It makes no sense. It seems fully random at large.
3 - 8 players shouldn’t be paired against 100 - 20 players
0 - 0 players shouldn’t face top 50 players right of the bat
0 - 3 people shouldn’t face 4600 elo players
4500 players shouldn’t face the folks as Foggy and Hitman
Games shouldn’t have >120 ms
It shouldn’t match you against the same player 10 times in a row
3on3 and 4on4 AT queues can easily take 15 minutes per game
abundance of maphackers on the ladder…
Only about 10% of my games are close games. The rest are stomps in which I totally own the other, or totally get owned. These games are not fun for either side…
You don’t base match making on win records. You base it on ratings. Someone who is like 8-0 really hasn’t played enough games yet to say that they are super good. Maybe the matchmaking simply played out favorable for them.
Even if you match someone against an unusually high level player, the actual consequences of this are small. You will lose less MMR and they will get little out of it.
As for ping, that’s not a matchmaking issue, it’s a “there’s only matchmaking servers in five locations in the world” issue. We actually gained two servers in the 2.0 update, so pings are averaging out to be slightly better than they used to be.
Side effect of not enough players in queue.
In fact, most of this happens because of not enough players in queue. The system doesn’t want players to wait way too long for the “perfect” match, so as time passes, requirements are loosened, because a questionable game is still better than no game at all.
So answer us this: How long are you willing to wait for the sake of match quality? Three minutes? five? ten? Most people don’t like waiting more than a few minutes. But if you and everyone else comes here and says they’re okay with it, then I would support a suggestion that the system take longer before creating less ideal matches.
I don’t care how they do it. Result is that matches really one sided. I’m and end user, I care about the result and experience. Not about how they build the road to rome.
someone who is like 8-0 really hasn’t played enough games yet to say that they are super good.
They have sufficient games to know not to be paired against a 1 - 3 player. Equally a 0 - 0 shouldn’t statistically be matched with a 8 - 0 players. This happens on a structural basis.
Maybe the matchmaking simply played out favorable for them.
That is what should be an outlier, not the MO. I’m not talking anekdotes. I’m talking large numbers.
Even if you match someone against an unusually high level player, the actual consequences of this are small. You will lose less MMR and they will get little out of it.
Not what I am addressing. My issue lies with the experience of the game. Not the math that is done once the match is completed.
As for ping, that’s not a matchmaking issue, it’s a “there’s only matchmaking servers in five locations in the world” issue.
It is, it shouldn’t put me on 360 ms servers to begin with. Its market standard to have more servers, or disallow such idiocrasy. Servers that are not in China cost less than pocket change (I know you are going to take this literally and quantify it. Don’t)
Side effect of not enough players in queue.
No it isn’t. It can perfectly put me in queue 30 seconds instead of 3. Equally W3C could arrange this with a smaller player pool. This is hardly a problem in other RTS games with non excessively larger player pools. I don’t get why every game and platform can avoid this issue, except reforged.
Your experience is that you lost. You think you shouldn’t have and now you try to look for reasons why you did. Some of those reasons might be more valid than others.
Why not? Knowing how it works is only going to improve your experience by giving you context, which helps you avoid frustration if things don’t go your way.
Like he said, the game does not match you based on your win/loss ratios. That count is irrelevant. All it needs is the invisible number that determines how skilled the system thinks you are.
There’s nothing preventing the system from matching you up in servers with 360 ping because there is no setting for it. As for server costs… You really don’t know how Activision operates, do you? They wouldn’t care if the servers themselves were 20 cents a month, their budget for the game’s upkeep is that small.
Says who? The system waits for you to be matched with a player around your level of skill. If it doesn’t find someone within a certain timeframe, it widens the gap until it eventually finds a match. It could be someone way above/below your skill level or it might just happen that someone around your level started queuing. The end result is the same - you getting into a match. What happens after that is up to you and your opponent.
Well you ought to start caring more about that, because that’s what matters.
When you are a brand new, unknown player, there are only a few options.
Restrict matching to only other new players (effectively, this is based on win record). This limits the avialable player pool right off the bat, but comparing two unknowns is going to produce just as unpredictable results as comparing someone with an established record to someone with no record, as they could just as easily be an old school player who just came back or any number of other reasons why they might have no record (new/smurf account, etc).
Base all matches on MMR. How they get to that MMR is irrelevant. Whether they crushed 3 ppl or got crushed themselves, each game results in a better-informed rating. Over time , match quality improves as they gradually move towards their expected rating, but early matches can be unpredictable, this is true.
I’ll take option 2 over option 1, personally. Basing matching off of rating is logical and sensible and what most games do.
THe only issue I have is wether or not the egregious flaws pre 2.0 have been improved in any way. The previous system was heavily biased in team games towards puting lower MMRs on one team and higher MMRs on the other, rather than balancing them. Even if the average MMR of all the palyers is close, matches were effectively being straight up rigged by the system because they were not correctly sorted into two teams with similar averages. From what I’ve seen this doesn’t happen any more, or at least not nearly as much.
No, they really haven’t. 8 games is not a sufficent sample size, and these two players could still have MMRs close enough to get matched together. You cannot use win records for matching for multiple reasons. somebody could go 8-0 but they could easily have gotten lucky and have been the player with the higher MMR of the two every time (even though the MMRs may have been close.
