(Edited to provide better data. Original post content is below the line.)
I played 18 games of Yeti Hunt in a row, without ever manually requeueing, selecting “Prefer Yeti” at the beginning. I didn’t get the Yeti a single time during those 18 games, but other players were clearly getting the “Prefer Yeti” behavior. (I don’t know, of course, whether they selected “Prefer Yeti” or not.) I tracked all of the players in my 18 matches, only 7 of whom ever played the Yeti:
| game | current yeti | other yeti players in lobby |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A | B |
| 2 | B | - |
| 3 | C | - |
| 4 | C | - |
| 5 | C | - |
| 6 | C | - |
| 7 | D | C |
| 8 | D | C |
| 9 | D | C |
| 10 | D | - |
| 11 | E | D, F |
| 12 | F | D |
| 13 | F | D |
| 14 | G | F |
| 15 | G | F |
| 16 | F | G |
| 17 | F | - |
| 18 | F | - |
Of these, it seems like players C, D, F, G all have the “Prefer Yeti” behavior active. When none of them is in lobby, the Yeti changes every game. When only one of them is in the lobby, they get Yeti up to 4 times in a row. When there are two in the lobby, and one has gotten the Yeti several times already, the new “Prefer Yeti” player gets Yeti several times. When there are two in the lobby with a similar number of Yeti games thus far, the Yeti swaps back-and-forth every 2 games or so.
Through all of this, I never get the Yeti once, which strongly suggests that my actual queue state is “Prefer Hunter”, despite the fact that I selected “Prefer Yeti” when I queued. If I had been assigned correctly as “Prefer Yeti”, then I think I would have been alternating Yeti games with these other players. In my less-well-documented report of games from the original post (below), the two Yeti games came early on and with several Hunter games in between. I think that this happened because, at the time, every player in the lobby was assigned “Prefer Hunter”.
I don’t know why I’m getting “Prefer Hunter” behavior, and I don’t know whether anyone else is able to intentionally choose “Prefer Yeti”. But there is definitely a bug here. Even if everyone had an equal chance of being the Yeti each round, the likelihood that I go 18 matches without getting Yeti is < 4%.
(Original post)
I’ve just finished playing 12 or 13 matches of Yeti Hunter, with “Prefer Yeti” selected each time, but I only got to play the Yeti twice. That’s a rate of 1/6 (at best), which is what I would expect if everyone in the lobby had selected “Prefer Yeti”, which is theoretically possible.
However, in the 10-11 matches in which I was assigned to be a Hunter, I only had 4-5 unique Yetis. One player was the Yeti 4 times in a row, another was the Yeti 3 times in a row, and the remainder had 1-2 games each as the Yeti. My understanding of how the matchmaking is supposed to work is that the more matches you’ve played with your non-preferred role, the higher chance you’re supposed to have of getting your preferred role. If this is true, then even if those other players also have “Prefer Yeti” set, why are some of them getting Yeti over and over again when there are other players in the lobby who also want to play Yeti?
Furthermore, I have reason to suspect that at least 2 of the Yeti players did not actually want to be on the Yeti. One player, who played as the Yeti twice in a row, spent both of their Yeti matches dance-emoting and waving at us, standing still in the middle of the map, with the result that they died extremely quickly (so quickly that we got 0 XP for the match). That seemed obviously intentional and like a pretty clear communication that that player didn’t want to play the Yeti. Also, the player who got the Yeti 4 times in a row, after losing the first 3 games pretty badly, left fairly shortly into the 4th game – again, this seems like behavior that might come from being frustrated at being repeatedly placed in an unwanted role.
It is perhaps worth noting that my Nepal Village loading screen always says “Yeti Hunter (Prefer Hunter)”, even when I select “Prefer Yeti”. (The green “searching for game” box does correctly say “Yeti Hunter (Prefer Yeti)”.) This might just be a copy bug, but the fact that I’m rarely getting to play the Yeti while other players are getting the role many times in a row makes me suspect that I might be getting “Prefer Hunter” logic, despite my selected preference.