Matchmaking

[Sly Reflex]

I'm sorry, this is a big rambling post and on proof reading it, it veers all over topic. Bear with me and hear me out.

I was going to put this into the Halo 4 thread, but I thought an open discussion would be better in this case, as what I'm about to talk about covers more than just Halo 4.

When I first booted Halo 4 up and jumped into the multiplayer it was very easy. Even though I knew none of the maps I could jump into a game and fend for myself, which was refreshing as normally going into a game like Halo it takes me a while to find my feet. Halo is a game I've never been great at, I'm middling to best at most shooters. Later in the week when more people had the game we all partied up and hit the multiplayer and I got the rudest awakening ever. I'd get fucked every which way from Sunday in nearly every firefight. Understandably I found this frustrating, as I could be playing beforehand and doing great and then as soon as I join my friends everything would turn to shit. Obviously the way Halo works and always has worked online is that you are given a trueskill rank based on how you've played and it finds opponents based in and around your bracket to play against. Playing alone is great, I've had matches where I've dominated and others where I've got fucked, but I've never really felt cheated over it until I noticed something today.

Today I jumped into a Slayer lobby and found myself with players of equal skill. I won games and lost games, some I did great, others I did lousy. It wasn't until I noticed that the people I was playing with dropped and were replaced by newer players that I started doing worse and worse. Surely these players are matchmaking and getting into games with equal skill? After looking into it, sadly not. I had a bit of a browse on the Waypoint website that details all the stats and stuff and found that every single person that joined that particular session was statistically better then the player that joined before. By statistically I mean their win ratio and k/d was a slight improvement when joining midway through a game. Finally I understood why I was doing OK when I started the matchmaking lobby as to when I decided to call it quits because the level of competition edged me out and made it no fun for me.

The sessions after the one where I started out in the paragraph above put me into a lobby where the game was already half done. Out of the people in that lobby I was statistically in the top few players (I pity the players that were lower than me, as I'm total shit at this game), I'm thinking a few people dropped and me and the other guys were brought in to fill the gaps. Despite being quite down on points the team managed to turn it around and edge into first place before the clock eventually ran out and declared us winners. I played in this lobby for a bit before part of the opposition dropped a few players. It wasn't long before new players joined when I noticed that one of the guys I'd been dominating for a few games had matching in game ID's to two of the guys on his team. I'm telling you, these two guys fucking cleaned up. The team I was on was managing between 10 to 20 kills each until these guys joined, after they joined we didn't manage to break past 10 kills. It was pretty brutal.

So what's my argument here? It's simple really. What is the point in matchmaking players of equal skill into games using algorithms to dictate who vs who when the players or even the system can break the system? Why can the system not detect that red team has a true skill of # while blue team has an equal skill number; except red team has 1 star player holding up 3 duds whilst blue team has 4 players of equal skill? Wouldn't that work out better, giving trueskill as a unit instead of giving it out individually and then pairing up games based on the top players?

Halo is I think the only FPS to use trueskill in its matchmaking. I played a lot of PGR3 and 4 and Forza 2 which were quite prominent with the whole trueskill thing. PGR3 had specific ladders you had to play between dependant on your performance, once you were in a game you were locked in and that was that. Forza 2 just used to chuck you in a lobby with whoever. I actually spent a night loosing to much better players to me in Forza 2 once and managed to go up trueskill ranks. Where altering your trueskill was concerned, once you started playing that was it. Entry was closed to people not involved, changes to your trueskill altered dependant on performance.

This is where I think Halo 4 get it wrong. Once a game start the players that are in the lobby when the timer begins should be the only ones in the game with the teams facing off being off equal level skill wise. I know people drop and all that, but it's usually people that are fucking rage quitting because they are getting killed anyway. I was always happy in the previous games when someone quit as they were usually a burden on the team. It's one less target giving the other team points.

