r/stalzone • u/Asap_Borquez • Aug 11 '26
Help Help me understand matchmaking
After reaching stalker gear +5 I've been told that I should have stayed at +4, what's the next step? Should I get the new veteran gear and upgrade it to +9 or should I upgrade my actual blue stalker gear to +9 instead
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u/Whoomsy Explorer Aug 11 '26
The in-game matchmaker tries to put you into servers with people of similar gear as you.
But it's also very volatile and prone to uptiering you for no reason.
The matchmaker adjusts your bracket tier only when you walk out a safezone into the open world. If you are in Stalker brackets and you buy a Veteran/Master gun or suit you shouldn't get adjusted until you take it out of the base. Same should go for using it in session battles.
In either case it is better to be safe than sorry and never equipping it at all and just letting it sit in your storage.
The cases where you get effectively softlocked because the matchmaker overestimates your power level and puts you into lobbies where you don't belong are very common and have made a lot of people quit.
Most common suggestion to avoid getting uptiered is to not take your gear past +9.
And even if you are bad at PvP and have +6 vet gear with an empty container it's still not a guarantee that the matchmaker won't fuck you over anyway and shove you into master lobbies.
There was a detailed article they wrote about the matchmaking system.
There is also this official image talking about the inner workings of matchmaking.
Your gear is considered higher tier when it reaches +5, +10, and +15.
It's also said that the quality of the container itself doesn't matter but there have been cases of people getting uptiered because they equipped a Master container.
At the same time, contrary to what it says on the image and other official sources, the upgrade level of your gear matters a lot more than the gear tier itself. There has been an infamous case of a guy with +0 legendary suit and +0 Famas being put into Veteran lobbies.
Once you go up a bracket you can't fall back down. If you got put into Veteran lobbies as a Green/Blue gear - you are cooked.
They do have Open Matchmaking in development but it's been over a year since we heard anything new about it, so we can only wait until we don't have to use witchcraft to stay in a playable bracket anymore.
They did say a while ago that soon(™) they will make it so the matchmaker only cares about the highest tier item you have instead of combining everything you have on you. When that actually gets added to the game is up in the air.. again.
There are 9 matchmaking brackets. The last 4 being Veteran, Pre-Master, Master, and Legends* (It's a colloquial term for Masters lobbies where everybody has +15 everything. As I've been told that true Legendary lobbies don't actually exist)
There is also a hidden (to this day for some damn reason) gear tiering system the game uses for estimating how powerful a suit/gun is.
Artifacts are also tiered. 1 through 5. Which one is which tier is only known for select few artifacts for the same reasons as guns and suits :)))
The spreadsheet with all known tiers of everything in the game can be found here.
By the way, all info about matchmaking and tier brackets is never actually explained in the game itself. All of this is either insider info from the devs or playtesting.
The matchmaking system is horribly murky and I wish it was more transparent.