Match Fairness Update
by JR Cook - 8 years ago show comments
Community Manager Spyrian took to the official forums today to share some thoughts on the current state of Matchmaking, as well as some changes that we might expect in the future. His post was #549 in an ongoing thread regarding Match Fairness, so it isn’t the easiest thing to find. Have no fear, Blizzpro has you covered, and the entire post can be found at the end of this article.
Here are some of the highlights:
Pre-made Parties vs Solo Players: They will continue to monitor this, and will need to collect additional data before making any changes. They are looking at the coordination advantage that being in a party provides, as well as the team synergy that a pre-made party often has compared to a team of solo queue players. I think this second point is often overlooked when people talk about pre-mades versus solo players, so it is good to hear that it is on their radar.
One-sided Matchups and Unskilled Play: Despite the improvements, they are aware that one sided matches can still occur. They will continue to fine tune the Matchmaking process, for ranked play in particular. They also point out that there is no way for the Matchmaking system to predict when someone is going to play poorly, and that some of what are perceived as matchmaking issues are just players have a bad game, and not playing up to their MMR.
Long Queue Times: Longer queue times are often the result of players attempting to play a Hero who is in high demand at the moment. A good example being Lunara, or any other new Hero, during release week. They are working on ways to indicate when a Hero is very popular in the queue, so that players can consider playing a different Hero if they are looking for faster queue times.
The Matchmaking changes are ongoing, and they continue to monitor feedback from the community. If encounter any issues with the Matchmaking system feel free to share your experience in the tread linked below.
Here are some of the most common report types and points of feedback that we’re receiving, as well as some of our current thoughts on each:
Pre-made Parties vs. Solo Players
- Coordination advantage – We’re planning to make additional adjustments in this area, and one of the avenues we’re exploring right now would cause the matchmaker to further prefer matching parties of similar size. While this will help to limit matching solo players against large parties, it wouldn’t completely prevent these situations if the system determines the match to be acceptable. While matching against a full party as a team of solo players can be challenging, solo and duo-queuing players can and do beat larger parties regularly, despite the slight coordination advantage, and we’re not planning to remove the possibility to match against four and five-player parties from Quick Match right now.Before we make any changes, we will first need more time to collect match data and continue testing internally so we can be sure that anything we implement will achieve the results we’re looking for.
- Coordinated team compositions – Large parties in Quick Match are able to coordinate their hero picks, which can be frustrating for solo players who get matched against them. While this primarily occurs with full parties, we’re aware that this is a point of concern for some players. We’re currently investigating changes that will help limit certain types of team compositions from being formed when solo players are matched into a team. Something to keep in mind is that Quick Match is meant to offer players a wide variety of hero picks and team compositions. Just about anything can happen in this mode, and players who are looking for team compositions that follow the competitive metagame more regularly may want to queue for Hero League as an alternative.
One-sided Matchups and Unskilled Play
- One-sided matchups – We are aware that one-sided matches can still occur, and while we haven’t completely eliminated the matchmaker’s ability to put a game together as quickly as possible after a long wait in queue, we have made vast improvements in this area. We’ll continue to tune the MMR spread across the players in a game, and will be focusing on ranked play in particular.
- Unskilled Play – While players are rated and matched for games based on their skill levels, it is not possible for the matchmaking system to predict how a player will perform in their next game. While we are looking for ways to further tighten up MMR in the future, it is also important to keep in mind that a teammate may be tired, sick, or just having a rough day, and any number of factors like these can contribute to poor performance in-game.
Long Queue Times
We’re still reviewing queue times and investigating ways that we can potentially help to reduce waits without sacrificing match quality.
- New hero releases – Many reports of very long queue times occurred on, or shortly after, Lunara’s release day. It’s important to note that when a new hero is released, the majority of players are usually attempting to queue as that new hero. When this happens, queue times will increase, causing the matchmaker to begin relaxing its rules, which leads to lower quality games. We are discussing ways that we might be able to better indicate when a certain hero is very popular in queue, to help players see that they can get a quicker match by selecting another hero.
We are still actively reviewing your reports, reading your feedback, and examining internal data after making our first round of matchmaking improvements. We knew that many of the items discussed above would not be entirely solved with the first phase of matchmaking changes, and we’re aware that some of you are still experiencing a few pain points with the matchmaker, but we do have a strategy in place as we move toward phase two. While our second round of improvements is on the way, we want to collect more feedback and data before we solidify our plans, and will have additional information about the next phase in the near future.
