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PvP Discussion: Matchmaking and Leagues


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  • ArenaNet Staff

This thread is to discussion matchmaking and league play. To kick off the thread, I wanted to talk a bit about the current state of the matchmaker.

In a recent random sample of 100,000 matches, we found that in approximately 95% of matches, the difference between the average skill rating of each team was less than 50 points. The matchmaker is doing a good job in most cases. Things get more problematic at the very low and very high skill ratings. Our change to duo queue for 1600+ ranked players is part of our efforts to address this. In addition to that modification, we’re working on some fine tuning on the matchmaker. Our simulation with the proposed changes extended the favorable difference ratio mentioned above from 95% to over 99% of matches. I can’t give you specific dates on when these changes go live, but we’ll be looking to trial them on the unranked queue somewhat soon™.

One thing to keep in mind is that just because the average skill rating of each team is close, that doesn’t mean you won’t have a blowout match. Some maps just tend to snowball, some players tend to give up when they get a bit behind, etc. This can lead to a blowout even if the average skill rating of each team was fairly close.

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I guess my first question would be: Is there a way to tweak the current matchmaker to balance teams so that each individual player in a match is within 50 rating of the others? Cause the current one does some weird things to average out the mmr (Iasked a group I was playing with for ratings in one match just to check behavior and we had at the highest 1758 and at the lowest 1400 which I thought was incredibly bizarre).

Now as far as matchmaking goes on alt classes, is it a possible idea to try and create a system with class specific mmr (or at least a grace period of 10-15 matches where you are matched at lower and slowly increasing mmr until you are back where your actual mmr is) to encourage players to try out new classes? (this can go in unranked if needed but at least from my experience, trying new classes is incredibly frustrating because you get placed in matched where you'd want to play your main and end up getting farmed pretty hard by a good deal of people in the match.)

And not to be "that guy" and bring this up but is there a possibility of a class lock upon entering a match and removal of class stacking from all pvp modes? I just know myself and many others are curious as far as if there was any discussion around the implementation of such a system or if other things were a priority thus leading to this not really being considered yet as matchmaking would be seriously impacted by a change like this.

Thank you for the thread and for the outreach!

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Hi Ben,

here are my ideas I would like to suggest for consideration:I try to be short.

I've got a two way suggestion:

  1. If you have the resource to rework the Match Making system. 
  2. If you don't.  

Case 1. If you are willing to rework the Match Making system. In that case I would like to suggest a method to avoid the annoying total blowout matches like 100-500 result (what happens most of the time) and make balanced games in ranked. Right now the information what MM is using to initialize games (player's actual league rating) just not enough.MM should consider the player's class and build. I know its very hard but maybe it would be enough if the player could define her or his build, role or playstyle (dps, tank, healer, condi etc... )MM should consider the total pvp experience of the player. Maybe the number of total matches and total rating, lvl or something. After the match MM system should blow up the teams and recalculate everything from the basics for the next match to avoid the exact same team participation on the next match.

Case 2. If you don't want to rework the Match Making system. In that case I would like to suggest a method to reduce the frustration sector what Match Making can cause when it draws together players with totally different amount of pvp experiences. These matches are mostly total blowouts with result like 100-500.The player can fall hundreds of league rank points in a bad row of games what happens more often then you think.  Instead of that it would be much more fair if the system would reward the player's personal efforts. Even if the player is in the losing side the system should consider her or his personal match points and calculate the league rank point loss according to this. The higher personal match points the less league skill rank points to lose (maybe even none at all) and maybe more to earn if your team has won. I think it'll make the game much more fair and less less less frustrating, the community less toxic and your rank will be reflecting your personal pvp skill better not your luck.We already got the following match statistics in the game: damage, healing, kills, deaths,  revives, offense, defense.Maybe more would be need to cover the different builds and playstyles like "party heal" and "boons applied on party members" etc.. Of course case 1 and case 2 can work together.

