you don’t know about: the Chinese server has an even more opaque “dynamic balancing” mechanic. In terms of experience, it matches players onto favorable/unfavorable maps based on their faction’s strength. And paying players on the Chinese server get enormous perks — not only do they get access to specially boosted squad loadouts (these squads are called “super squads”), but to maintain some illusion of fair matches, these paying players are largely funneled into “stomp” and “bot” lobbies to keep them entertained. That’s how these people earned the nickname “bot-farming marshals.” It’s a two-pronged system: paying players get fed bots, and veteran players get “dynamically balanced” into bot lobbies because of their squad strength. This matchmaking is built entirely around the monetization system.
At its root, the Chinese server’s P2W monetization design has already reached the point of no return. The moment you take away the seal-clubbing, those “bot-farming marshals” get upset — inevitably leading to paying players leaving and the Chinese server collapsing even faster.
“A repeatedly proven business model is this: paid content needs a ‘stomp experience’ to sustain it. The Chinese server provides that experience with AI; the international server provides it with uptiering. This explains why the international server’s uptiering has been kept for five years — it’s not a flaw, it’s part of the business model.” and Chinese server community’s discussion has already proven this model
The ones paying for content are the ‘bot-farming marshals’ — players who need to crush the weak to feel good. The international server simply swapped the ‘weak’ from AI to low-BR players."
Nobody here is actually having a good time — except those four-man squads stomping every lobby, the “pro players.” And I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.
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Since you admit the ±0 matchmaking on Chinese server is bad, that means that player count problem is still a valid concern if we want to implement ±0 matchmaking to international version of Enlisted.
What’s the boosted squad loadouts and super squads? Can you explain to me, I’m really curious
You obviously didn’t really read what I wrote. The CN server’s matchmaking is shaped by a bunch of different factors. Isolation matchmaking sounds like one thing when you look at the decision, but the reality is totally different.
More health and reserve soldiers.
You use Chinese server can do ±0 to support your player count is not an excuse theory.
But you admit that it was implemented badly. So you can no longer use that to support your player count is not an excuse theory.
So in the end you still can’t prove player count is not an excuse.
On the player-count point: neither of us actually has the daily or monthly numbers. enlistedrollcall is a third-party estimate, and I’m not going to pretend it’s authoritative. The only party with real data is Gaijin — and they’re not sharing. So let’s stop litigating a number neither of us can prove, because that’s a dead end. I was never using player numbers as some big talking point.
On the CN server: yes, I acknowledged its ±0 is implemented poorly. But you’re conflating two completely different things. The CN server’s problems don’t come from ±0 matching itself — they come from the pile of P2W mechanics bolted on top of it: the “super squads,” the dynamic balancing that feeds paying players into bot lobbies, and the whole “bot-farming marshal” ecosystem. The CN server didn’t fail because ±0 is bad; it failed because ±0 was turned into a monetization tool.
So pointing at the CN server’s mess and saying “see, ±0 doesn’t work” is like pointing at a P2W mobile game and saying “see, this genre is doomed.” You’re blaming the mechanism for the disease it was infected with.
What I’m actually arguing is simpler than all of this: removing uptiering is a net positive for the experience of the majority of players. That’s the claim. It doesn’t need a player-count study to be true — it needs you to answer one question: is a BR IV player being pulled into BR V and used as a punching bag a good experience, or a bad one?
The uptiering system on the international server is a leftover — a design redundancy from an older era that now serves mainly to feed paying players the same “stomp room” the CN server gives them with bots. Retiring it wouldn’t just fix one BR; it would relieve years of accumulated frustration across the whole ladder. That’s the argument. Not player counts.
Where do I say this? You are the one who use Chinese server as an example to support ±0 matchmaking. I am just proving that your example is not valid. I didn’t use Chinese server as an example to say ±0 won’t work.
The problem is you make this topic and claim that there is no problem, but in the end the problem is still there.
If there is not enough players you will face significantly longer wait time or even getting matches full of bots. You are just replacing a problem with another problem. At least I have a choice to avoid playing br4, but I will have no choice to avoid match full of bots.
“At least I can choose not to play BR4.” Think about what that sentence actually admits. A player should never have to avoid a Battle Rating like it’s a hazard. The fact that your recommended solution to uptiering is “just don’t play BR4” is itself the proof that the system is broken. BR4 is the least-played BR precisely because everyone has made the same “choice” you’re describing.Healthy game does not have a BR that its players feel forced to abandon.
