They've slowly been transitioning from fully random connection based matchmaking to fully team based matchmaking (they increased the "team" aspect again with TLW update). I now regularly get 1-2 complete wizards on the other team who can teleport at will. I'm a solo queue quickplay no life so let me try to explain what [i]I think[/i] the match is: 1. Players are ranked 1-12 as they enter the lobby: there's some non-randomness to this, I play the same people way too often and I can't figure out why. They have wildly varying connections almost as if it's trying to fill some of the 12 positions in advance after a few players join the lobby Now the 12 players can be placed on teams. I will refer to the best player (ranked in some way by the game that isn't strictly elo-based) as #1, second best as #2 and so on... 2. #1 is put on team A, #2 and #3 are put on team B 3. #4-#9 are randomly placed (giving 3 to each team) 4. Team B get #10, team A gets #11 & #12 [u]Final theoretical teams[/u] [b]A[/b] #1, 3 random #4-#9, #11, #12 [b]B[/b] #2, #3, 3 random #4-9, #10 Edit: to directly address part of your post, stacking breaks the previously mentioned matchmaking system which is far more likely to cause an unfair match **I'm probably wrong about this but it really [i]feels[/i] like some form of TBMM... And I can't imagine bungie will clarify the matchmaking anytime soon (please prove me wrong)** --------------- (this turns into a rant not a lot of tangible info below) This style provides very fair matches, in theory. Surprisingly, DTR gives a 40-60% win prediction (meaning it thinks X team has a 40-60% chance of winning). This is pretty consistent with the game experience too, with most of my matches being very close with ~66% being wins overall. The only problem here is that the matches at [b]never[/b] difficult for me, but I have to absolutely slaughter to make up for #11 and #12 on my team. My win rate drops significantly when I don't reach 40 defeats becuase I can't counteract the guaranteed negative KADs of the bottom 2 players (for example, if someone goes 1-20 I have to go 20-1 at some point in the match to make up for that). This gets even worse in control where I'd theoretically have to make up their deaths twice or three times over all while trying to maintain map control being effectively down 2 players. For this reason my clash win rate is much higher than my control win rate (#39 elo rank VS #365 respectively). Now this probably sounds like a pvp tryhard whining about how hard his life is in QP, a playlist he should've giving up on long ago; but this also hurts everyone else in the lobby, most notably the worst players. Not only are they getting a carry (potentially giving a false sense of success or improvement, I've been there before) but they have no way of improving when they are guaranteed to get atleast 6 people who are much better than them in the lobby. If the matchmaking was truly random (and maybe protected new players with a separate playlist entirely) they'd actually see improvement and not give up after going negative 5 games in a row. Well I ranted for a bit too long there but as a QP professional it's my duty to share this info ;)