Why Matchmaking Sucks... and How It Could Be Fixed.

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It's so sad that because of Namco Bandai patent on mini games during loading screens so very few games implement it. Even though it got lifted in 2015 everybody got so used to it that we're still very rarely see it implemented.

This is something a number of fighting games already do. When waiting in matchmaking, you can be in training mode honing your skills. An extra minute or two practicing perfect parries could be the difference between a win and a loss.

Yup, loved it when they added mini games in Splatoon match making, sad when they removed it in Splatoon 2, and was excited to see the physical lobby in Splatoon 3

4:09 you ranked them ping, queue time, skill verbally, but the graphic showed ping, skill, queue time.

Most of the big fighting games that have come out in the last couple years allow "training mode matchmaking" where you sit in training mode while you wait for a match. You can even set some up to use the stage and opponent from your last match so you can try labbing things from the fight you just had. Its *great*.

What if there was a way to combine different types of matches? So while one side wins points from kills, the other wins points from terrain control. Or King of the Hill vs Capture the Flag, where one team wants to man a specific location while the other keeps running back and forth across the map. Could be interesting...

One idea for dealing with the loneliness of high skilled players is having an asymmetric mode where it’s 1 high level vs a few of low. The high has experience and map knowledge to make the fight balanced. Plus it would encourage players to earn the high level to play as the boss.

Psychological perception of queuing is a well studied field with applications from coffee shops to theme parks. It has a lot of existing ways to make you feel happier while waiting. Distractions are one of them, but so is grounding your expectations (and often artificially beating it). I think providing an estimate is really useful for some games, especially if they have high variance in queue times. Knowing whether I can get up to take a quick break is great, but often I’ll worry a game might start while I’m out and maybe I’ll get AFK kicked. Solid estimates help respect the player’s time and let them find their own entertainment… maybe watching a YouTube video that just fits under the wait time.

Huh! I never noticed that about elevators! Mind blown!! 🤯

I miss when you could join Valve tf2 servers, from the server browser. Rather have a higher ping, then being stuck with bots swarming the local servers. Goes to the nightly active community server.

I think this is a very surface level analysis or at least an analysis of just one genre of games. And not only genre but also scale. Stand by queue is the absolute standard right now, if the games you play don't have that, it's either stuck in 2015 or the devs just don't know how to do it. And people are willing to wait quite a few minutes especially in smaller scale games. But for the big games, where queue times are already basically instant, people are also very willing to wait just that bit longer for a higher quality match And there are games too small to have a match making system and they have to rely on public lobbies and organized events And also Elo is not an anagram, it's the name of the dude who invented it

There's another factor to consider. Not "what makes a good match" but "what makes a human BELIEVE that had a good match". For a very large number of players, a 'good match' is one where they fairly effortlessly dominated their opponent. They find 'close matches' stressful and any loss at all is a fault of the game and 'poor matchmaking' that 'makes them lose'. Now, while you have some segment that plays your competitive PvP mode to be, well, competitive in the true sense of the word - to get better, to test themselves against others who are a real challenge to them, and to 'be the best like no one ever was' - real competitive players are a minority next to faux competitive players. These players want to be told they're really good, and get all the dings, and crush enemies, but they mentally wilt instantly when things don't go well, when someone else wins. They SAY they want the hardcore PvP experience but what they WANT is to be the big fish in a small pond, to be the best player amidst a group that won't actually challenge them in a way that takes effort. There's big overlap here with ragelords who become toxic and disruptive when they don't get to be MVP every match, every time, but I'd actually like to drive towards a different issue: The people from the above paragraph DO have a point, even if they rarely know it to say themselves. Giving 100% effort every match, like you need to in a true competitive environment, is less "having fun at a game" and more "working hard at a job." Part of why matchmaking gets so much hate to it is that the goal of making every game as close a competitive match as possible, isn't necessarily the same as making the match "relaxing and fun". BUT, conversely, a match lopsided to where one player can relax and dominate the scoreboard without putting in their best effort... is a match where the losers are having a really bad time getting kicked around by someone they never should have been matched with. Streamers want to show off getting 10x killstreaks - you can't get a 10x killstreak if every duel is 50/50 with an equal opponent. Joe Gamer wants to grab a beer and unwind after work by winning some rounds of PvPFite - he can't unwind if he has to put his best effort forward, every game, every time. And yet if we DON'T match like every match is true-competitive, then while the streamer and Joe Gamer are having their fun, Bob Gamie is getting his face wrecked in an obviously unfair match. There's probably more factors than I can count that go into why this is so hard to do in online games compared to casual sports offline. Casual sports games, you're usually playing with friends or at least coworkers, where 'fun' is a shared concept. If my team is up five touchdowns on the other team in a game with friends, I won't feel great, I'll feel guilty. I'll WANT the game to be close because part of my fun is all my friends there having fun too. An online PvP match is a hoard of complete strangers, and its very hard to get the 'average person' to emotionally connect to an anonymous opponent they don't know and will never see again. Offline casual sports I can just quickly swap a player, "Hey Joe, go swap with Jim" and they trade jersies. Online obviously not. And if I was tired and exhausted and already grumpy, I would excuse myself from a competitive game with friends because I know I am not in the best spot to interactive competitively with people, yet, a lot of people don't emotionally engage with PvP games as if there are real people on the other side.

