The matchmaker is one of the most important components of our game, existing since World of Tanks’ creation. It works with the vehicles that the player chooses and assembles the teams. Also the matchmaker fulfills other important tasks, including:

Selecting comparable and competitive teams

Selecting various types of vehicles for each battle

Maintaining map variety

The matchmaker’s primary goal is getting you into battle as quickly as possible. In 2010, this task was much easier than today. At that time there were far fewer players, especially at Tier IX and X, and only 3 nations. There were also significantly fewer tanks than today. In order to reduce the waiting time, the matchmaker could send vehicles to battle with a difference of five tiers, so Tier VI and X tanks could often be in the same battle. Naturally, this may seem a bit strange to you now.

Over time we encountered some festering problems which the matchmaker simply could not resolve, because the tools weren’t there in its current form. These issues were:

No restrictions on the number of vehicles on one team, depending on their class

So-called "fail Platoons" , consisting of vehicles that differ by more than three tiers

Few opponents of your Tier in battle. For example, there could be 13 Tier Xs but only 2 Tier VIII vehicles on the enemy team. Simply put, you just might have no real adversaries to realistically take on.

To solve these problems, it was necessary to fundamentally change the matchmaker and create a completely new architecture.

Update 9.18 And A Template System

In 2017, Update 9.18 was designed to solve these issues and to increase player comfort in battle. We introduced some restrictions: Platoons could only be single-tier and we also reduced the number of artillery to three per team. But most importantly, Update 9.18 brought with it a template system. These templates (the main ones are 3-5-7 and 5-10) are still in use today.

Overall, the game is now completely different. On the other hand, after the release of Update 9.18, we overlooked another crucial aspect of our game, the Queue.

What’s the Queue?

The queue represents a list of vehicles, which is filled in accordance with the players' choice. Once you've chosen a tank to roll out into battle, you immediately are placed on this list.

To put it simply, imagine that the queue is one big waiting room. It gathers vehicles, where they're waiting for the matchmaker to send them into battle. This happens when a sufficient number of vehicles of suitable tiers are assembled.

Queuing time depends on the number of players in the queue and the tiers of vehicles that they've chosen. The matchmaker also picks a template, sorts various classes of vehicles accordingly and selects a random map.