My Inquiries on the Current State of Matchmaking (and how to fix it)

Question

Note: the majority of the content of this thread is taken from a comment I recently posted, as I felt it was important enough to deserve it's own thread.

I'm very new here, but from what I've seen the 'competitive ladders' here are drastically flawed in multiple ways (one of the ways being what you originally mentioned.)

First of all, in games that award elo, you should not be able to "pick" who you want to challenge; this results in new players being targeted by advanced players who seek to abuse their most likely low skill / elo ratio (they will quickly drop down to 900's or even 800's from this - NOT a good way to handle mm.) Instead, you should be matched with a player of around the same skill level as you and around the same activity level as you (the more you play, the faster you find matches and play against other highly motivated players). This way, higher level players can avoid getting "sniped" by other high level players or advanced programmers who are new to sololearn on new account

Answer 1

This post was meant to include the problems with badges and a few more questions as well, but I ran out of space ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Answer 2

Please tag SoloLearn as your question concerns SoloLearn game aspect. Not even sure why you tagged 'smurfing' though.

Answer 3

Wasn't aware how tagging works; I thought tags were used for search keywords and not pinging members