Posted 21 February 2013 - 12:20 PM

I wanted to just help clarify some points about the new match making system as there seems to be some confusion on these points:



Is the match maker taking weight class into account?



Yes the version currently live on production does take weight class into account. The way the match maker works it tries to group players within certain thresholds and grows those thresholds over time to ensure a match is made within currently a 2 minute time period.



These curves will likely see some tuning for both skill and weight as we monitor the data coming in and work to ensure more and more matches are created within good thresholds. This tuning will happen over the course of upcoming patches.



I'm still getting matches that seem unbalanced.



It will take time for the ratings to stabilize please bear in mind that this will likely happen over weeks not days. Also it's important to clarify that the system is only using your match history since we announced that we enabled it for pre-seeding. If you've been with us since closed beta your skill rating is essentially a few weeks old and only based on what you've done in that time. This is the only way to be fair to everyone.



Also currently after 2 minutes you may get an unbalanced match as the match maker increases the thresholds dramatically to ensure you get a match this is as designed to ensure that you don't wait longer than 2 minutes to find a match.



How does the match maker compose a teams Elo rating, is it average rating or closest to a target?



It's closest to a target value, so the match maker starts trying to make a match for an Elo of say 1300 and will pull in players to those teams closest to those values; however, as mentioned earlier within growing thresholds and those curves will be tuned. Currently it may be a bit 'sloppy' about how it's filling those buckets but over time it will be tuned to be much more precise.



We need to do this carefully over time as generally the cost of precision is time to find a match we want to slowly find a very nice balance between time to find a match and the number of matches that are correctly composed.



Can we expect match making to be tuned?



Yes as just stated we will monitor and tune over time to ensure it is working optimally and as everyone plays more games things will naturally settle out over time.



If your getting consistently hard or easy matches please bear with it while the system adjusts and know that we are monitoring and planning adjustments to ensure everyone gets fair matches.

