Hi Everyone - We wanted to share an update on ongoing work that's underway to try and alleviate some of the matchmaking issues players are experiencing in less populated regions (specifically areas like Australia, NZ, Asia, India, and parts of South America).



Latency Tolerance Adjustment

On Wednesday, 9/5, the team deployed a configuration change to increase the latency tolerances for matchmade games. This change was made only to SOCIAL playlists for the time being. Now when matching, the latency tolerance increases over time, so players in low-population regions should give matchmaking a bit of extra time as MCC first tries to find games locally then eventually starts to fall back to other regions.



We've heard from some players that this change has resulted in them being able to get into matches - although it did take some time. Other players have reported that this either resulted in inconsistent success or didn't improve their personal situation at all.



A number of players on social and here in forums have asked for more information about the "latency tolerance", what this all means, and what else can be done. Here's some tech-talk direct from MCC Technical Director Greg Hermann:



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Currently in MCC we display ping times to all possible dedicated server regions. In practice, our builds are deployed to a subset of those regions due to availability. More specifically…



All regions: South Central US, North Central US, East US 2, Japan West, North Europe, West Europe, East Australia, Southeast Asia, Southeast Australia, South Brazil, West US, East US, Central US, East Japan, East Asia

Actual deployed regions: South Central US, North Central US, East US 2, Japan West, North Europe, West Europe, East Australia, Southeast Asia, Southeast Australia, South Brazil



The next MCC game update will filter the in-game ping list to display only the deployed regions. The information below is based on MCC’s deployed regions:



Game latency

We worked with our internal QA teams around latency tolerances for MCC’s game engines, and their general feedback is that we should try to stay at or under 100ms.

This also corresponds roughly to historical latency data / matchmaking tables from other Halo titles.



The Xbox Live latency rules we currently use base the allowable matchmaking datacenters on your lowest ping time. For example, in our office the lowest ping time I have is South US at 51ms.



The latency expansion rule is currently configured as:

60ms for 35 seconds

90ms for 10 seconds

120ms for 10 seconds

150ms beyond



Which for my connection will match these intervals: [51-111], then [51-141], then [51-171], then [51-201].

(For my local kit, this ultimately covers all possible dedicated server regions, but does require some waiting).



We recognize this expansion cycle, while following a more traditional pattern, takes time to expand and is suboptimal.



Based on player feedback we’re planning to convert our ping times into more of a ‘connection quality’ metric in our next update.

The allowable servers for a user will be { anything under 100ms } + { all servers up to your nearest high population server }



Where a high population server is currently defined as anything in the US and Europe.



For example, for these ping times:

East Australia:66, Southeast Australia:74, West Japan:174, Southeast Asia:217,South Central US:230, East US 2:260,North Central US:263,North Europe:308, South Brazil:343,West Europe:353



The allowable regions the user will match on will be (<100ms):

East Australia:66,Southeast Australia:74



But then now ALSO:

West Japan:174, Southeast Asia:217,South Central US:230



As ‘South Central US’ is tagged as a high population server.

This no longer requires lengthy expansion cycles, and should significantly reduce wait times for players in lower population regions.



This change has been given the thumbs up from Test and we hope to roll it out soon.



We also understand that some datacenters like West US could significantly improve the play experience for cross-continent matchmaking, and we’re working to get in there with MCC as soon as possible.