By no means am I impugning anyone’s skill—lord knows I hate Crucible too much to be any good at it. But this sounds like a serious problem with the matchmaking system – nine and fifteen Mercies in a row? Not even wins, but straight up obliterations? I would certainly find that too strange to fully appreciate. I mean, it’s safe to assume it’s not the same teams/opponents. It still seems like “unfair” matchups.

That's the thing though. our team was half and half in terms of PvP/PvE players, but someone mentioned that all of our seasonal IB K/Ds were 0.0, so maybe the game reset our matchups?
But according to Bungie, they don't think that SBMM is on in Iron Banner:

Re: Crucible Matchmaking

Reached out to the team to verify. Each season, we see reports from players thinking Skill based matchmaking was re-enabled. Every time we check, no changes had been made.

Double checking today to confirm, but more than likely no changes have been made.

— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) August 30, 2021

By no means am I impugning anyone’s skill—lord knows I hate Crucible too much to be any good at it. But this sounds like a serious problem with the matchmaking system – nine and fifteen Mercies in a row? Not even wins, but straight up obliterations? I would certainly find that too strange to fully appreciate. I mean, it’s safe to assume it’s not the same teams/opponents. It still seems like “unfair” matchups.

Matchmaking does seem a little loose at the moment, possibly related to crossplay. I'm not sure how they are doing matching between console populations at the moment.

That being said, the Iron Banner gametype is also practically designed to create blowouts. The slightest area control error or small delay in capturing a zone can be a 30+ point swing either way.

You gotta pump those numbers up, Korny!

The Golden Gun in this clip wasn't even the real target - I missed the guy I was shooting at with my grenade. My lack of aiming, though, didn't help the GG any.

(This was a great game; we were about to lose, Saladman just told us it was almost over, 113-89. Our worst player decided that moment to quit, and we went on a tear... ended up winning it.)

Grenade Launchers are just the best...

Speaking of which, maybe it's the shotgun nerfs, but boy does IB feel good this season. I played nine matches with folks last night, and Saladin had to call Mercy all nine games in a row, without a single match hitting the five minute mark:

This sums up the start of every match:
I know, I know, I should have held back and Desperado'd them. But wouldn't Spawnkilling them the moment they spawned be the funnier thing to try? The answer will always be yes.

This sums up the middle of every match:
Fun fact, this was a full-on Xbox vs Playstation match. They hit Orbit before Saladin could hit the final words of his sentence as he called it.

And this sums up the end of every match:
Love the bit where I fire a Nova Bomb at the guy, and it veers completely away from him because it decided to chase someone offscreen.

Bonus clip!

Ever see someone thread an Axion Bolt for a triple kill steal? :P

Good stuff!

(This was a great game; we were about to lose, Saladman just told us it was almost over, 113-89. Our worst player decided that moment to quit, and we went on a tear... ended up winning it.)