And let me quote the reply.
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?