Beside of this cases I got another suggestion to make decent matches with low server population: make smaller maps.1v1 for duel2v2 for dual duel3v3  maybe 2 cap points4v4 3 cap pointsIf the Match Making consider too much time to wait for a 5v5 then it makes a 4v4 or a 3v3 but it makes quality game not an unbalanced one.

And one final thought:Maybe ranked should be a little more exclusive if there are Leagues. To join ranked the player should have 20-50 unranked games. This way unexperienced gold diggers can be filtered out from ranked.

Thanks for reading it.

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There has been discussion and photo proof over the years of the matchmaker getting two teams and then stacking one of them. This may have been due to erroneous code in the past that was fixed, but it definitely has occurred. Many players still believe that the matchmaker gathers teams and then incorrectly distributes the players among them. Other games display the skill rating of the players on both teams before matches. Why does GW2 not do this. This would inspire more confidence that the matchmaker is working properly, as it is impossible to do this on your own to verify. You saying that with a 99% confidence you can get the match spread within 50 points literally means nothing but words at the moment, because people really don't just believe without proof and their experiences and/or perspective would indicate otherwise. Additionally, it has been discussed that when you get to the extreme end-say legendary/upper platinum and you get a team with a wide range of rating and lose, you lose massive points because the rating adjustment post match is based on personal rating instead of the average rating that the matchmaker uses. Will there be consideration to move to adjusting rating based on average rating in the future to fix this? It would also be nice to see the rating change difference for all players post match as well. One other thing that needs to be mentioned is post match statistics. The new timeline is fine, but I also would like to see how many kills/deaths/res/damage/healing, etc. for everyone on my team as well as the other team in the post match UI.

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  • ArenaNet Staff

@Bazooka.3590 said:Hi Ben,

here are my ideas I would like to suggest for consideration:I try to be short.

I've got a two way suggestion:

  1. If you have the resource to rework the Match Making system. 
  2. If you don't.  

Case 1. If you are willing to rework the Match Making system. In that case I would like to suggest a method to avoid the annoying total blowout matches like 100-500 result (what happens most of the time) and make balanced games in ranked. Right now the information what MM is using to initialize games (player's actual league rating) just not enough.MM should consider the player's class and build. I know its very hard but maybe it would be enough if the player could define her or his build, role or playstyle (dps, tank, healer, condi etc... )MM should consider the total pvp experience of the player. Maybe the number of total matches and total rating, lvl or something. After the match MM system should blow up the teams and recalculate everything from the basics for the next match to avoid the exact same team participation on the next match.

Case 2. If you don't want to rework the Match Making system. In that case I would like to suggest a method to reduce the frustration sector what Match Making can cause when it draws together players with totally different amount of pvp experiences. These matches are mostly total blowouts with result like 100-500.The player can fall hundreds of league rank points in a bad row of games what happens more often then you think.  Instead of that it would be much more fair if the system would reward the player's personal efforts. Even if the player is in the losing side the system should consider her or his personal match points and calculate the league rank point loss according to this. The higher personal match points the less league skill rank points to lose (maybe even none at all) and maybe more to earn if your team has won. I think it'll make the game much more fair and less less less frustrating, the community less toxic and your rank will be reflecting your personal pvp skill better not your luck.We already got the following match statistics in the game: damage, healing, kills, deaths,  revives, offense, defense.Maybe more would be need to cover the different builds and playstyles like "party heal" and "boons applied on party members" etc.. Of course case 1 and case 2 can work together.

Beside of this cases I got another suggestion to make decent matches with low server population: make smaller maps.1v1 for duel2v2 for dual duel3v3  maybe 2 cap points4v4 3 cap pointsIf the Match Making consider too much time to wait for a 5v5 then it makes a 4v4 or a 3v3 but it makes quality game not an unbalanced one.

And one final thought:Maybe ranked should be a little more exclusive if there are Leagues. To join ranked the player should have 20-50 unranked games. This way unexperienced gold diggers can be filtered out from ranked.

Thanks for reading it.

