Certainly feels like there has been some matchmaking tweaks. Majority of the players who have shot at me have been using a Venator tier 4 ; none of the free loadout crew.
We know duos are matching more, but apparantly they have become very sweaty. I also think Rank or loadout value (or both) must play a part, the odds of you running into almost entirely friendly game is 95% as long as you are friendly too and you're running a free loadout. The moment you take your own loadout (even a cheap one) it becomes more shoot on sight, and it really really becomes shoot on sight if you take in something like a rare or epic gun. The meta has already settled on the Venator IV. The streamers and sweaty players are already stocking what they expect to be the best weapons after they nerf it, so they're kind of way ahead of the devs.
That said the sweats now tend to stick to specific maps and/or locations in the maps where the very best gear is, mostly those after blueprints. If you go as a Trios with juiced loadouts into the tunnels under Blue Gate you're going to get utterly dumpstered.
Those area are often hit and run too, you can have fairly close spawns, use stims to get there ASAP and find the high loot rooms emptied already meaning it's kind of luck if they're even lootable as to where you spawn. This is made infinitely worse if you spawn into the map late, this destroys any chance at you finding good loot (read: blueprints)
Needless to say I think the endgame is a bit of a mess right now, people are going to these area specifically to just get into fights as fast as possible, looting has become almost entirely secondary to the game. Most of these people just trade Venator IVs and have inventories stacked with them. I'm going to go out and a limb and say I don't even know if workbenches even matter. A lot of time the more advanced kit is worse, the slower speeds of using the stronger healing and shields are favoured less over the speed of lower tier things. You can buy a lot of the OK gear, people already have millions in spare coins. Finding nades and stuff in match is pretty common once you know where the locations crates have a chance of spawning. Most of your guns are just re-used off bodies you kill since there's still quite a lot of luck in that. The second teaming and third teaming and sometimes even a 4th means where you are in that chain of fights decides who comes out alive most of the time.
I don't believe the devs have the experience to know what to expect from the kind of end game they're setting up here, if they can't stay ahead of the META in the game, it will become pretty boring play quite fast, people will stick to the same maps, the same few corridors and routes, the same few weapons, etc. I've already found myself clearing out my stash of any just objective bad or useless guns, leveling everything else to IV, getting mods on everything to sort of compress the value of the stash more so I can just pick from a shelf of ready made stuff rather than build it each round.
managed to fight my way back and make it out with a minute to spare (minus my teammate), there was bodies everywhere and I didn't even get chance to loot them. Not sure how many I actually knocked but got 3000 xp just for knocked raiders so must've been a few.
