Matchmaking Settings Updates
As many of you have noticed, we’ve made a few matchmaking changes lately that are already live as we try them out.
Letting Matches Start Even if They Aren’t Full
There’s an ongoing issue that randomly drops players after a full match is found. This can result in players waiting awhile for that missing slot to get refilled. We are still searching for the main cause of this drop, but to alleviate the issue in the meantime, we’ve allowed matches to start without being full in several playlists. Currently, any playlist with 10 or more players in Social can start down 1-2 players. This has been resulting in overall faster matchmaking so far.
Team Balance Check Adjustments
Before allowing a match to happen, there is a check that makes sure that the teams are balanceable into reasonably fair matches. In the past, it has prevented matches if the best balance possible resulted in worse than a 40% chance for one team to win. The main reason being it’s not fair to make matches much worse than that.
Since then, we have analyzed player behavior and observed that there are different fairness tolerances per playlist. So we went through each playlist and adjusted the requirement based on how players react in that playlist. The result is that with only one exception, we were able to widen the fairness tolerance, resulting in faster and more inclusive matchmaking. The exception was Elimination which stayed the same as before because its players are more sensitive to the fairness gap.
In addition, we noticed although tolerance decreases quickly as fairness goes down, in some Social playlists, it eventually levels off to a reasonable level. In those playlists, we now allow the team balance check to relax after a certain point. At that time, players and FireTeams that have been waiting awhile will match with the best set of players possible that are still searching and start the match. This affects most playlists in Social except for Quick Play. Other lists should now have near guaranteed shorter wait times.
All these changes are now live, and we will be monitoring the results of the changes carefully and may make further tweaks in the future.
As many of you have noticed, we’ve made a few matchmaking changes lately that are already live as we try them out.
Letting Matches Start Even if They Aren’t Full
There’s an ongoing issue that randomly drops players after a full match is found. This can result in players waiting awhile for that missing slot to get refilled. We are still searching for the main cause of this drop, but to alleviate the issue in the meantime, we’ve allowed matches to start without being full in several playlists. Currently, any playlist with 10 or more players in Social can start down 1-2 players. This has been resulting in overall faster matchmaking so far.
Team Balance Check Adjustments
Before allowing a match to happen, there is a check that makes sure that the teams are balanceable into reasonably fair matches. In the past, it has prevented matches if the best balance possible resulted in worse than a 40% chance for one team to win. The main reason being it’s not fair to make matches much worse than that.
Since then, we have analyzed player behavior and observed that there are different fairness tolerances per playlist. So we went through each playlist and adjusted the requirement based on how players react in that playlist. The result is that with only one exception, we were able to widen the fairness tolerance, resulting in faster and more inclusive matchmaking. The exception was Elimination which stayed the same as before because its players are more sensitive to the fairness gap.
In addition, we noticed although tolerance decreases quickly as fairness goes down, in some Social playlists, it eventually levels off to a reasonable level. In those playlists, we now allow the team balance check to relax after a certain point. At that time, players and FireTeams that have been waiting awhile will match with the best set of players possible that are still searching and start the match. This affects most playlists in Social except for Quick Play. Other lists should now have near guaranteed shorter wait times.
All these changes are now live, and we will be monitoring the results of the changes carefully and may make further tweaks in the future.
