I totally agree with what you're saying, and agreed, it's not ideal unless there are a lot of people in each player pool to draw up consistent matches. I'm not recommending it, all I'm saying is that what the OP claims to be 'SBMM', isn't. The way things currently are, when high level players enter a game, there typically aren't enough high level players currently searching for a game to create a team in reasonable time, so matchmaking gives them the next best thing, a group of medium/average players to play against, this may still give the game an estimated win rating of greater than even, in favour of the more experienced. To bring this back down closer to 50/50, matchmaking brings in low level players to play with the high level players, the entire reason that they are brought in is to bring the estimated win rate to 50%, their sole purpose in this game is to be fodder for the opposing team and to weigh down their own team. Exactly what we are seeing in OP's post (and others like his). Clearly, this isn't the skill based matchmaking you see in other genres like Fighters. Again, I'm not endorsing SBMM, it has its advantages, but they are at a large cost, as you said, wait times, constricted player pools, harder to find 12 people in the same pool, etc. I'm merely saying that this is not what SBMM is, SBMM wouldn't allow players to be brought in solely for the reason of evening out the teams. I've checked my recent games, and I seem to regularly be matched with fairly even teams, that's thanks to having an average elo/KD, statistically, there are more of us. But I've just checked my wife's account and she has a KD of 0.3, needless to say, she's not an FPS gamer, but she still gives it a shot every once in a while. In the matches she gets put into, there are generally one or two very high skilled players in her team, much higher than me, and the opposing team is still a much higher level than even who I would come up against. The trend continues when you check the games of high skill players, there's usually one or two low level players. This isn't characteristic of a system which is supposed to protect players from people outside of their skill range. I agree that we largely see eye to eye on it, I just think that some of the things I've said have been misconstrued, I'm not endorsing it, I understand the downsides, but too many people on this site are blaming their poor experiences on something entirely different.