You just made my point for me🤣
Second, you’re equating two problems of completely different natures. Uptiering is a design flaw — a fixable error in the matchmaking logic. Bot lobbies (if they even appear) are a population problem — a consequence of player count that any matchmaking system can suffer from. You don’t justify a design flaw by pointing at a hypothetical population problem. That’s not a fair trade.
The bot-lobby fear is speculation, not data. Neither of us has the numbers. But here’s what we do have, observable right now——BR IV is dead and pure fodder, BR I newbies get farmed endlessly by BR II squadstackers, and BR III’s only appeal is farming BR II. Players have long been fed up. Faced with all this, are you just selectively blind? You keep hiding behind “not enough players” to shut me up — but I already said I won’t use that as a main argument without hard data, and you still keep coming at me from that angle.
So the real question isn’t “would ±0 cause bot lobbies?” It’s "why are we still defending a system whose own defenders admit you have to avoid it?
Interesting — I looked up your stats, and they tell a very specific story:
240 of your last 242 games are BR5. You’ve played BR4 exactly zero times.
184 of those are Japan — the strongest BR5 faction.
You queue with the same group of players.
So when you say “at least I can choose not to play BR4,” you’re speaking from a position where that choice was never even on the table for you
You’ve simply never had to live in BR1-4. You sit at the top of the ladder, on the strongest faction, in a premade squad, and you’re telling the players being dragged up from BR4 to “just choose not to play.”
And now it makes sense why you’re defending uptiering. For you, it just a feature. It’s what feeds BR4 players into your matches as punching bags. You don’t experience the downside of it; you experience the upside, every single game. Your “bot lobby” concern isn’t really about queue times — it’s about what happens to your matchmaking when the lower-BR players you’ve been stomping are no longer forced into your games.
I’m not saying you’re wrong about everything. But let’s be honest about what this is: the people most invested in keeping uptiering are the people on the winning end of it. Your stats make that pretty clear.
About your “bot lobby” worries — let me take a wild guess at what you really mean: “If uptiering is gone, who am I supposed to use as a punching bag?” 
???
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A question for you: you’re a BR V Japanese stacker — what the hell gives you the right to tell BR 1-4’s victims to “just don’t play”? Seriously, what gives you the right?
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You already don’t have the option to choose how many players you get. Choose the wrong nation at the wrong time and you get a single player besides yourself on your team even with uptiers and downtiers.
And there’s always the old reliable, just quitting a match with too many bots and rolling the dice again.
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OOOF! cmon, get out of here with your factual data! real, provable and indisputable information is not allowed here, only fearmongering from disguised seal-clubbers that not only want to fight people with inferior gear than them as much as possible, but is waiting for them in a stack with their open arms, the most unbalancing issue in the entire game!!!
just as you said, noone knows how a ±0 queue system will affect the queues. because noone knows what the population is, the distribution of said population is by BR, and what that population would choose given a choice in the matter. and noone will know, cause that information will not be given to us by official means. but, as you said, what we really know is that the uptier system is factually making the game worst.
so, why cant we have a month long test of ±0 BR in the main server? because we could actually acquire the factual data. and keeping the community in the dark seems to be the purposefully chosen modus operandi. that, or the poor janitor working on Enlisted cant clean the office, make coffee and develop the game at the same time, and we dont seem to have much more personnel dedicated to the game than that.
hell, we dont even have an exclusive community manager anymore, enlisted CM work is being handled as a side project by Active Matter CM, not to mention War thunder WW2 infantry got entire maps made for their test run while here…radio silence. just watch the last WT infantry test in case of any doubt.
they took 3 months to develop 4 jeeps (develop, as in take them from existing assets already on the maps and letting players spawn in them) and they didnt even added fuel tanks on some of them…
the list goes on. hell, if im going down id rather go with a boom, why cant enlisted apply the same philosophy? if we are going down the drain, at least do it with style and make the population happy just for once!
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Lol, you mean that site that was only online few months ago?
What gives you the right to claim I never play other br if you only have few months of data while the merge was already released years ago? Japan br5 wasn’t even there when the merge dropped. Now I mainly play br 5 only because I am tired of supporting those players that don’t even want to build rally point. But that doesn’t mean my experience on other br will magically disappear.
Lol, in br5 you will face those veteran br5 players and many players simply avoid br4, so there is not that much br4 players for you to use as punch bag to begin with.
Also, the most stacked br is actually br3, where a veteran can go there and farm clueless newbies while have little risk to be uptier.
If I want punch bag I will simply go to br3.
Once again you are just ignoring the player base problem and replace it with personal attack. I play this game long before the merge so I know how bad a bot match is.
Moreover I was already against splitting the playerbase even before the merge so you said I like to use uptier player as punch bag theory is simply nonsense. Where are you at that time?