Right now elemental types do not seem to play ANY part in the match making. If they did, maybe it could help balance things out more? So if I have a 5k advantage I would face a team that at least has a heavy elemental advantage over me.
As for the AI playing better, I see no issue there. I am not talking massive differences. For a 5k point disparity, maybe the person with a lower power rating would have all their AI make 5-10% more shots? Something relatively minor, but enough to still help lower the gap
EDIT: And for those saying an 8-10% gap “isn’t that big of deal”, it is when it’s clearly the difference between a loss and win most times:
I’m guessing it’s the fact his team’s highest hero is only 9* and +1 bar plat, and that hero is less than 2500 points higher than any other hero on his team. A pretty balanced team. Meanwhile his opponent has a 9*, +4 plat Panzer that is over 5k points higher than 3 other heroes on his team. Granted he did have a 3k point advantage on his opponent.
But like the picture posted above your comment, there is no synergy, I get a lot of matches where people use a 9-10* panzer plat 4 with random hero’s to keep his power low.
But I win 95% of those min max fights because my team keeps me alive, you had a different case, you faced a full mauler with Mandrake Korean, they use Mandrake to roll around with mauler so you can’t kill him and you had a lot of bad luck with the matchmaking
Even if he used a meta, or even tried a counter to his opponent (not sure there really is one atm), he still would have lost. His opponent is much higher power than he was and each of his opponent’s heroes are, on average, 1700 points stronger. That’s a whole star and plat bar difference… per hero.
There is no way he could have won here unless he got insanely lucky AND his opponent was terrible. It’s bad enough his opponent was playing one of the strongest metas currently in the game, but then to have a 8500 power advantage just makes it insulting.
The punishment for not leveling up you hero skills and playing with a significantly lower power hero is the same. If you want to play some heroes that are not in you A or B team and therefore have underleveled skills (because you barely have enough money to level your top heros skills) you always get bad match-ups.
His skills were leveled, while mine are not maxed out. So in the matchmaking algorithm matched us without a punishment, even though his team is much more unbalanced than mine.
That is the difference I saw also. I have without realizing it always maxed out the stripes of my heroes to which ever skill level they are at. It’s why I don’t PvP with my Plats that often. I working to get them evened out. My PvP runs start out with matchups against lower power squads -most of the time. Then I’ll get a few high ones. After that it settles in with +/-500. What’s weird is that I’ll lose to the underpowered squads after 3 or 4 crates.