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[capnjosh]

Last week we made 3 adjustments to matchmaking:

 

1. Tighten tolerable MMR limits for manually joining matches in the Server Browser (also tolerances used by MatchMaker).

  - Decreased from 500 to 425

2. Increased the time the MatchMaker takes to expand the MMR tolerances when you're in the MatchMaker queue.

  - It can take up to 2 minutes to get a match if your MMR is well outside any current server's MMR

  - Yes, by entering the MatchMaker queue you *will* get a match, even if you can't manually join a server via the Server Browser.  Take it as a compliment - you're amazing at this game ;)

3. Private servers now ignore MMR and are no longer included in MatchMaking

  - You will always be able to join a private server if it's public or you have the password

  - Users in the MatchMaker queue will not be put into matches on private servers

 

 

Here are the charts showing what happened:

 

Avg MMR spread on teams (top line is winning team, middle is losing team, bottom is deatchmatch):

 

How often does someone's manual Server Browser request get rejected because they are outside the fitness range of the server:

 

 

The first chart seems to indicate teams have tighter MMR spreads - approaching what they were before any changes to the matchmaking configs were attempted.  The second chart indicates an additional 15 users per day are now encountering at least one instance of being prevented from manually joining a server because their MMR is outside the server's tolerances.

 

 

What now?

 

I want to further tighten the MMR tolerances.  My goal is to protect matches in the 1200-1400 MMR range from predation by higher-MMR pilots ;)  I believe reducing it to 350 may be good enough.  Here's a chart that shows why.

 

This chart shows 2 things - avg kill spread on each team and the avg MMR of the highest-rated player on each team:

 

Note the 1800 MMR number.  1800 - 350 = 1450.  Something around 58% of all user-matches happen below 1450 MMR.  Reducing the limit by 75 MMR theoretically would protect an additional 15% of all user-matches from encountering significant MMR-based imbalance.

 

So, here are the things we will be changing, and we can all watch the outcome through the fun of refreshable reports:

 

1. Reduce MMR tolerances for Server Browser and MatchMaker from "<avg MMR of server> plus or minus 425" to "<avg MMR of server> plus or minus 350".

  - This *should* result in tighter MMR spreads and kill spreads, both within teams as well as between winning and losing teams.

  - This will likely result in more users getting rejected requests to manually join a server.  I really don't want this number to get too high.

  - Note that private servers now ignore MMR, so you should be able to readily join those any time.

 

2. Increase the time it takes the MatchMaker to guarantee a match for users with MMRs well outside of any any available server's MMR tolerances.  2.5 minutes, up from 2 minutes.

  - This should result in more appropriate servers being selected.

  - I want feedback on this one.  The risk is too much annoyance for our elite pilots.

 

 

I want to emphasize that I do not consider these changes to be the end-all.  Matchmaking in the wild is inherently an iterative process, and I'm trying to give a picture of what that's like.  These changes are not the best one could imagine - they do, however, represent what we *can* do right now.  When we start releasing new client and game server builds, we will be able to improve on things like midmatch balance, server browser filters, and getting more variables to be considered in the MatchMaker algorithm.  For right now, we tune the existing parameters and find out exactly what happens.