Started out from the bottom, climbed up to Silver 1 decently quickly around lvl 45 or so, but I've been stuck at Silver 1 since October, just yo-yoing between 1300 and 1370 depending on who I get paired with. There are folks at all levels of game progress and skill for me to get paired with here, from folks with a single fighter over 10kfs to folks with 20+ marqueed 18kfs diamond fighters, and over my time here I've seen them all as my own collection has steadily grown in strength. I crave those early days where I would get paired up against a Gold 4 whose strongest fighter was a partially upgraded nat dia and their base completely lacked catalysts. Everything was much simpler back then, and I have to admit I'm more than a little salty that someone whose collection is that lacking can race to the top and camp there because their collection is too weak for them to get paired against someone who could show them what being Gold ranked really means.
Might fall back down to Silver 2 this week though, unfortunately. Last week I lost 4 of 5 matches, and this week both my matches have been against the same person, who has a really well built rift defense (Scratching Post MnF with support Vals, boss node is AG / LC / Bio all with marquees, Blockbusted catalyst spam, y'all know the type of rift I'm talking about), yet is somehow lower ranked than I am. Even though I didn't even manage to finish their rift the first time, the matchmaking system decided to pair us up again anyways so screw me I guess. Looks like I'm headed back down to the lower ranks unless the matchmaking decides to pitch me some softballs for the rest of the week.
Speaking of getting paired with the same person multiple times in quick succession, that really grinds my gears. All the matches of those pairings tend to have the same results, which is always really frustrating for the loser, especially if there's a big power gap involved. My one win last week was against someone who lost two matches to me the previous week, which has to be incredibly aggravating. Like, after a second loss in quick succession or a loss by a large gap the system shouldn't pair those two people up again for at least two weeks or so, to give time for leveling chars or a base rework.
I only tend to do the minimum 5 matches per week because of how sketchy the matchmaking is, and how if you lose a match it was totally not worth it to participate unless you're trying to meet that quota. If you try and do extra matches and you lose and go down in points, not only was it not worth it to participate, you've actively damaged your rift rating by trying. The minuscule rewards per battle at Rookie/Bronze/Silver are not worth that risk since the cutoffs are so close together, especially now that gifts give more rift coins on a daily basis than a single rift battle. (This isn't a problem with gifts btw, it's a problem with the way rift rewards are balanced.)
TLDR: Rift matchmaking makes me mad. Extra battles aren't worth the effort/time/risk. I'm salty. Nothing new here.
Don't get me wrong though; At it's best, when you've got a truly fair matchup with an interesting and well built base and your win/loss ratio is decent and you're a safe distance from the closest rank cutoff, Rift can be fun! Even if you lose! I was having a wonderful time with it for a while, up until last week when everything started falling apart and I got a long string of bad matchups that pushed me down into the danger zone. Things need to change in order for it to really be fun without that long string of qualifying statements though, and I love hearing folks talk about potential changes that could make it better. Stuff like Attacker/Catalyst Diversity to undermine the strategies that boil down to 'spam the most OP combo available on every node', and reward rebalances to genuinely reward effort/engagement so that even a lost match was worth the effort it took to attempt it.
