I've played a decent amount of the comp rework so far, all in freelance, and I find it to be better than the old comp, but I find the matchmaking to be very strange. I'm a pretty good player, won 6 of my placement games and placed Gold 3 which seems to be the highest you can initially place. Since placing, games have been a constant up and down; I lose pretty much as often as I win. I'm certain I will climb eventually as I get more used to it. What I find confusing is the matchmaking. In every single game I match people in Adept and even Ascendant and I know this because I am playing against streamers, who I can go watch and verify that they are in higher divisions. I frequently come across the likes of Kami, Clan, Boy, Syncro, and Zorbiqq each of them in more than once, all of which are at least Adept and most of them are Ascendant. They are not mismatches; I win these games just as often as any other game. The point of this observation is that matchmaking is obviously not rank based, and this is only based on the sample of the people who I can verify are at those ranks. This does not include the people who I match who are higher rank than me and are not streaming, meaning I don't know what rank they are, of which I'm sure there are very very many. I'm not necessarily complaining because 1. despite this, the skill grouping is tight and games are pretty even and 2. obviously there are population constraints to prevent true rank based matchmaking. If you only matched people in your division or maybe within one deviation of it you would never find games and matchmaking already takes upwards of five minutes sometimes at least for me. Even then, if the matches are even, why change the matchmaking? The shoe seems to fit. I am honestly fascinated that this many top tier players even exist in this game to the point where I never, EVER encounter a player who clearly doesn't belong in a lobby. There is variance among the top 5%, and some people have bad games or make bad plays or are not good at playing as a team, which is ultimately what decides the outcome of games, but just at face value everybody in my games is at least above average and most of them are VERY good. As a result I don't really understand the point of divisions as a symbol of your placement along the skill distribution. Typically in a game with ranks, like apex legends, valorant, counterstrike, or overwatch, the worst players are at the bottom and the best are at the top. The general principle behind a ranking systems in these games is that you rank up by winning more games than you lose until you find your "true skill", where the skill level of your lobbies is to the point where you win and lose evenly and are stuck at one rank. As people play and the rank distribution is fleshed out, you typically end up with a bell curve rank distribution where very few players are in extremely low ranks due to being below average, the majority is in the middle ranks from being average, and then less players are in the higher ranks from being above average with the pinnacle being a rank reserved for the top 1%. Destiny does not follow this at all. You don't play against people in your rank, you just play against people who will give you a fair match, regardless of rank. And from what I can tell you don't lose less or gain more from losing to or beating a higher ranked team, which is a typical feature of ranked games, but I obviously don't know because d2 comp has no way to see peoples' rankings... which is its own fundamental issue. I'm not really complaining. The matchmaking is honestly my favourite part about d2 comp because regardless of how strange it is, you get close and fair matches against good players. My primarily complaints with gameplay are in regards to the state of the meta (there is indisputably a correlation between teams who have more thundercrash titans and teams who win) and the bad map pool which is exacerbated by the VERY bad gamemode pool (rift on convergence, wormhaven, and disjunction are absolutely unplayable). I just wanted to share my experience with how... strange the matchmaking has been for me.