Looking into the whole matchmaking and trueskill thing got me thinking about it in general. I remember playing Halo 2 and never really calling foul at the players it matched me up with besides people that were cheating by exploiting glitches or whatever. It was a totally solid game. I was pondering why this was and then realised that it was mainly because it was really the only competitive vs shooter out so had a colossal sized userbase. I never really played with other people from my friend list although I'm sure it'd suffer the same problem the later Halo's did with mismatched balancing.

So why don't other shooters use trueskill to matchmake players instead of dumping them in omniskill lobbies? Why do games like Battlefield and Call of Duty avoid this method? I've personally come to two conclusions.

The first is that it circumnavigates the problem that happens with Halo. Battlefield is a series I love, but there's no fucking way I'd play it on my lonesome. It's not designed that way. I could see a lone wolf ranked set up working well for it though, similar to how Gears 3 had, they are both predominantly team games and if the right people played it'd be fine. It's easy saying that though, we've all been on teams where you have people not having a clue what to do.

My second conclusion might be a controversial one. Youtube. I think youtube is to blame indirectly. If you are an above average gameplayer, which many people are, they like to show off their skills. Omniskill lobbies cater to these people. If you look at what games are the most popular on youtube and to a certain extent twitch, the lions share come from games where no skill matchmaking is on offer. Damn, if I had the ability and equipment myself to record some of the stuff I saw in Bad Company 2 I'd be proud as fuck to throw that up on a video sharing website and declare that I did this phenomenal act. It's in our very nature to brag about achievements, no matter how fucking pointless they are.

I think it's a weird one, I actually feed the beast I'm arguing against. I want to see amazing things done in games, and while I can see those in games like Halo, Starcraft II and Street Fighter, games that have no skill restrictions on lobbies tend to throw up the most entertaining videos. I don't really want to watch teams chipping way at each other in the way most sports play out, I want to see someone running about like fucking Rambo absolutely dominating. It doesn't really matter that the competition the player is facing is shite because it's a spectacle to watch. Going back to the sport analogy, it's like watching the 1st rounds of the FA cup where you have Man United just dicking over guys that have day jobs delivering post or mending central heating, except it has a longer lasting appeal.

A real life friend of mine who I was talking to on Steam earlier is addicted to Starcraft II. Whenever we chat it normally comes up in conversation and he tells me about games he's had and stuff like that. He's made it his goal to make it into the platinum league. I've never actually seen him play but he records his sessions with FRAPS to see how he's improving and I'm told that whenever he looks back at the way he played when he was in bronze leagues he wonders why he ever took up the game. To him he can see where he's improved over the months of playing because of how the game matchmakes. He's very definite on this as whenever it pulls games from higher leagues to test him he always gets fucked and likewise whenever someone from the league below plays him they get stomped. He often links me to videos of the Koreans bigging up some play that they did and saying that it's far out of his skill reach, but I don't really have any guidance as to what is good or bad as I've not played the game. It's left a big enough impact on him to play nothing but that game so I'm guessing it's quite an important feature in that particular game. I cannot imagine him sticking with it if he got absolutely crushed every time he went online.

So yeah. Matchmaking. What do you think about it? Good? Bad? Indifferent? Can it make games better or can it damage the experience? Can competitive games be taken seriously without some sort of skill matchmaking? Will an even playing field make e-sports take off, or it is totally fine that there's no barrier of entry for stuff like that?

I'd really like to know what you think. If you are terrible at competative games and actively avoid them, would leagues of similar skilled players entice you to dip your toes in?

[Hendo]

I admit I didn't read all of that because it is rather long, but I think good matchmaking is a must.

There's a new league system in Black Ops II that should fix that - play about 5 games to give the game an idea of how good you are and it should put you with players of similar skill for the rest of the league. Of course, it should do that all the time though.

[RoboticMonk3y]

It's an interesting thing, and I've never found anything solid from microsoft/343/bungee about how exactly they apply the 'trueskill' rank.

