























Leave it as it is and spend our time on other improvements.

Take the time and effort to put it in without changing anything else and probably see a rise in quit rates, and more 3v4 and 2v4 matches.

Put it in, but add even more time and effort to try and find a messaging that would encourage people to stay in. This assumes that type of messaging exists.

Do 2 and maybe also 3, and also put even MORE time into making sure matches end quickly and less painfully once we get into 3v4 or 2v4 etc.











































Our UX design lead, Vincent, wanted to get some feedback from y’all on how you go about finding teams and parties for matchmaking. What has been the easiest way for you? There are many tools currently available to find folks to play with, but I don’t want to bias you by listing them, I’d rather here your feedback on them.For those of you who play solo, is that because it’s a pain to find a team? Or do you just love that playstyle?We’re looking into ways of making it easier to find folks to party up with, but want to first see what you’re already doing, and where the pain points might be.In theory, this sounds awesome. Punish the jerks by making them play with the jerks. The problem is that most quitters are not habitual. Most of the quits you see are just normal players who sometimes quit. Because of this, matching quitters vs. quitters would not change things much because most people don’t quit enough to get marked as “quitters”. We do temp ban habitual quitters though.We can probably focus on more effectively getting you out of matches where your team has quit, and into new ones faster.We're also considering rebalancing how we penalize players who quit to make it less punishing if they decide because they're already down a man or two. I think they still need to lose the same amount of points as a losing team would, but at least they could leave the match early without having to play through it.My personal philosophy is to not show stuff on the loading screen that doesn’t affect the experience. Once we correctly account for party skill, being in a party shouldn’t strongly affect the fairness of the match, so I wouldn’t normally want to show it because it would be misleading. It could cause players to quit when the match would actually be fair. We saw some of this in the beta when showing CSR on the loading screen.There are several reasons we don’t do this. One being that people use playlists like Proving Grounds to test something new, and we don’t want people to worry about their Team Arena Rank being affected by it.Another reason is this is actually a lot harder to do than it sounds. When you have millions and millions of CSRs and MMRs, and you want to optimize delivering and updating those values to specific places in the UI and on the Web at certain times and for certain reasons, the engineers have to strike the right balance in terms of storage and flexibility. It turns out grabbing the MMR from one list and using it for another is deceptively harder than it may sound after considering all the other things you need to do with MMRs and CSRs.This gets brought up now and then, but is probably worth repeating. I like the idea personally, but have seen mixed results with the psychology of different players. In the past, we’ve put this on the loading screen and had players quit because of perceptions. I think we would want to come up with a good way of presenting it that made it feel OK to have a challenge.Here’s a sort of high-level breakdown of the options from a design point of view:So now, as a designer, I have to ask myself, what would be the priority on items 2-4? Can I do 2 without doing at least also 3 and 4? Should I do those first? Or is more important to look at improving party matchmaking? Or smurfing? Or how often you see the same map and mode? Or are we OK with just staying with 1 for now so we can address other concerns first.This gives you a sort of loose idea of the process we go through when looking at features that need improvement. It’s never just, “let’s add this or that today,” but a bunch of trade-offs.Personally, I would prioritize number 4 because over and of those because that’s a problem in general with or without number 1. It’s probably a more important thing to fix.We get feedback from many sources. Some sources really love the variety and potential competitiveness of the best forge maps. We have some players saying, “please put this forge map in,, the gameplay and balance are amazing! Definitely belongs in Ranked!” and then we have other players saying “please don’t put forge maps into Ranked”It’s not my personal role to prepare a forge map for Arena, but I wanted to convey the fact that there are many perspectives on each issue like this one, with both sides having fairly convincing arguments. Just because it’s a forge map, doesn’t mean the gameplay and balance on the map can’t be just as good as the other maps. Or, “try and not judge a book by its cover”We are constantly looking at how to better balance our tradeoffs between skill, latency, and local population size within the framework we have. There are some knobs we can turn now, some knobs we want to add, and other knobs we probably can’t add in the near future. I don’t have much more to say on that at the moment though.In case you don’t know, we still have a skill rating or MMR we use when matchmaking in social, and even Warzone. We just aren’t as strict on how tight the matches need to be. We are still really strict in the team balancing though, so in theory you should win about as often as you lose.We saw a lot of comments last week on using smurfs to boost Champions. Some bans were given. I thought I’d chime in with some comments on this.In general, we don’t like any kind of smurfing being used to manipulate your ranks because it hurts the players you step over while doing it. You will always run the risk of being banned for it.I do understand that it can be super tempting to have a few teammates re-roll new accounts just so you can matchmake faster. You can still potentially get banned for this, but I would say it’s understandable and we might be nicer about it.But there’s an even worse trend that I’ve seen on some folks do. I won’t describe that “other” behavior, but those who are doing it know what I’m talking about. That type of behavior may eventually get you permabanned, so I suggest stopping now. We don’t even need fancy systems to detect it because it is really obvious.That said, I am working on some improvements to both how CSR reacts at these high levels of play, and how fast you can matchmake. The CSR improvement will make it so playing with smurfs results in a lot less CSR than playing legitimately. Champs will still eventually hit a wall because eventually their CSRs will far outstrip the skill of the opponents the matchmaker can find for them, but at least they’ll get there faster than today, and with legit teammates instead of smurfs. They also won’t have to compete with the smurfs.I will try and get these improvements in before the next season, but I can’t make any promises.