Activision Patent to Manipulate Matchmaking

General Discussion
141

What is so hard about that?
You just create a bunch of filters and run the MM through them. If no matches, you begin easing up the constraints of the filters or removing some of them (the server can do all that trial-and-error-readjusting in nano-seconds). It is only a matter of creating and combining filters really - including business-ones that will affect amongst other sales (and create an unbearable gaming experience over time).

I am a game programmer, although not specialized in MMs. But as a long-time player across multiple SR levels (from low Gold to low Diamond, even a brief stint in Silver when the MM was particularly nasty), I can tell you for certain, that something is wrong. As a high-Plat player with forays into Diamond, it feels completely off, if I can’t reliably win matches in low Gold.

Can you tell me who you are? You claim all this MM programming skill. For who? Are you a Blizzard employee out defending this crap?

Let the GM play 2-4 games in Bronze, and you will see him matched against one or more smurfs and his teammates dump in quality, until he is evened out. That will be repeated again and again, all the way up. Sure, he will climb over time, especially with that extreme a skill gap, but it will be a long and hard journey. That is how Blizzard’s MM creates “even matches”.

142

For sure this a dream for a total dishonest company… help some player to feel more good at playing cheating server side for them…

1 Like
143

Why do you think for so long they never nerfed Tracer or Genji…

Genji hasnt been substantially nerfed at all. But lets nerf all the stuns in the game because they’re just ever so slightly annoying

144

I’ll be dropping a million dollars on moira skins so I can instantly kill everyone with damage orb

:sunglasses:

2 Likes
145

That patent is for PvE. A lot of games have dynamic difficulty with PvE modes.

146

Nano seconds you say? Lets show you why matchmakers are not as simple as you think they are.

You have 12 people to get into a game, say, you have 1000 people queued, that means you have 9e+35 combinations… (well, actually more, if someone queues for more than one role) - on a 4gz processor, if doing all of the calculations for checking a combo only took one cycle, you would take 10e19 years, Or very roughly, one year for every single grain of sand in all of the worlds beaches.

What matchmakers are doing is using various shortcuts to cut down those possibilities, without throwing out good answers, that branch of computer science is specialized and hard.

Sure, it is easy to speed it up by orders of 1000 or more, but that isn’t enough, hell, it isn’t even close…

Yep, something is in Blizzards one. Mostly it has to do with unbalanced amounts of people in roles. As people end up queueing for longer, the “cost” of to put them in a match changes, so you end up trading off good matches for getting people into them who have been waiting too long.

Anyway, what looks like an easy thing is actually a crazy hard problem and FULL of tradeoffs.

I’m actually happy to talk shop on how we go about doing this, but, it isn’t NEARLY as easy as it sounds.

How does the matchmaker know if someone is smurfing?

147

dam reading this whole thread almost made me insane. the paranoia and possible manipulation of me playing a video game will make me feel like this dude from now on…

is somebody watching me!?!?

1 Like
148

It does, and very fast. It is quite good at finding out a player’s real MMR and will do it in only a few games.

149

That isn’t the matchmaker. That is something run before the matchmaker.
That is like saying the software you use to create your skins is game itself.

Matchmakers are pretty specific things. And saying “Oh it just knows” isn’t right.

Remember most of the smurfs throw, and it is again, hard to detect that.

150

It is none-the-less affecting the matchmaking. As I wrote here or in the other thread, there is probably so much crap going on in their MM, that the devs themselves have lost the big picture.

151

Sure, but don’t blame the matchmaker itself. It is given the MMRs, and makes matches based on that.

It gets to know the MMR, ping times to various locations, how long someone has been waiting for, which people are banned, which roles are being queued, and which places have servers available for a game to happen in.

That can easily happen. It is why I used constraint solvers for doing matchmaking, because it gets lets you build one in a way which makes it easy to see what is going on and to debug it.

However, it is STILL complex, and a pig to tune.

I can even say what things are set wrong in Blizzards one, and what tradeoffs it would cause.

But again, NONE of this area is easy, and people who just throw “oh, all you have to do is…” are usually VERY wrong.

There is a reason it is a specialized area. Throwing someone in the deep end, is like grabbing a javascript developer and saying “ok, you are making pixel shaders now” - (I was in a place where a company did that to some poor guy).

152

They can give it so many weights of different kinds (maybe a “smurf-multiplyer”, or what about a “toxicity-hell multiplyer” in a rage-inducing system?), that it is not even the real MMR anymore. Heck, in OW2 they can even put weights on you for not shopping if they want to.
You have alot of faith in this thing being fair.

