This entire short-story by you is made false by the simple fact that the error message 'unable to find a lobby' is still a present issue.
According to Josh the matchmaker always places a player into a match as shown below.
Last week we made 3 adjustments to matchmaking:
1. Tighten tolerable MMR limits for manually joining matches in the Server Browser (also tolerances used by MatchMaker).
- Decreased from 500 to 425
2. Increased the time the MatchMaker takes to expand the MMR tolerances when you're in the MatchMaker queue.
- It can take up to 2 minutes to get a match if your MMR is well outside any current server's MMR
- Yes, by entering the MatchMaker queue you *will* get a match, even if you can't manually join a server via the Server Browser. Take it as a compliment - you're amazing at this game ;)
3. Private servers now ignore MMR and are no longer included in MatchMaking
- You will always be able to join a private server if it's public or you have the password
- Users in the MatchMaker queue will not be put into matches on private servers
So, yeah, if the message still pops up, or not, I don't know. I don't experience that issue, I'm just going off of what the most informed person in the game has said publicly more than a few months ago, I'm sure he tested the system out first hand. So excuse me for assuming, but don't take that single issue and try to invalidate my post completely. It is still very valid, and I'll say it again.
The system takes in more variables into account than you are when you are forming a decision on which lobby you should be placed in. The ones you think are valid are not. Combine that with the expansion process which lowers standards greatly the longer you wait, and you end up with it finding a match it thinks is better than the others. The problem is the expansion, but if you take away the expansion you increase the null results of not finding a match. You can't have both, you get one or the other. Which one do you want??
On another note, looking back I think the issue is that my combined MMR with some of these lads was most likely on par or slightly higher than the average of lobbies present at the time. However, it doesn't make sense that the matchmaking system would think that placing these low MMR players against much higher MMR players is the correct decision when there were clearly a lot more balanced matches they could of joined in the 1200-1800 range.
Can you explain your vague thoughts better? What on earth does combined MMR (2900+1250, 2900+1350, and 2900+950) have to do with anything? I don't understand and can't follow you.