Menke Meddling



We have some new updates trickling in from Xbox Live that let us improve matchmaking.

The first is live now, and allows us to expand our searches for up to 10 minutes, instead of only 2.5. We currently time out our searches at 5 minutes though, so in practice, there’s still a 5-minute max for now. The main difference is we can expand search rules during the entire 5 minutes, instead of only half of it. For example, before this change, we could only expand the allowable skill gap for 2.5 minutes, and then after that rely on a set hard threshold that could no longer expand. Now, we can potentially continue expanding the allowable skill gap over the full 5 minutes, resulting in tighter matches.

This also means we can extend the amount of time we try and pair full fireteams with only other full fireteams. We tested this over the weekend at the full 5-minute mark. We may back off a minute on this to give a small window of time during which full fireteams can match with non-full fireteams so people wait a little less than now.

The second feature we are waiting on isn’t live yet, but it will make a larger difference once it is. This feature is a bit more complicated to explain. The short answer is, we can make matchmaking and team balancing much tighter when there are fireteams involved than we can today. Note: this is NOT the feature I’ve discussed the past that allows us to measure the skills of fireteams better, that one isn’t coming soon. This is purely a matchmaking improvement and not part of the skill system.

To understand the second feature requires a little more understanding of how the matchmaker currently works on skill. Today, the matchmaker looks at the average MMR of the fireteam you are in --- or just your solo MMR if you are alone, and only allows you to match within a set gap from that value. This means, if you are, e.g., a Silver player in HCS, you generally only see Bronze, Silver, and Gold players in your matches.

This works great if everyone is queuing alone. It’s OK if there are a few solo Gold players in a mostly Silver match because they will get evenly balanced across the teams by the team balancer. However, if there’s a full Fireteam of 4 Gold players, the matchmaker currently doesn’t consider the fact that they can’t get split up. Instead, it can potentially match 4 Golds vs. 4 Silvers. This is because the team balancer will rightly refuse to split up a fireteam.

Let’s say a gold player is a “2” and a Silver player is a “1”. The average gap in the case of a team of Golds vs. Silvers is still within the max tolerance since we have a 2.0 team and 1.0 team. But, total gap is now 4.0 (4x2 = 8 vs. 4x1 = 4), which is not a fair match. We currently have no way to both balance for the solo queue case (where 1.0 is just fine) and the full party case (where 1.0 is always unfair because it’s really 4.0), without making one or the other suffer either longer than needed wait times, or unfair matches. We currently err on the side of unfair matches because most players do queue solo, and use party restrictions to mitigate it. But, those restrictions do NOT mitigate it at all when a full party faces another full party. They actually make it worse.

With the new feature we are expecting soon™ the matchmaker will simultaneously restrict the maximum player to player gap and the team to team gap. This will mean that when a full Fireteam plays, it will always find opponents that are fair.

In fact, when we look in the data and find Fireteams beating non-Fireteams, in the vast majority of cases, the MMR system knew the match was unfair ahead of time, but we couldn’t prevent it with the current matchmaker. It wasn’t because Fireteams are inherently better than solo players, it was because we couldn’t match them right.

This means that most of the unfairness that comes from matching vs. full Fireteams goes away with the update, and means there isn’t much of a reason to keep the current party restrictions. They are causing unnecessarily long wait times in most cases, so when the new feature comes online, we will probably test removing them. It should result in matches that are actually more fair---even with solos matching vs. parties---and faster matching times.

We may also allow 12-player Fireteams in Warzone with the change, but repeat the warning that wait times will be very long for those Fireteams. The only group of players that will have a total MMR high enough to match a 12-player Fireteam will usually be another 12-player Fireteam, of which there won’t be many. So queue at your own peril. If you can’t match this way, you will want to back off on the party size until you can match, like today.

If we get this feature before next week, I will give an update in a tweet, and more explanation in next week’s post.