1) I don't believe the matchmaker needs a complete rework. It's doing a decent job in most cases. Snowballing isn't necessarily due to poor matchmaking, there a lot of other things going into it. However, I think our tweaks we're planning will help quite a lot in insuring the match starts out fair.

2) Basing your skill rating change on personal performance is nearly impossible to do systematically. There are so many things that contribute to good or bad play, and most of them are contextual.

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In the case of analyzing individual play from someone, what about factoring in things like the statistics measured of someone's performance in a match? Have the system analyze how much healing, damage, etc. someone is doing and help adjust their rating and matches based on those personal performances. It could go pretty in depth measuring boons applied, boons removed, conditions applied, conditions removed, cc uptime, etc. but this allows you to more or less see the level of contribution of a given player in a match and check how they are performing compared to those around them and then adjusting their matches according to what their performance shows they can handle.

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  • ArenaNet Staff

@Ario.8964 said:I guess my first question would be: Is there a way to tweak the current matchmaker to balance teams so that each individual player in a match is within 50 rating of the others? Cause the current one does some weird things to average out the mmr (Iasked a group I was playing with for ratings in one match just to check behavior and we had at the highest 1758 and at the lowest 1400 which I thought was incredibly bizarre).

We've talked internally about reducing the maximum rating range of the matchmaker, but the tradeoff is that queue times will increase. We will likely do some testing in unranked to see how much of an impact certain ranges have, and look to make some adjustment for ranked in the future. 50 rating might be an unrealistic goal, but I do think there's some adjustment that can be made here without blowing out queue times.

Now as far as matchmaking goes on alt classes, is it a possible idea to try and create a system with class specific mmr (or at least a grace period of 10-15 matches where you are matched at lower and slowly increasing mmr until you are back where your actual mmr is) to encourage players to try out new classes? (this can go in unranked if needed but at least from my experience, trying new classes is incredibly frustrating because you get placed in matched where you'd want to play your main and end up getting farmed pretty hard by a good deal of people in the match.)

And not to be "that guy" and bring this up but is there a possibility of a class lock upon entering a match and removal of class stacking from all pvp modes? I just know myself and many others are curious as far as if there was any discussion around the implementation of such a system or if other things were a priority thus leading to this not really being considered yet as matchmaking would be seriously impacted by a change like this.

These two ideas are tied together. We do actually track profession specific mmr, but it isn't currently used because we don't lock professions in queue. Without the character lock, players could queue on a profession with lower mmr, then swap to their main profession after the queue pops for easier wins. Some time ago we held a poll asking players if they would prefer using profession mmr and locking characters on queue, but it did not pass.

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I think that one of the biggest issues right now in pvp is the team balance, skillwise. This is mostly noticeable in higher tiers. Queue times are maybe too short to have time to find enough top players to put into the same match and in my opinion, it's worth sacrificing queue times (making them longer) in higher tiers for the sake of making the games more enjoyable. Back in earlier seasons like season 2, the games were more enjoyable even though you often had 10+ minute queue times. I see no reason for not increasing the queue time these days (maybe not so much, even though I believe most wouldn't mind), considering that now you can do other things while you queue: like pve, wvw, free for all arena in hotm or even being in a custom arena doing duels or whatever.I think it's important to somehow improve the match quality in terms of balance, because it's just as frustrating for top players to deal with lower tier players in their own team as it is for the lower tier players themselves to be getting beaten so easily to the point of not even understanding what's going on.

Something that could help aswell would be having separate ratings for each class. How often have you seen someone in your team who "doesn't care about losing" because he's only there trying to do some achievement on a class he rarely plays or more simply, someone just trying to learn a new class? This kind of stuff can trick the matchmaking and cause even more unbalanced games. Maybe a class lock and having separate ratings for each class would would be for the best, if class stacking can be avoided.

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A lot of this pre-supposes that there is enough of a player base of PVP that these changes could be made without significantly increasing queue times.

