Heavy Aim Update



Barring any unexpected complications, we are planning to release the fix we’ve discussed recently that addresses one form of “heavy aim” tomorrow (5/31).



EDIT: Since this will get asked a lot. We have a fix for one issue that can definitely make aiming feel bad when it happens. We haven't found any other issues at this time that can cause "heavy aim," but we don't want to claim all "heavy aiming" issues are totally gone forever. We're going to be keeping an eye on how much the issue resolves itself in the wild first.



Party Restrictions Update

I have some good news and some bad news.



The bad news is that although the update that gives us the ideal party solution is moving along steadily, it will still take quite some time to finish.



The good news is, we’re putting in a temporary stopgap to tide us over until the more intelligent solution is ready. It’s still another month or so off, so don’t @ me about it yet. But it’s coming.



This stopgap is like the classic solution. We will try to match full parties only against other full parties. It's a bit inefficient in that there are plenty of full parties that are terrible and don't need to match against other parties, and those parties will now wait a little longer and get slightly worse matches. But it should be helpful to non-full parties while we finish the ideal solution.





Does blocking players prevent me from matchmaking with them?



Some of you playing Warzone Warlords this weekend got the impression that players were blocking you so they didn’t have to matchmake against a hard team. I was pretty sure we weren’t doing anything with those blocks in matchmaking because I have ample evidence that blocked players DO match each other.



I was wrong, and I was also right. I had to do some digging, but it turns out there’s a switch that enables / disables honoring blocking in matchmaking per playlist. This switch is not explicitly a “blocking” feature, but is tied to a different set of usually unrelated options. This made it a bit tricky to track down.



It turns out that for Warlords, the switch was indeed set to not matchmake players with those they have blocked.



In Ranked playlists, though, this feature is not enabled, and blocking has zero effect on matchmaking in Ranked.



I don’t like this feature because it allows dodging, and usually just makes matchmaking worse, especially in more niche playlists.



Since it’s a switch we should be able to turn on and off, I am going to look into making sure it is off at least for playlists like Warlords.



In theory, it’s not terrible for healthy social playlists, but shouldn’t be used for Ranked or more Competitive lists like Warlords.



Thanks for the feedback.