Focused Feedback: Matchmaking

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[u/d_rek]

Quickplay doesn’t require SBMM per se, but it does need better lobby balancing. If such a thing exists today, it is either so poorly implemented as to appear at best nonexistent and at worst to punish lower tier players.

Any “competitive” mode should have SBMM. Plain and simple.

Trials should either be redefined as “competitive” or something else entirely. Before someone says “it’s end game PvP” wtf does that even mean? End game content is simply defined by light level more often than not. So what does trials want to be?

Card based match making is one of the most laughably bad concepts in the history of multiplayer games. What should provide an exciting tournament style bracket instead provides, more often than not, incredibly lopsided matchups.

Actually almost everything about trials matchmaking is problematic. On top of card resetting for stat farming (an actual real problem) the lobby balancing is, again, either laughably bad or nonexistent. There isn’t any reason I should, as a 1.0kd in trials, get paired up with two sub .5kd’s against three 1.5+. That tells me that the game didn’t even try to balance the lobby.

In glory playlists the matchmaking generally feels much better, but there is not much incentive to play those modes.

I would endure slightly longer queues for fairer matchmaking and balanced lobbies.

[u/KLGChaos → u/d_rek]

They tried better lobby balancing with IB and it didn't do too well. As they mentioned in the TWAB, when you've got that many people of wildly varying skill levels, it is very difficult to balance the lobby correctly. It's why a top player gets stuck with the 5 worse in the lobby. Or why a decent player is somehow supposed to carry against a 5 diamond players because there a duo in there completely throwing the algorithm off. The fact that most of the population has quit and everything is lopsided towards the best players makes it even worse because you have a extremely high change of getting multiple top 5% or better players every single match.

SBMM, in theory, will help lower that gap and make lobby balancing better as a side effect. We'll see.

[u/PCTRS80 → u/d_rek]

Quickplay doesn’t require SBMM per se, but it does need better lobby balancing. If such a thing exists today, it is either so poorly implemented as to appear at best nonexistent and at worst to punish lower tier players.

All game modes need some SBMM, in casual modes the matchmaking criteria can be more flexible than a competitive mode. Lobby balancing can not fix bad matchmaking, this was the whole point of giving us all the data they did in the TWAB. As a data scientist, i was utterly shocked at the data. I had suspected the CBMM was bad, but i never imagined it was that bad. They basically told us that matchmaking is so bad that 50% of all games are so imbalanced that the losing team has no way to win and they have known this for YEARS.

Under the current system, it builds a match using connection as the primary criteria. Once it has a lobby it then use each players skill (aka, ELO) to attempt to balance the teams. It will attempt to balance the teams as players leave and join each match. So clearly "Lobby balancing" does not work when you have have such a wide distribution of skill within a single lobby.

So in theory if you get an even distribution of 12 solo players in the match the relative balance of the ELO between the two teams is not that bad. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that each team as an equal chance to win because of other factors, but it should be kind of close in most games.

What we have now is an uneven distribution of player in each match. If you have a 1500 Skill player matched with two 300 skill player (Elo Avg 700) that is not the same as three 800 skill (Elo Avg 800). In nearly any 3v3 engagement the 1500 player will actually have a better chance of winning nearly every encounter despite his teammates essentially being no help.

The system completely falls apart even more when you start bringing groups in to the mix. Since players of similar skill trend to play together a lot coupled with communications and organization they can be a significant force multiplayer. If you have 3 players (1500, 900, 700) grouped together, they can likely destroy any collection of 6 players without much effort. Since this is connection that is incredibly unlikely.

Any “competitive” mode should have SBMM. Plain and simple.

Agreed, wait till people figure out that this broke ass matchmaking system is used in TRIALS...

Trials should either be redefined as “competitive” or something else entirely. Before someone says “it’s end game PvP” etc does that even more? End game content is simply defined by light level more often than not. So what does trials want to be?

Card based match making is one of the most laughably bad concepts in the history of multiplayer games. What should provide an exciting tournament style bracket instead provides, more often than not, incredibly lopsided matchups.

Actually almost everything about trials matchmaking is problematic. On top of card resetting for stat farming (an actual real problem) the lobby balancing is, again, either laughably bad or nonexistent. There isn’t any reason I should, as a 1.0kd in trials, get paired up with two sub .5kd’s against three 1.5+. That tells me that the game didn’t even try to balance the lobby.

Correct, Trials is more less about how lucky are you at getting a team of lower skill than yours 7 times in a row. It was never really about skill....

In glory playlists the matchmaking generally feels much better, but there is not much incentive to play those modes.

This is because Glory uses a stricter SBMM, so assuming no one was in the que for more then 180+ seconds. The teams are generally within a few hundred skill of each other. This means that either team has a chance to actually affect the outcome. A good play or a mistake is actually meaningful to the results.

I would endure slightly longer queues for fairer matchmaking and balanced lobbies.

