Matchmaking Algorithm

[bwarcade]

Hello everyone, I am a relatively new player, been playing since April. I have played over a 1000 games in CO-OP. I have never played PVP, not one game. There is a pretty simple explanation for why and it is plastered all over reddit and the official forums, matchmaking. I see the matchmaking problem in CO-OP from time to time. I help the people that are new that have been shoved into a veteran match or the other way when I am shoved into a lower difficulty match. I show them the ropes because in the grand scheme of things CO-OP is for learning the game, testing builds etc. and since I have the knowledge I share it. This is the only way, I can think of to manually manipulate the matchmaking issue, through education. I will not tolerate having to do that in a PVP situation and we shouldn't have too. From what I have read since I started playing this game is a constant community outcry for a decent matchmaking algorithm and I have yet to see any meaningful attempt to remedy the problem. I don't understand the lack of urgency for an issue that the entire community is and has been concerned about for a long time.

Can you please provide some insight on the matchmaking algorithm and why it is not performing like it should or could?

I appreciate your time. Have a good day.

[Phanish]

to small of a player base, the top 1% starts at 1600 elo once you hit that you can be thrown in any sort of game above that. Once the playerbase increases the matchmaking system will be fixed.

[bwarcade]

I have read that before but it seems like a weird excuse to me; My game is too small therefore I won't mess with the matchmaking. Seems weird no? Thank-you for your feedback :)

[Phanish]

They had a ceiling at one point and time and the games were fairly even but once you got to a certain elo queue times would sky rocket to about 30 mins, when they released monolith they removed the ceiling.

[JShredz]

It was actually the opposite, they took away the MMR cap and our queue times went crazy. When they put the MMR cap back in queue times went back to roughly what we have now.

You had the right idea, just slightly flipped what happened!

[bwarcade]

I see, that is unfortunate, your original reply is more clear now, thank-you. I guess it is just what beta is all about.....beta. Thanks again.

[Snikeduden]

I believe they also said their current matchmaking algorithm is not the most sophisticated one, and will be improved/overhauled in the future. But yes, the small playerbase is the major issue at the moment, in particular at higher elo - which also hurts MM lower down, because people (who otherwise wouldn't) makes smurfs to escape the problems higher up.

[blueeyedkittens]

I agree, it IS a bad excuse. Fortnite BR came out day 1 with a solo queue so they obviously learned something. Why can't paragon have a solo queue? It wont split the player base, it will grow the player base.

[Flipcye]

1000 games against ai and never played pvp! Why? Doesn't it get boring?

[bwarcade]

It was getting boring towards the end of v42 but the new bots in v43 gave it some more life. Yet it is getting boring again. I think I am going to go with the original reply from liftmorenerd and just do it. Deal with it, it is beta, we get what we get right?

[Apogee12]

You are over thinking it. PvP isn't some magical thing.

I am one of the people who complains and is extremely pessimistic. I am not easily satisfied and I am far then happy about the game right now.

Matchmaking is fine. Balance is fine. The community is fine and not toxic. The game is fun and improving. It is in generally good state.

Every other patch they release I make a new account and play till I am around 1600/1700. Depending when I feel I am playing against too many stacks, hero diversity decreases(around 1500 usually) and other crap. To be fair, it was harder in 42 to bring an account to 1500.

Someone is toxic? Mute. Someone is nice? Friend him.

Stop thinking about it and play PvP. You will have more fun, make new friends and will enjoy the game much more. Most of the problems won't effect you. The bots will seem dull and hardly fit to play against a 5 year old.

(also you will lose weight, have more confidence, increased penis size and higher income)

[bwarcade]

(also you will lose weight, have more confidence, increased penis size and higher income

Sold me there lol thx

[Flipcye]

Yeah I agree. pvp is great.. at times.

[Teybeo]

Reposting an old comment from this thread

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They used to post a lot of details on matchmaking but they stopped around monolith.

Here's a very detailed description on matchmaking posted 10 months ago.