You DO NOT have enough data in this situation. You can invent a bunch of win record situations if you like but win record by itself is not a good matchmaking metric and basically no game uses win record alone to determine matching. Most MOBAs still use a hidden MMR value even in non-competitive modes to facilitate matching players of similar skill.
Matchmaking is global, because the game community isn’t large enough to seperate players by region. Blizzard (or whoever) decided that it was better to limit wait times in this situation than wait potentially forever for optimal match quality. If War3 was restricted by region, in particular people in southeast Asia (the KR server) would likely be unable to play pretty much at all since there are comparatively few players there. This would force them to connect to other gateways to play and then you have the same problem you had before- the ping is high because someone in the game is far away. If two options are equally bad from a functional standpoint, I’ll take the one that’s less of an inconvenience (i.e. global matchmaking vs forcing people in other regions to switch gateways to be able to play- the end result is the same either way)
I’ve asked before: Just how long are you willing to wait to maximize match quality? You’ll likely find most people are not willing to wait as long as you probably are and would rather just play than fuss over wins and losses.
Now, if they didn’t completely botch the original launch of Reforged, we might not have this problem, at least not to the same degree. But they did, so we have to work with the available playerbase.
One of the problems here is you’re only considering how things affect you personally. The world doesn’t revolve around you and there are other people who want to play this game too. Should they have to wait forever so Blizzard can make Kiezel’s game experience better? Or should Blizzard balance the needs of every player so that people are at least able to enjoy the game to some degree?
In a perfect world, they would activate many more servers in different locations to minimize ping differences based on the locations of all the players matched together for a game, but the world isn’t perfect and I’m honestly amazed we gained 2 servers with version 2.0. I’m amazed they were willing to spend even one more dollar on server infrastructure considering the size of the playerbase.
No my experience is that pala rifle is dominating, regardless if I play it, or play against it. Or friends do that. Case: Starbuck vs Happy. But I know more people who have broken their PR on ELO just by switching to human and playing pala rifle.
No I don’t. I use a car. Doesn’t mean I know how everything works. That is up the the car dealer and repairshop. Same for the game. I want equal matched games. Not whatever the F they are currently doing to pair people against each other. If they do it based on elo, that is fine. then the conclusion is simply that elo calculation is very poor, as we empirically see the games are just skewed one way or the other.
Well you really should try to, at least. Knowing stuff about your car makes it easier to know what to look for at the car dealership and describe the problem to your repairshop so they get the job done quicker and save you money.
What are you and Captain talking about? The matchmaking is really bad. The worst players always get matched with other bad players, and the best players are together 80% of the time. What are you talking about? Just because he complains doesn’t mean he’s bad. For 1v1, the matchmaking is easy, but for 4v4 or 3v3, it makes no sense. It feels like you have no problem at all. The matchmaking is broken. I have the same problem as him, and many others do too, except for you two. You never have the same problem that others have. You guys are so unique. Can you tell me where you downloaded the game? Seems like we’re not playing the same game.
It isn’t dominating at all. You’re just not very good at the game. If you see it a lot that really just says its the most viable strat- but that doesn’t make it the only one nor does that mean it’s overpowered. It more likely means “this is what we have to do to even have a chance.”
I don’t usually cite high level statistics because I personally believe all levels of play should be looked at for balancing. But anything above the lowest tiers of play, the Human race is underperforming, with around a 47% win rate at high levels of play. At lower levels, it’s right around 50%, which is where it should be. If it was “overpowered” we’d be seeing win rates noticably higher than 50% but we’re not.
Regardless, this thread is about matchmaking so I’m not sure why you’re trying to merge the balance thread into this one.
I didn’t say it was “good.” But the OP is basing / thinks matching should be based on win records and not a rating system, which is a terrible idea.
TL;DR: Yes, matchmaking should be better, but the OP does not have the solution. What we have here is an armchair game designer who’s never actually worked on a video game and doesn’t understand how these systems actually work.
You literally can’t know everything in todays society. You also don’t use trains as you don’t know how they work? Phones? Airplanes? central heating? -MEDICATION-?
We live in the information age. Educating yourself in topics to at least a fundamental level is easier than ever.
…I mean, unless you live in somewhere like Africa. Or a war-torn country. Or a dictatorship.
You get what I mean though.
Those are essentials and a bad comparison. It also doesn’t disprove my point. That being said, I do admit I should have added a couple of words to the end of that first sentence (Go read it again if you want to.)
I would agree in certain circumstances, but not here. Seems they can’t a post out without insults. It’s part of their MO, and that’s a credibility problem.
Edit: The convo I was replying to was removed. So pay no mind.
I originally had a bit longer of a comment written out but then I saw the mods deleting this off-topic conversation. In the spirit of their efforts, I’ll admit you do have a point on that front in some respects. That said, we should leave this discussion for another thread where it’s better suited, Whisper.
Yeah, but even though they say they fixed the matchmaking, the MMR is still broken. Some pro players have an MMR of 3400, while I have 3900, even though I should be at 2800. The MMR system has been messed up since version 2.0, and now the game is even worse.
The game starts too fast before you can check people’s ratings or levels. Players keep leaving, and version 2.001 is terrible. The level system is harder now, and the game just keeps getting more broken. Haha!