The biggest complaint we’ve had over the Open Beta period about our Ranked mode has been from solo players who encounter 5-Player pre-made parties, giving them very little chance of winning. This is in part due to the inherit coordination and tactics advantage gained by 5 friends playing together, and also due to the difficulties of matching a group of 5 against fair opposition in an acceptable amount of time with an fluctuating Ranked playerbase (see Graph B).

When planning Ranked Season 1, we made the decision to split the Ranked Matchmaking into two different pools to prevent these frustrations. These two pools were Solo/Duo and 5-Player Parties only. It’d be the best of both worlds, right?

But then, there’s the fine print… we then analysed the behaviour of the matchmaking population over the past few months, we were able to determine several things:

[ul][li]Solo/Duo made up over 85% of the matchmaking queries (see Graph A)

[/li][li]5-Player Parties made up less than 7% of matchmaking queries

[/li][li]3 and 4-Player Parties made up less than 8% of matchmaking queries combined

[/li][li]The AU and Asia regions did not have enough queueing players for reasonable queue times[/ul]

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When we factored in the maximum allowed skill difference (this expands over time, so how aggressively the matchmaker is at balancing the teams softens in order to get a match going), along with only allowing 5-Player Parties to match with each other, we found the following:

[ul][li]During peak hours in the EU, a Cobalt Rank 5-Player Team would be looking at average queue times of over 40 mins

[/li][li]During peak hours in the US, a Gold Rank 5-Player Team would be looking at average queue times of over 30 mins[/ul]

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With this in mind, we decided to remove the 5-Player queue for Ranked Season 1, as finding a game in a decent amount of time would essentially require two teams telling each other when to join the queue… almost as if it were a private match. In the short-term we’re prioritising improving the Private Match feature to help Clans play matches against each other.

We consider organised team play the lifeblood of Dirty Bomb, so this isn’t a decision we’ve come to lightly, nor is it necessarily a wide-ranging indicator of things to come. In the longer term, we are working towards the following:

[ul][li]Reintroducing 5-Player Parties to Ranked with full 5v5 team play as soon as possible

[/li][list][li]This involves working on removing/reducing the worst queue times and also communicating more information to players who are queueing[/ul]

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[li]Giving friends a method of Partying-up and playing together in Casual games

[/li][ul][li]Due to the much larger population, any sort of waiting time would be much faster in Casual[/ul]

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[li]Giving players the ability to rent and admin their own community servers

[/li][ul][li]Providing players with more flexibility and also the opportunity to build a community on their own servers[/ul][/list]

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One of our imperatives for Dirty Bomb is to better support playing with friends and encouraging healthy competition, and we feel that these features will go a long way towards that.