153

Here is the big secret for matchmakers, they CAN’T feel fair. They straight up will NEVER feel fair.

The reason is a weird one, people expect to win 70% of their games, for it to feel fair.

Same brain thing as 70% of drivers think they are above average, so the first thing you need to know is, they WILL NOT and CAN NEVER feel fair.

So people will ALWAYS rage on a matchmaker which is fair, with all kinds of stuff where they say it isn’t, and it is rigged etc.

Always.

Blizzard one hasn’t been updated for the roles getting more and more unbalanced, which is honestly a problem.

154

That doesn’t explain why I as a near-Diamond player will have equally hard matches in low-Gold as in high-Plat. That is a huge discrepancy skill-wise. Up to 1000 SR.

1 Like
155

Oh, that is a different but also interesting problem.
I ran into the exact same thing.

So, here it is, you make plays, with certain expectations around your teammates. The game actually changes, and if you play LIKE a high ranked player, sometimes that hurts you more than it helps.

Lets take a classic overwatch example.

Low ranks Mercy players will CONSISTANLY pull off the most bat crazy Rezes you have ever seen, and they get value from them.

If, you as a high ranked Mercy player end up in the low ranks, and DON’T adjust your play, they can and will get more value that you will.

Because you WON’T go for the same plays as they do.

As a high ranked player, you will be expecting people to focus fire (they won’t), you will expect people to push when you or someone else makes an opening (they won’t).

It is a slightly different game, where different things get value, and you ABSOLUTELY have to adjust your style for it.

But since you have the skills, if you do, you will ruin them.

That being said, I still can’t get Mercy out of silver, I have to take some other support, and DPS my way up, even though I can play her in Plat without a problem. But I HAVE that option.

1 Like
156

oh sweet summer child

157

Interesting take, but seeing the discrepancy in player skill as you go lower, is just extreme. You see people who seemingly have no idea about the game, while at the same time you see players obviously alot better. I have tried sometimes winning games so massively (70%+ kill involvement) only to instantly be put up against multiple smurfs on the other team, and with so dumb team mates that it beggars belief.

As reasonable as your explanation sounds, it is obvious that something else is going on.
It can not be right in an MM that you have to tone down to climb.

158

Yeah, the big thing is they get a LOT less consistent. You will see the same player killing one day, and on drunk the next.

Not tone down, but play differently. I don’t think the matchmaker sets up vs smurfs, because if they were that easy to detect, Blizzard would just ban them.

I think the bigger thing is, there is a LOT of smurfs, and you, as a higher ranked player, are better at spotting them in low ranks, than the low ranked players are.

If you got rid of the smurfs the matchmaker would have a MUCH easier time of making good matches. If you got the queues more balanced it would have a HUGE impact as well.

But the matchmaker can’t know if someone is having a good or bad day, if they have a headache, if they are throwing, if they are going to play a hero they are not good at… etc etc etc… so there is a lot of randomness as well.

Anyway, you know how I was saying “matchmakers are hard to write?” rigged ones would be another level harder, for VERY dubious gains. It just isn’t worth it, even if you could make it work, which honestly, given how hard it is to get it to make good games…

159

They can’t ban them. They have been a heavy income stream for them, as they are the ones buying new accounts.
Also, they have said smurfing is not illegal - also, exactly as you say, how can they know if someone played drunk an entire weekend and dumped his account? Should he then not be allowed to play anymore?

And then there is the problem with account boosters.

By making these close-to-50/50 matches, you actually keep the smurfs lower for longer, which disrupts the lower games. A fair system (a dumb and blind system, based on SR without any analysis) would see them explode out instead.

As for boosters, there must be another way to deal with them than trash the MM.

160

There is something known as high-validity environment. A tennis player will with input get an exact result. The same with a chess player. If a tennis player’s strikes are off, he will immediately get the result (losing), and vice-versa.
That is a high-validity environment. What you put in, is what you get out.

I believe what frustrates alot of players in Overwatch, is that it is a low-validity environment. You can play perfectly and still lose. And in other instances from one match to the next go from 70% Elimination involvement to barely being able to get out of spawn the very next game.

This has IMO been a very big factor in people leaving in disgust, because they could not see any correlation between how they play and the result that came out of it.

IMO this low-validity environment has alot to do with the MM, and I fear it will get even worse in OW2 when they add shopping to the MM (giving whales an easier time, giving cheapscates a harder).

1 Like