  1. Class component is something that I think needs to be factored in - if it already is, I don't think the component rules are doing a particularly great job. Unless attempting to force some sort of composition balance would result in queues that are entirely too long.
  2. Don't match up party teams with non-party teams. If you have a team of 5 people who know each other, have build a good comp, and are connected via TeamSpeak or Discord, they are most likely going to wreck a team of 5 PUGs, regardless of individual skill on the part of the PUG group members. I'd go so far as to suggest that queuing up solo means you will ONLY queue against other solos.
  3. Better evaluate players who are throwing or abandoning matches in Ranked. I don't do as many PVP matches as the heavy PVPers, partially because I am hesitant to invest in this system as it is now. I frequently encounter people who AFK through an entire match, or decide as soon as the score is 100-20 or so that the match is "over" and they go to make a sandwich instead of participating, figuring they'd not waste time and just move on to another match. That may be great for them, but it means four other people are going to (most likely) lose a match because they stopped trying. And nothing is more frustrating than that. I feel there has to be better a system to detect and punish people who aren't playing properly in Ranked matches.
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@Cal Cohen.3527 said:

@Ario.8964 said:I guess my first question would be: Is there a way to tweak the current matchmaker to balance teams so that each individual player in a match is within 50 rating of the others? Cause the current one does some weird things to average out the mmr (Iasked a group I was playing with for ratings in one match just to check behavior and we had at the highest 1758 and at the lowest 1400 which I thought was incredibly bizarre).

We've talked internally about reducing the maximum rating range of the matchmaker, but the tradeoff is that queue times will increase. We will likely do some testing in unranked to see how much of an impact certain ranges have, and look to make some adjustment for ranked in the future. 50 rating might be an unrealistic goal, but I do think there's some adjustment that can be made here without blowing out queue times.

Now as far as matchmaking goes on alt classes, is it a possible idea to try and create a system with class specific mmr (or at least a grace period of 10-15 matches where you are matched at lower and slowly increasing mmr until you are back where your actual mmr is) to encourage players to try out new classes? (this can go in unranked if needed but at least from my experience, trying new classes is incredibly frustrating because you get placed in matched where you'd want to play your main and end up getting farmed pretty hard by a good deal of people in the match.)

And not to be "that guy" and bring this up but is there a possibility of a class lock upon entering a match and removal of class stacking from all pvp modes? I just know myself and many others are curious as far as if there was any discussion around the implementation of such a system or if other things were a priority thus leading to this not really being considered yet as matchmaking would be seriously impacted by a change like this.

These two ideas are tied together. We do actually track profession specific mmr, but it isn't currently used
because
we don't lock professions in queue. Without the character lock, players could queue on a profession with lower mmr, then swap to their main profession after the queue pops for easier wins. Some time ago we held a poll asking players if they would prefer using profession mmr and locking characters on queue, but it did not pass.

Yeah my first number was kind of a spitball/hopeful number but If population can't support it that could be widened to a certain degree if it works with the matchmaker.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the original poll was only asking players about class locks in matches. The main reason many said no to it (myself included) would've been fear of having stacked classes such as thieves making it harder for your team or stacked scourges on the other team making your life harder. If the entirety of the idea were pitched it may have seen at the time, or likely would now see, different results.

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The matchmaking is actually pretty good, but IMO some of the "considerations" could be adjust to be either configurable by the player or more apparent to the player.

1) - Show a visual indicator of the matchmaker. I'm thinking of "Searching...+-50" or "Searching...+-100" values in the PVP arena. Let the player know before the game starts when it is searching that the current state of the matchmaker is searching over a larger gap. I could see this being argued against and #2 is more important IMO.

2) - One consideration that keeps being brought up is "speed of queue" vs "quality/tightness of the matchmaker"...Why not both? How about a scale that allows the player to use a slider that choose if they want a fast queue, or a risk of a longer queue with a tighter match maker.

3) - I"m not sure what this would look like technically, but it sounded like the 50 average rating is based on the team average, not the individual player average. What would it look like to keep the +- based on ALL players in the match, not the average of the players in the match.

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Is it possible to get matchmaker to put together teams based more on what amulet archetypes they are using rather than what profession they are playing?

