Release Notes 14 December 2016

Hi everyone!

It’s a new week and we have a new release for you. At the end of October we announced that we were working on a number of changes based on your feedback with the goal to improve the competitive experience on FACEIT significantly. As part of these changes so far we implemented the FACEIT Behavioural Index (live), the Client Anti-Cheat (open beta), the new voting that automatically picks location to avoid dodging (live) and a lot of tweaks to the ranking system and the smurf detection system.

Today we have released one more of these improvements: a new matching algorithm. We are very excited about this as it is probably the most requested feature after the anti-cheat.

New Matching Algorithm

Let’s start by mentioning that this is the 6th iteration of our matching algorithm, we therefore baptized it “M6”. The algorithm has been changing over the last few years based on the changes in needs. Initially it used to focus on things that were very important in low liquidity queues, while as the popularity of FACEIT grew we started focusing on things that were more relevant in order to optimize high liquidity queues. As a consequence the last algorithm we had was focused on maximizing matches during peak times and was not adequate for lower activity queues like the premium queue, nor for new games that were added to the platform. With this new algorithm we looked back at all different iterations we had in the past and we combined them to find a system that maximizes team balance, no matter the liquidity of the queue.

The new matching algorithm has been running live for the last 24 hours and you can see a comparison of the results of the new algorithm vs. the new one below. For all matches across queues:

Matching quality across al queues — Good equals matches for which a team can win between 4 and 6 matches each 10.

And, as an example of a low liquidity queue, for Team Fortress 2:

Matching quality in TF2 — Good equals matches for which a team can win between 4 and 6 matches each 10.

As you see the results are impressive. The new algorithm’s impact on low liquidity queues (like TF2 or premium queues) is huge, with well balanced matches in certain queues increasing from 24% to 85% of all matches created! Not only that, the new algorithm also performs better for high liquidity queues, with an improvement of matching quality at 360 degrees.

In the next few weeks we are going to keep tracking the performance of the algorithm, queue times and feedback and we might give you some more stats to evaluate this change on your own!

Anti-Cheat Open Beta Update

The Client Anti-Cheat Open Beta is still ongoing and as of today tens of thousands of players are using it everyday. Since we opened the beta phase to everyone last week we made quite a lot of progress. Most of the issues that have been reported so far have been fixed and we are going forward towards the full release of the client. A few notes below on the current progress:

Fixed a bug on the installer that was forcing an infinite loop of updates in certain cases (in certain cases this could have been linked to the O/S being out of date — please see below)

The client now detects operating systems that are out of date / require an update to support the client and warns the user. Before this fix the client would have started an infinite loop of updates or would have shown an error claiming the driver was not signed properly. If this happened to you please uninstall the client and download the new installer.

Started tagging users to force the anti-cheat in all their matches. As of today we already have thousands of users tag.

Players need to have a supported game connected to log into the AC

Based on the progress so far we expect to start forcing the client on certain queues in the next couple of days and we may be very near to the final release. The 32-bit version will be made available with the full release.

Unfortunately (for obvious reasons) I can’t talk in detail about detections, but I can say we are very happy on this side of things as well :).

FACEIT Behavioural Index Update

It’s now more or less a month that the FACEIT Behavioural Index is live and two weeks that we are taking action based on this index and we thought it might have been interesting to share some results we have been observing.

The goal of the index is to identify users that behaved in a negative way and take action based on that. We can all have a bad day or a bad match, the main goal is therefore to warn users and incentivize a good behaviour rather than banning them. If the behaviour is too bad or reiterated a ban is issued. So far thousands of players have received warnings on the platform — the graph below shows the behaviour of these players after having received a warning.

As you can see from the graph, after receiving a warning over 75% of the players behave in an extremely positive way — in other words, if these players were always this positive they would have access to the premium queues! Approximately 15% of the players behave in a good way. This means that they don’t cause any disruption, but at the same time you probably won’t remember them. Finally, only 7.6% of the warned players behaved negatively again (and got banned). This is an extremely low percentage and it improved significantly since we announced the system.

Conclusion

These update notes are a bit different than usual, as we decided to try and give you more insight into our data and how we use it, rather than a list of features and changes. We may start doing this more often to show you how your feedback and new features impact everyone’s experience on FACEIT on a daily basis.

GL & HF, see you on FACEIT!