It is a massive joke. It is bad enough as a laner where you could win your lane HARD and still lose cause the rest of your team cannot pull their own weight or the enemy team’s high tier player is better at solo carrying than you are, but casual is UNPLAYABLE as a jungler. Since you are matched with new players, they do not understand how to bud good conps and more often than not you get players that try to share jungle outside of the buffs, which leads to losing gold oaks to your team, effectively starving you. You can’t even be mad at your team mates, because they are clearly not educated enough on how the jungle works and stuff and are just starting out. SEMC is pushing potential fans away with their casual MM which is one of if not the biggest clusterfrick of a match maker I have seen in ANY game with a playerbase that can support a decent match maker. I’d understand if VG was falling to the low thousands of players, but there are clearly enough players out there for casual to not be so awful.
I’m beginning to wonder, actually. 
I’m not intending to be a debbie downer here, but this feels like the 10th post about this same topic.
PSA: the casual MM system is inherently ‘flawed’ for a competitive experience. Know that before you start a casual match. When I play casual, I’m prepared for and expect literally anything from toxicity, AFK, wide gaps in skill play all the way to awesome games.
I don’t see the point in more complaints. It’s not going to change. It’s not designed to be competitive. I see nothing wrong with it. It’s labeled ‘casual’. Be casual about it
To play devil’s advocate: the casual matchmaker used to be a LOT better. The casual experience is pretty poor these days compared to “peak VG” in 2016-17, so for OG players, today’s casual mode pretty much sucks.
Also, it’s the Salt Mine – this is where people who feel like complaining to let off steam are supposed to go. So no big deal if it’s the 1st or the 50th post venting about the same thing.
Fair enough. You’re the boss! 
BIG understatement…
Being casual it’s not an excuse for it’s poor performance. I get that shouldn’t be like ranked and all that, but think of a new player coming to this game: you basically get destroy doing nothing match after match after match. With that there is no way he is staying. While the casual MM shouldn’t be as hard as in ranked, pairing people of all tiers with no control whatsoever isn’t a good idea.
I’ve tried bringing to the game no less than 6 friends, which isn’t that many, but this will give you an idea. None of them played more than 2 days. All of them said the same thing: it’s impossible, you get destroyed and you feel useless because you are paired with people much higher even in casual. The experience for new players it’s terrible, and without making new players stay, the game can’t survive. So yeah, the excuse of it being casual is true to a certain point, being casual doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
The experience newbies get from the game is really bad. They can only play casual or brawl modes, but if the main mode is 5v5, they are expected to play 5v5 casual, and the MM gives them a very bad opinion of the game.
MM is atrocius. Last 6 games in a row i played were awful. On my side gwen and kestrels who build nothing but tornado trigger, while on other side tier 9 players and duos.
I find ranked games relativaly fast never waiting more than 5 min and are mostly balanced. In casual due to people not picking heroes, declining or worse dodging( which is not rare) i wait same time ( around 1 to 5 min) yet you get worse mm results. They should fix casual mm and make it better as a priority.
100% agree. I should’ve clarified my post. I’m getting a little tired of veteran/skilled players complaining often. Not that I’m not sympathetic to the situation, it’s just that we know what’s up. We know it’s bad.
I agree with all your points about frustration for new players and that there should be some elo range it sticks to.
My proposal would be 4 tiers. For a party ranked match, you can’t be more than two tiers apart. Casual would be fine if a t4 was paired with a t8, and a t10 knows that they’ll get paired with no worse than a t6. The only problem then becomes what about players with no rank?
Is casual you shouldn’t get paired if more than 2 tiers of difference IMO. There is a huge gap between t8 and t10, and imagine a t6 gold getting paired against t10G! What I mean is: the gap between 2 tiers (6-8; 8-10…) is enough big to make it up to 4 tiers.
There’s no “unranked” any more. New players start at T4, more or less.
Not entirely true. What about the accounts that haven’t played a ranked match yet?
Actually, it IS entirely true. As I said, new players start at T4, give or take a bit based on their casual MMR.
You may be misled by the fact that the game shows players in their first ranked match as “unranked.” However, a player who unlocks ranked mode is automatically assigned an MMR around 1400 (T4 bronze), with the actual score varying based on their casual MMR.
A while back (years) it was talked on reddit about why new players no longer start off at t3 or t0 anymore.
I started at t2 and got up all the way to t10 I don’t see why they changed it but…
Your remark about the player base size got me thinking, so I checked Google Trends … and things certainly don’t look good:
VG’s not the only MOBA suffering from a decrease, but both AoV and ML continue to generate >40 times the interest that VG does:
In addition, there looks to have been a bit of an upswing in both of VG’s competitors over the past few months, while VG has continued to decline:
I guess Nat said it best:
Yeah I agree jungling is hard in 5v5 like Iam playing ranked 5v5 in mid tiers and I do a lot but it go for nothing , 3v3 more rewarding for good jungling strategies , while in 5v5 whatever you do they can counter , like while you helping one of the lanes pushing , the others getting down you win lane you lose two .
Casual is very bad for jungling because it’s like mid tiers but worst , it’s like when people tell you don’t roam in 3v3 , in 5v5 don’t roam or jungle .
Tried some ML, it also looks decent as AOV… nothing like the VG current state. I played VG for 3 hours from 00:00… only 3 games that lasted around 25m, you all can count how much I spend in que/declines/dodges… a lot of fun waiting, yeah. AOV/ML - instant match found and I can actually play the game with my limited free time. Instead I stayed up till 3am to try to play VG and tomorrow will be a zombie at work.
Oh, well, atleast I got a troll for good night. 
I mean, if you do move over to AoV, I just want to let you know that both @RiseChu (me lol) Hazel, Saw1 and some other forumers play it as well.
So add me if you do start to play AoV more 
Seriously the kind of fixes VG needs are SO obvious. They need to act on them fast cause the game is actually suffering right now because of all of this…I REALLY hope 4.3 fixes a lot of stuff. I was always optimistic, but SEMC keeps messing up