That is, matchmaker, rather than trying to keep one of every profession in a team, tries to balance a team so there is 3 people with offensive (main stat condi damage or power) amulets, making sure only 2/3 max are either condi or direct damage focused, 1 with a defensive (main stat toughness)amulet and one with a healer (main stat healing power) amulet? Maybe you can test this algorithm in unranked first and see what the results are.

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Like someone has mentioned previously, all I truly care about is the match ups between a single player and let's say a duo or a full five man.

For an example, yesterday my team had a duo yesterday (even though I qued alone) while the other side had a FULL four or five man. I know this is just unranked, but I do not understand the reason why I was paired up like that to begin with.

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Hello, could you provide me the reasonning behind not locking characters before a match starts? Right now I see very often someone bringing a non meta class logging out during the first minute wait before the match and coming back with a class that is going to have a much stronger impact on the game. Locking characters wouldn't solve balance issues but at least it would help to alleviate them.

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@Kuya.6495 said:Is it possible to get matchmaker to put together teams based more on what amulet archetypes they are using rather than what profession they are playing?

That is, matchmaker, rather than trying to keep one of every profession in a team, tries to balance a team so there is 3 people with offensive (main stat condi damage or power) amulets, making sure only 2/3 max are either condi or direct damage focused, 1 with a defensive (main stat toughness)amulet and one with a healer (main stat healing power) amulet? Maybe you can test this algorithm in unranked first and see what the results are.

The problem with that is there are very few builds, if any, that use amulets with a main toughness or vitality stat. So you'd end up with either really unbalanced comps with likely stacked classes or eternal queues while the matchmaker tries to find someone who fits the criteria.Even mender druid is is a main power amulet so I don't think the system would end up working well with that type of setup. If they could make it work that'd be cool but it looks to me at least right now like focusing on classes and such is the best way to equalize comps in matches.

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I would really like to see the ability to queue 2 of the same class be removed, people definitely exploit how powerful running 2 scourge or 2 p/p thieves can be. I also feel if this was implemented it would make sense to remove the ability to change your class before the match starts and this would be a lot more fair. Just my opinion.

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@Skye.9862 said:I would really like to see the ability to queue 2 of the same class be removed, people definitely exploit how powerful running 2 scourge or 2 p/p thieves can be. I also feel if this was implemented it would make sense to remove the ability to change your class before the match starts and this would be a lot more fair. Just my opinion.

I completely agree ^

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  • ArenaNet Staff

@ButterPeanut.9746 said:The matchmaking is actually pretty good, but IMO some of the "considerations" could be adjust to be either configurable by the player or more apparent to the player.

2) - One consideration that keeps being brought up is "speed of queue" vs "quality/tightness of the matchmaker"...Why not both? How about a scale that allows the player to use a slider that choose if they want a fast queue, or a risk of a longer queue with a tighter match maker.

We have discussed a "strict matchmaking" option that would be an absolute cap to the range of players you get queued with. But this also leads to a lot of undesirable scenarios. Like legendary people never getting a match. We'd probably cap the minimum range to something to ensure that didn't happen.

3) - I"m not sure what this would look like technically, but it sounded like the 50 average rating is based on the team average, not the individual player average. What would it look like to keep the +- based on ALL players in the match, not the average of the players in the match.

The 50 is team average. The matchmaker does automatically try to create teams within a certain range. The range starts at + or - 25. It starts expanding after 5 minutes in ranked and 3 minutes in unranked. However, if someone else of a much different rating has been waiting for a long time and their range has expanded to include you, you can get pulled into their match even if you haven't been in queue too long. We've talked about ways to adjust this.

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My number one request about Matchmaking is making sure that when I queue up, i'll be match only with people that are either a max of 100 rating above me or 100 rating below me and that try to prioritize people from the same league and tier i'm in.

Because has you have said earlier, the MM try to put team together that have about a 50 rating difference, but only doing that leads to have people 300 rating a more below some of his teammates or opponents, which isn't good for anyone.

