Face the same teams twice in a row. Face fireteams as 3 solos multiple times in a row. Im in california, don't tell me the player pool is too small, but if it is, that says a lot about the devs decision making.
Lobby balancing also is an atrocity. I know the BDF will be here like "its trials you should be able to beat any random team out there as a solo player no matter who they put on your team." but thats rubbish.
The old model was much much better. The new model feels more like a slot machine than pvp.
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To breakdown some stats for you - 10% of the entire D2 population play PvP with any frequency. I read somewhere that of the 10, about a 1/4 actually play Trials with the ability to go Flawless, and that's with a team. Lobby balancing, unfortunately, has been an impossible task. No multiplayer PvP game has had any success in the 30+ years the game type has been around. That's why things like SBMM and CBMM have failed miserably - and there's been calls to move to EOMM - experienced based. With that said, there are players who can pretty much solo Trials matches; taking out teams within the first few minutes, and usually it's players who can also do so in the original Comp. They're just that good. That's why you see people them carrying 0.3 k/d individuals to the Lighthouse, so it's not unheard of. But when you say "old model", do you mean from D1, Trials of the Nine, or when they first brought back Trials in D2?