If an issue with matchmaking is that people who are very different from most players, like someone with a high level or maybe someone who has much higher ping than most players or something, then developers could make it so that the longer yoy wait in a queue, the faster the range of acceptable level or whatever else expands, so that if you're like level 1000 it's not taking 10 seconds for each level it expands or something like that, but for normal people things still take a regular amount of time

Why not add a visualisation of the matchmaking progress? So players have a idea why it takes so long. Maybe add player preferences for what metric to drop first?

Honestly i really like TF2's complete lack of matchmaking by skill- it's a weird thing to say but like I feel as though the game actually works much better when theres a very random mix of skill levels, something about how it can sorta feel like everyone's off in their own little world (as long as its evenly-ish distributed between teams which is usually is cause 24 players is a lot)

Being able to join a game in progress seems like it would eliminate one of those huge splits in the population. In a sense, you make the game its own mini-game. This could require some gameplay changes to make work better. For instance, a match could support a variable player size, like by expanding or contracting the play area to allow adding and removing players to an existing match. Another gameplay possibility would be that players added during an existing match had an onboarding process where their ability to affect the match gradually grew over time to both prevent them from changing the match balance and let them get a feel for the match before being tossed in. This onboarding could be something like a ghost mode where players had to perform some task like activating a portal to walk through or to take over existing weak NPC bots before being able to interact with players in the world.

4:05 ping, queue time, and then player skill huh? Weird way to spell them, but whatever.

One thing I saw a bit of correlation is how this works in larps especially the more sport like boffer larps. You are drawing on a relatively small pool of people with widely differentiating skill levels. Now when you have a small group like I do you can separate and everyone has to play everyone. But it feels less unfair playing with a mix of skills than it does in a game. I have a few theories as to why and how to implement them into games. Balance Teams So when we set up teams we try to balance them as evenly as possible. We balance the classes first and then skill levels. This can be achieved by searching for players by classes and pooling them together and then averaging the two teams player scores. This can still cause imbalance team like one really good player stuck with a team full of newbies but sometimes in larp we have to do that. Prestige When your playing a larp you really don't get any credibility stomping new character unless you take out a bunch at once. Usually its more strategic to take on people more of your skill or team up against higher level players. Now in Larps you are playing the same people over and over so you know who is good and who is not. So if you have teams with with skill levels you should have an indicator of how high or low they are so you'll know whether to engage or retreat. This could be done with colors like people who are lower than you are green, people around the same level are yellow, and higher ones are red. You get more points taking out red players but not much of anything for green. This will make it harder for better players and now beginner players to be able to fly under the radar because the others going after your better teammates. Teaching Now this I'm not sure exactly how to implement this into a game but in Larps one of the ways people get betters is from the higher level players teaching the lower level ones. Now I've done this in the middle of matches but outside of combat is where I can show them stuff discuss on what they did well and where to improve. This builds community and friendship and though not everyone does it I think its vital to a sustainable game. The only thing I can think of on how to implement this in games is have a training lobby where players can meet and work together on tactics and drills. I hope that's some ideas but I'm sure other larpers or people who play similar games could add to this.

I personally really like it when this is solved by having a computer/AI player of a skill level similar to yours stand in for missing players when your elo gap reaches a certain threshold, so that you can always have a somewhat fair match. Nothing is worse to me than being stuck with only very unfair matchups just because only very different leveled players are available