I hit diamond 4 yesterday after playing through platinum, having fun with friends and mostly balanced matches after the split, only occasional SirDel stomps here and there. The next games had masters, ranked 1# and 4# predator squad, etc. Needless to say I got sent to demotion protection pretty soon and didn't have fun almost at all. In what other game does matchmaking work so horribly?

I don't mind much the pros and preds who don't play ranked 24/7 climbing through the lower tiers every now and then (except smurfs) since they'll be up in their class and out of my games quickly. What I do mind are matches where we only see master and pred trails and me along with my platinum and diamond friends either get killed right away or scavenge for shit loot, maybe take and even win one or two fights or try to play for position. We just aren't good enough to hold a position/escape against third, fourth, and fifth party masters or a pred squad with red armor just popping up with ults and nades and stuff. But we definitely get kills and placement in lobbies with other diamond 4s, 3s etc. (in general)

I would personally rather wait a couple of minutes chatting with my friends on the lobby or doing other stuff than having 20s-1min wait with imbalanced games 3/5 times. And I do realise that the preds would need to wait much, much longer if the games only had masters and preds. But something needs to be done in my opinion.

How about putting console and pc preds/masters in the same lobbies for quicker matchmaking? How about indicating average wait time?