I remember the level system in halo 3 was somewhat broken, it took into account the number of games you'd played as well as who you were beating in a game. I was at level 29, and would play 10 games in a row, coming first or second in every game, then have one shitty game and drop back to level 26. There was a huge amount of people who would reset their gamer tag, which in turn would reset their skill rank, meaning that someone who really should be a level 40-50 was being paired up with people of a much lower skill rank. Bungee let slip that Microsoft rarely do anything when people submit a report/complaint about cheating, and said there was little they could do about he situation.

Reach did a fairly good job of roughly matching skill, some evenings I'd get a kicking, other evening's I'd be handing them out.

Halo 4 I'm yet to really work out how well the multiplayer is balanced, similar to reach, I've had games where I've come out with a +17 spread and others where I've had a -12. I can usually attribute my sucking to getting pissed off and running into a shitty situation where I'm outnumber over and over.

I think that matchmaking will take a few weeks to level out, and there's always going to be times where you take a kicking. My biggest problem is forgetting that in Halo, you really do need to work as a group, and if you're getting a shit-kicking, hang back, and change how you're playing the game.

[Sly Reflex]

I have a tiny understanding how it works.

The levelling system works between a scale of 1 to 50, 1 being the worst and 50 being the best. Whenever you start playing a new game online you're automatically given rank 25, although a lot of games never tell you that. I know launch Forza 2 was open about what rank you were right from the off. The night I started playing it fell from 25 to something like 12. Over the duration of me playing online I think I clawed it back up to about 21. The system operates a confidence algorithm dependant on how many games you've played. At the start of my Forza 2 career my trueskill level would fluctuate all over the bloody place, but the more games I completed the more sure the algorithm felt my trueskill actually was it barely shifted even if unless I had a stellar/crappy night and the it would rise/drop. Because of the nature of the racing game, the trueskill works more accurately than it would in a teambased game.

In team based games you have to play more for the maths to do its thing and pick apart your actual skill. For instance, if you play with someone that sits and camps in a FPS and goes 6/2 on k/d and an other that goes 18/20 k/d. The guy with the higher kill count will have a higher and more accurate trueskill even though on paper he's worst statistically on paper than the camper because he faced off against more opponent he could have bettered more better trueskilled players than himself and therefore. I've actually dropped levels in Halo 3 at a lower skill and in the same game a higher skill has gain levels. It depends on performance over sustained games.

From personal experience where the game isn't matchmaking but showing trueskill, between 15 and 25 is what I say was the most treaded ranks. I'm not sure if this is the mode number.

I remember one night in Forza 2 we had this American guy come in and he was something insane like trueskill 40. He was a nice guy though, he explained to us that he'd have to win hundreds of races against us low levels just to maintain his skill as the system was showing that the other players in the lobby showed no threat to him. It was hard for him to find lobbies where the competition was enough to push his rank up.

[Uncle Dokuro]

League of Legends uses a rating system called Elo for matchmaking. It is the same ranking system that is used for the game of chess. It is a method of calculating the perceived skill level of a player. If the system has ranked you to high it will correct this after you lose a few games. Elo is calculated using three mathematical formulas. Matchmaking is only used for raked games and the ranking is different for each type of ranked game 3v3 team, 5v5 team and 5v5 solo. Matchmaking is not used in custom or co-op vs. AI matches.Each player starts with a Elo of 1200 and is adjusted after ten games are played. Also your Elo will decay for every four weeks - I think - of account inactivity.

[Manicm]

Must admit i stopped playing online after getting beat so many times, i love playing online reminds me of my college days of doom networking. But i went from being pretty good for the first week of a game, and my stats would rise nicely on halo or gears, always the 3rd week it would go downhill and i was completely useless at it again. The matchmaking made me seem better than i actuall was.

The last time i played online was with you guys on gears 2 i think it was, had a great laugh but since then i haven't renewed xbox gold, i might do one day maybe.