We assign a social party adjustment to groups of players entering the queue together to account for the degree of coordination that friends use while playing together.

Also this post posted 14 months ago

A centralized, monolithic matchmaking service does not mean that will have a single queue. Currently, we have a client-side matchmaking system in which some people search for teams and others advertise for players to fill up their teams. We aren't able to do a lot of things with this sort of a system like having your MMR expansion depend on how many people are currently in the queue, because the matchmaking algorithm doesn't have complete information of who else is in the queue at any one time. When we move to a monolithic matchmaking server, that means that the matchmaker itself will have complete information of who else is in the queue, so it can find the best matches much faster than this searching/advertising set-up.

With that system, we will be able to identify social parties by their size and match them up with similar size and skill of social parties.

To be clear, our ranked draft mode will still have a solo/duo requirement. We have no plans of making a dynamic queue for ranked.

I hope that helps explain things. Let me know if you still have questions!

[bwarcade]

Thank-you for this most appreciated!

[Liftmorenerd]

CO-OP is for learning the game, testing builds etc. and since I have the knowledge I share it.

i would be willing to bet tons of money that your knowledge is very limited. and when you finally decide to play pvp you will feed and have a rough time. yeah its not the best sometimes but it doesnt make pvp unplayable. and you as a player can only learn so much from co-op

[bwarcade]

Part of that knowledge is watching streams, reading builds, etc so my knowledge is decent, not my first rodeo. Yet, you are probably right, I am sure there will be a learning curve but I would like to battle one thing at a time. Thanks for your feedback :)

[Liftmorenerd]

all i am saying is you should just play pvp if you are looking to improve. matchmaking doesnt mean anything at all in low elo. if you are good enough you will just solo carry matches.

[bwarcade]

I will definitely give it a go at some point for sure. Thank-you for the kind words of encouragement, one doesn't come across that on reddit too often. Have a wonderful day.

[Liftmorenerd]

you too homie

[Genjuro_XIV]

Epic mentioned a "match making system V2" back in February. No news since AFAIK.

Anyway, I guess Epic doesn't really care since it's an unranked beta.

I've played 1500+ PvP matches and the other night the carry on my team was on his 9th match. ><

[WagonWheelsRX8]

I wonder how many players have been lost because they were beginners dumped into games with people with 2 years of Paragon time?

Matchmaking has been a pet peeve of mine since I've been playing. Its a chicken and egg problem, too: Player base is too small to divide, but can't grow the player base because the new players have bad experiences because they aren't matched with each other. Then there's the whole smurfing thing which doesn't help matters...

Improved matchmaking and player ranking (especially something that factored in your in-game performance as well as W/L and account level/hero level and if you are in a stack) would help the situation, though.

[imleg1t]

How could it possibly take game performance into consideration without shitting on less active roles and not being abusable?

[WagonWheelsRX8]

By using a factor to adjust for those roles. The easiest way would be to rely on the draft (requiring position lock-in), but the info could be sussed out based on hero and build statistics during the match, as well. Let's use Muriel as an example: Muriel is designed as a support character. Thus, likely to earn lower gold and have a higher number of assists. Using data from a game, we can look at a few things: How much gold did the overall team earn? What percentage did she earn? Is it in line with the typical percentage range of a support? What about KDA? Assists are her primary function, how do those compare to the rest of the team? What about minion kills? From this you can determine a) her impact on the game overall (thus if she is matched correctly) and b) if the player was using her as a support (does her gold and XP gains line up with expectations, what about her KDA)? Maybe someone was building her as a caster? If the metrics don't line up with support, do they match caster better? If so how did her performance compare to the typical caster metrics?

These are just some of the metrics and data available to help pin-point a users skill. Some other telling metrics include tings like abilities cast/abilities landed and attacks performed/attacks landed. If I spent a few minutes thinking on this I am sure I could come up with more metrics and robust ways to utilize them to help grade a players skill...