PvP matchmaking doesn't make sense to me.

Rhipf

I don't have any 5 stars..
I don't have any champed 4 stars (most aren't even leveled above base).
I do have all the 3 stars but I only have 2 max leveled.

Despite this I seem to be getting more and more PvP matches against teams with multiple 5 stars. Admittedly it is mostly in the simulator but it also happens in the other PvP events. It would seem to me that I am a low enough player (roster wise) that I should be only seeing 4 stars at best. The 5 stars I am encountering may not be high end 5 stars but they have significantly greater health and power than my highest character.

Scofie

Others will know better than me, but I expect that the 5*s aside, their rosters are quite similar. Click on their names to view their roster and have a look. It seems a bit odd if they're massively more powerful than you. I rarely get battles with multiple 5*s and I've got most 4*s champed. 

Phumade

The situation changes in various events.

In sim you got hit because the 5* rosters have outpaced similar rosters and there is no one que able in a similar roster/ point size.  At that point the game serves up everyone.

It might suck that your getting hit and hammered by double 5*,  but lets me also point out, that they are hitting you for less than 10 points a hit and leaving massive 70 point retails.

The leaderboard shows a raw lb score.  But really there is a hidden leaderboard that is based score, roster, etc.  That secret lb changes based on active players, who shielded, who's floating, so there's no real point to show it visually other than to say its a "cloud" of players.  Developing  a strategy to figure out how that cloud works  provides cover/immunity which is what will minimize the 5* hits.

Dormammu

You're going to see players who have low-covered 5-stars because MMR isn't factoring them into their rosters. MMR seems to take an average of your 2-5 highest leveled near-fully-covered characters and use that as a baseline. So if someone has two-to-five 3-stars at level 200 and that's similar to what you have, you'll be matched against them. But those players may be using their one-or-two cover 5-stars at level 255-270 which MMR never accounted for because they are so pitifully under-covered and have little-to-no ISO invested into them. When you see a 5-star on an opposing team, check their roster and you'll probably see that the 5-stars they are using are woefully under-covered.

When I was a 3-star player I fed on these teams ravenously: under-covered 5-stars are rarely a challenge for a fully-covered and champed 3-star team.

Jwallyr

The dirty little secret is that NOBODY understands the the matchmaking in this game. It's very opaque to the playerbase, seems to serve up very inconsistent matches at varying levels of play, and the best that even veterans seem capable of doing is alleging certain rules of thumb as being how the MMR "seems to work".

I can't help but wonder if that plays a part in why around half the playerbase doesn't even join most PvP events at last count, and most that do play very few games per event. There's just no way of knowing how bad a slog it's going to be for rewards that are ultimately not that compelling, it just happens to be another avenue of rewards for players willing/able to slog through it.

DyingLegend

MMR is the worst and it will most likely never be fixed, just gotta skip and move on. If you get hit by a better roster, oh well, just queue up a team you can beat. 

DAZ0273

The thing that is unique to 5* is that you can level them relatively high with very few covers. I often encounter level 300+ 5* which when you check the roster are actually only a few covers and hit like a newborn kitten power wise. You'll be surprised how beatable these teams can be.

Rod5

DAZ0273 said:

The thing that is unique to 5* is that you can level them relatively high with very few covers. I often encounter level 300+ 5* which when you check the roster are actually only a few covers and hit like a newborn kitten power wise. You'll be surprised how beatable these teams can be.

This. 5*characters are only as good as the level they are at, largely speaking. 

Take them on, you can beat them with 3*s for sure.

Rod5

To the OP question, it is not easy to be precise, but it is largely about comparably levelled teams that are available in some sort of proximity to your score.

How the algorithm decides whether to pull a bigger/smaller team into your qs vs one that is further away score-wise is a bit of a mystery, but there will be teams that you can q easily(ie with very similar characters/levels) and others that you are not able to q at all. I’d describe the in-between as a sliding scale also based on how far away from you they are score-wise.

One of the biggest issues that newer players are facing is due to the MMR they give themselves by levelling undercovered 5*s...it’s a very poor idea and will make PvP so much harder as 5s are pussycats until you can get them to higher/champ levels. It’s a pity that this information isn’t more easily available to the player or maybe a CL-based restriction on levelling them should be applied to save the noobs from themselves.

Projectus2501

PvP mm is very weak. You always play against equal or stronger players and when you are way up in the scale you get the same adversaries over and over again, no matter how many times you skip