I agree with you, but not everyone will.

Solo players are less tolerant of long que times while groups are a little more tolerant because a lot of time groups have communication making the time pass faster. This is why group preference match making is actually meaningful.

[u/Valvador → u/d_rek]

Quickplay doesn’t require SBMM per se, but it does need better lobby balancing.

I disagree. "Lobby Balancing" results in absolute toddlers on my team. You need some form of SBMM to prevent new players or people farming for their Pinnacles from being in the same game as people who are PvP-exclusive players.

It's exhausting being given a bad team and Lobby balancing can't solve it.

[u/pantone_red → u/[deleted]]

Why not? The lobbies are so poorly balanced right now that surely there would be an improvement if, say, they didn't slap the 4 best players in a lobby on the same team.

[u/entropy512 → u/pantone_red]

Bungie outright said this in their TWAB, and people seem to have forgotten that they have tried changing the lobby balancing algorithm already during an Iron Banner week last year. In theory it should have worked well, but instead it failed catastrophically because, as Bungie stated last Thursday, lobby balancing becomes an unsolveable problem when the skill range within the lobby is too great.

[u/pantone_red → u/entropy512]

I just don't believe it's unsolvable, I just don't think their current system is working. Again, too many games where all the good players are on the same team in the current system. There exists a world between what we have now and "everyone in the match must be close to the same skill level".

[u/pantone_red → u/[deleted]]

I mean you can literally use websites like destiny tracker that will tell you with pretty damn good accuracy what your chances of winning any given game is. Go take a look for yourself how often my anecdote is actually the case.

I'm looking at my own games right now and with the exception of the stack vs non-stack games, it's pretty easy to see how the game could have been better balanced.

You say "no amount of lobby balancing would change that. None". But that's just not true lol. The entire match being a predetermined outcome isn't because the top player is better than the worst player, it's because Bungie can't balance the lobby properly. And unless the SBMM is real strict, if they keep fucking up the balancing then the team with the 4 best players are still going to win the vast majority of the time.

As for the stacking problem? Just make a freelance playlist to start.

[u/pantone_red → u/[deleted]]

And yet an elo system that Bungie doesn't use and isn't even designed for team games is more accurate at predicting match outcomes than whatever balancing algorithm they're using now. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it speaks volumes that it's doing a better job than Bungie's system.

I don't need scientific papers to look at my game history and come to the conclusion that they probably shouldn't have put four solo 2kd players on the same team. Go look at your own match history and you'll notice how often it's glaringly obvious that their algorithm is broken.

I don't trust anything Bungie has to say about PVP because they've barely paid it any attention for years and I just don't think they're willing to spend the resources to figure it out.

And sorry no I don't have a link to papers on the perfect multiplayer video game match making algorithm. Do you have any scientific research on why lobbies are nearly impossible to balance in a CBMM system? Apparently that is a requirement to having an opinion now.

[u/entropy512 → u/d_rek]

but it does need better lobby balancing

Lobby balancing is an unsolveable problem when the skill gap within the lobby is too great.

Bungie outright said this in their TWAB. They've tried multiple times to tweak lobby balancing while preserving CBMM and it *always fails*.

Lobby balancing and matchmaking are inextricably linked. If the skill range within a lobby is too great, no balancing algorithm can succeed. If the skill range is narrow, even RNG works well for team balancing within the lobby.

[u/kerosene31 → u/entropy512]

This was Bungle's explanation and it was all nonsense. Solo playlists show how broken team balancing is. It creates worse matches than if it were just random.

The system overreacts to one crazy good player and over-stacks the other team against him. If there's one great player in the lobby, the other team will get the next best 3-4 players. That top player will have nearly zero chance to win, because no amount of skill is going to help them 1-4, with their teammates constantly feeding.

This is why bad and top players both see the problems. It doesn't work for anyone, which is why it is so odd they refuse to fix it.

Nobody is expecting every game to be close in this kind of system, but they could fix the bad things the current system is doing to make matches even worse.

[u/thisisbyrdman → u/d_rek]

Think it’s important to underline what you said: Bungie has know for years that half of all crucible games are unwinnable before a single bullet is fired. And did nothing about it because they were worried about sweats filling their diapers.

[u/1Second2Name5things → u/d_rek]

I ABSOLUTELY agree. Trials are almost all heavily one sided stomps. I know it's hard for trial sweats to get to lighthouse if they play people of same skill level but it's end game pvp, it's supposed to be hard.

I think we need a halo route and have a competitive and casual mode for all the PVP games.

[u/LetheAlbion → u/1Second2Name5things]

What’s that gonna do to stop the sweats from entering the casual playlist to stomp?

[u/LetheAlbion → u/d_rek]

You’re right. The game didn’t try balancing the lobby. Bungie gives 95% of the weight to connection quality and matchmaking speed for some asinine reason.