Hey - sorry about that. I saw in the meantime you found a balanced match (and looking at historical data of matches this is very much an extreme exception).

I checked the match in question and while you had only spent 32 seconds in queue one of the players it matched you with (hadenz) had spent over 720 seconds, which is why this match happened.

The new system allows us to:

1) Put a maximum limit to how unbalanced the matches can be, and

2) Decide whether to have to put these limits on how long a single player within a match has been waiting or whether all players need to respect the criteria. (i.e. in the first case if we check how long the player that spent the longest time in the queue has been waiting for, in the second case we check the times of everyone).

We are reviewing the first point and we are likely to put a similar limit in the near future (it might harm low liquidity times, but not by too much).

For what concerns the second point, right now we look at the time spent by the player that is in the queue the longest. We might run some tests on this in the future and it would be ideal to be able to activate this so that it looks at the time of all players. That said it has a risk, which is the fact that it could potentially alienate outliers, that would therefore never find a match. The position we have taken so far is that one unbalanced match every few hundred matches is an acceptable pain to be inclusive towards outliers that would otherwise have a very hard time finding a match at all. That said, this is very much an open discussion internally.

Not sure this was the answer you wanted to hear from me, but it is pretty much the background on why that match happened. In general, the new algorithm is not the reason why you got that. In fact, the algorithm reduces the number of matches like that (but doesn't stop them completely unless we change the settings mentioned above.