I absolutly know that the queue time would get longer, waiting maybe 30 minutes or plus for a game, but I believe match quality should prevail, maybe people wouldn't agree with me, so maybe do a poll explaining the pros and the cons of doing somethign like that.

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I have a question on locking duo queuing at 1600 rating.

This chance has affected me and my teammate negatively, because we are less inclined to try harder to reach top tiers because of the lock, this chance even incentivizes us to remain below that rating so we can continue to play together.

  1. So is there a chance to raise the cap in future so we wouldn't feel limited in our growth or removed?
  2. Are there any plans for giving another queuing options for duos/teams, because currently rank is unfriendly to anything team/duo based, unraked is waste of time due to a lot lower game quality and ATs happen only at specific times and at worse offer only 1 game with added time consumption of getting 5 people together?

Would also like to add putting restrictions on rank only damages community, because team/duo based parties are turned away from ranked and community has less reason to work together in a team based game.

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@Scary.8034 said:My number one request about Matchmaking is making sure that when I queue up, i'll be match only with people that are either a max of 100 rating above me or 100 rating below me and that try to prioritize people from the same league and tier i'm in.

Because has you have said earlier, the MM try to put team together that have about a 50 rating difference, but only doing that leads to have people 300 rating a more below some of his teammates or opponents, which isn't good for anyone.

I absolutly know that the queue time would get longer, waiting maybe 30 minutes or plus for a game, but I believe match quality should prevail, maybe people wouldn't agree with me, so maybe do a poll explaining the pros and the cons of doing somethign like that.

And with longer queues it would allow them to redesign HoTM (again) to allow for practicing and exploring though the map. Possibly if people have access from HoTM to the actual pvp maps that'd be good so players can learn the more intricate details of each map (kiting/jump spots) and it allows players to teach others by demonstrating good rotations or other such things while they wait in q. As long as there's stuff to do and play with while wait, I am okay with waiting 10+ minutes for a match to pop up.

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Can you tell us how many matches it takes for avg player to be placed in the mmr ladder within +/- 30 pt range of their 'right' placement? It seems to me the current system is not very good at predicting the real mmr of a player. This based on my own experience of over 300+ matches played and still get 100pt mmr swings.

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@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:

@ButterPeanut.9746 said:The matchmaking is actually pretty good, but IMO some of the "considerations" could be adjust to be either configurable by the player or more apparent to the player.

2) - One consideration that keeps being brought up is "speed of queue" vs "quality/tightness of the matchmaker"...Why not both? How about a scale that allows the player to use a slider that choose if they want a fast queue, or a risk of a longer queue with a tighter match maker.

We have discussed a "strict matchmaking" option that would be an absolute cap to the range of players you get queued with. But this also leads to a lot of undesirable scenarios. Like legendary people never getting a match. We'd probably cap the minimum range to something to ensure that didn't happen.

3) - I"m not sure what this would look like technically, but it sounded like the 50 average rating is based on the team average, not the individual player average. What would it look like to keep the +- based on ALL players in the match, not the average of the players in the match.

The 50 is team average. The matchmaker does automatically try to create teams within a certain range. The range starts at + or - 25. It starts expanding after 5 minutes in ranked and 3 minutes in unranked. However, if someone else of a much different rating has been waiting for a long time and their range has expanded to include you, you can get pulled into their match even if you haven't been in queue too long. We've talked about ways to adjust this.

I totally understand caps and having to have special scenarios for people who are outliers. I truly believe that much of the negative outcomes and comments people have with matchmaking would go away if players simply had some choice in the matter. Even if the code behind the scenes has some restrictions, let players choose a matchmaking style that fits them at that moment.

As a person who was in legendary earlier this season, I personally would have no problem setting my slider to "strict matchmaking" and then after X number of minutes if the game told me "We cannot create a fair match for you at this time". Would I want this all the time? No, but if I'm on vacation and have lots of time to kill but only want really good games, I really don't see an issue with telling the player that a match to their specific needs/requests can't be made.

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