Check the date on the complaint you were shown
The single most-linked matchmaking thread in this game’s history is "Zero Matchmaking, Full Purple chads wiping entire Lobbies", whose author reported ten consecutive games against a full-purple rogue wiping the lobby including brand-new players in white gear. It is a vivid complaint and it circulates constantly. It was posted on 9 May 2025 — during the playtest, more than a year before release.
- Quoting it as evidence about the launch build is wrong, and several sites do exactly that.
- Within that same 2025 thread another player noted matchmaking worked fine for them in grey gear, so it was contested even then.
- A reply in it warned against a "casuals unwelcome" trajectory and named Dungeonborne as the cautionary example — which is the same comparison players are still making today.
What the post-launch complaint is actually about
The live complaint has a different shape. On 31 July 2026 a player framed it as a spiral rather than a single unfair lobby: you lose to a better player, you lose your gear, and you re-enter with grey starter equipment against opponents who kept theirs — so each loss makes the next fight harder. That is a progression-economy problem, and it is a fair criticism of an extraction game that is otherwise generous about death.
- The counter-argument raised in the same thread is that the Auction House lets you re-equip cheaply, and that combat bags exist precisely so you are not forced in underprepared.
- The other repeated ask is gear-score-banded matchmaking, matching players within a narrow averaged gear-score range as some other extraction games do.
- Both positions are held by people who play the game. We are not resolving that; we are telling you the state of it.
What the game does instead
Difficulty gates do some of the work matchmaking would otherwise do, and they are the part that is actually documented. Hallowgrove Normal caps starting gear at Excellent (blue), which keeps the beginner lobby gear-honest. Hallowgrove Chaos requires 800 Gyldenblod of equipment value, Brandrgarde Normal requires 300 combined with starting gear no better than Epic (purple), and Brandrgarde Cataclysm requires 2500. So the lobby you enter is bounded by equipment, not by how good you are.
- This is why the beginner advice to stay on Hallowgrove Normal is not just about map knowledge — it is the one bracket with a gear ceiling above you.
- Cross-platform matchmaking is confirmed. How gear, rank, latency and party size feed into lobby creation is not.
- Bots are permanent and officially confirmed, which is a separate answer to the same underlying problem: lobby population.