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.
Being outnumbered, and being two-shot, are both usually the lobby working as designed
Two things get read as cheating that are neither. The first is being outnumbered: solo and trio players share the same lobbies today, so queueing alone and meeting a full squad is the normal state of a run rather than a matchmaking failure. Brandrgarde has been trio-shaped since launch for exactly this reason. The second is dying in two hits. Lobbies are bounded by equipment value, not by ability — Brandrgarde Cataclysm requires 2500 Gyldenblod of gear to enter, so everyone you meet there cleared the same bar and someone well above it will kill you very fast. That is a gear gap doing what a gear gap does.
- That changed on 3 September for one map: Brandrgarde now has a solo queue on Normal and Cataclysm both. Read what it does carefully — it removes trios from your lobby, not PvP. You will still meet other solo players, and Hallowgrove is unchanged.
- If you want the smallest gear gap available today, Hallowgrove Normal caps starting gear at Excellent (blue) — the one bracket with a ceiling above you instead of a floor beneath you.
- If you still believe you were cheated, Bellring publishes weekly penalty lists and does act on reports — see the fair play page for what each enforcement bucket costs and how reporting works. What does not happen is restitution: this is an extraction game, gear you lost on a run is gone, and no published process returns it.
A change to the gear ceilings is on the table — and it is a vote, not a patch note
On 9 September a Bellring developer posted that the studio is "considering two possible adjustments to the current equipment restrictions", to "further improve matchmaking fairness and provide a more varied experience across different difficulty levels". Both adjustments are quality ceilings, which is the mechanism the section above describes: Hallowgrove Chaos would gain an Epic (purple) equipment-quality limit, and Brandrgarde Normal would drop from Epic to Excellent (blue) while still admitting Novice, Advanced and Pro combat bags. Neither is live. At the time of the only account available here they were being voted on in the official Discord, and the post was written as though one or the other would be chosen rather than both.
- If the Brandrgarde Normal change passes, the gear requirement quoted above changes: today it is 300 Gyldenblod with starting gear no better than Epic, and the proposal lowers that ceiling one tier to Excellent.
- If the Hallowgrove Chaos change passes, that bracket gains a ceiling it does not currently have — the 800 Gyldenblod requirement is a floor, and nothing caps quality above it today.
- Read this as a proposal and nothing more. We have not seen the developer post itself, only a creator reading it on camera, and a vote is not a shipping decision — this page will say which way it went once a patch note does.