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  1. #1
    Lead Developer / Designer Gondorian's Avatar
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    New Much-Improved Matchmaking is live

    Players have been reporting for a while now that they could be waiting quite a long time to get paired up if they are at a low rating. This was particularly bad if on zero rating, which means our new players got the worst experience! NOT GOOD! (Apologies for sounding like Donald Trump.)

    With this weighing heavily on my mind, I've spent a fair amount of time trying to conceive a solution for this that doesn't compromise the ability of the pairing system to put players against opponents as close to their rating as possible (which is needed when you are going for Top 250 on the Best Score Leaderboard), and thankfully I came up with a solution the other day that I tested and believe to help those on low rating without affecting those on high rating (i.e. 300 or more).

    It's just gone live about 30 minutes ago.


    OLD SYSTEM EXAMPLE

    (Assume no one is waiting at the start.)

    Ross hits BATTLE! and there is no one to be paired with so a Waiting game is created for Ross.

    Nik hits BATTLE! and his rating is compared to Ross. If the gap is close enough, they are paired up and are now Playing; if the gap is too wide, then Nik also creates a Waiting game.

    Maxi hits BATTLE! and his rating is compared to the other players who have Waiting games, starting with the player who has rating closest to his. If someone in close enough range is found, then Maxi is paired with them and the other player continues waiting. If no one is in range, then Maxi creates a Waiting game too.

    Buqs hits BATTLE! and we go through same decisions as were made for Maxi.


    This system has a fundamental flaw that the time spent waiting is not taken into consideration when choosing the order to process the Waiting games.

    And it's not as easy as just adding some bonus to the rating to cause the long-waiting game to get picked first. Here's why:

    * Players up the top end will start being paired with very low rating players who have just waited a long time.
    * Waiting time will start causing bad pairings to be picked when there are two or more reasonable pairings available.
    * The system still depends on a long waiting time to occur to be eligible to be paired with someone normally outside their range, when our goal is to reduce waiting time as much as possible.


    NEW SYSTEM

    As above but with two differences:

    1) all players at 0-150 rating are treated as though they have 150 rating for the purposes of pairing. This means they are all considered in the range of someone at 250 or less from the outset.

    2) the order of processing Waiting games is determined first by the rating gap and then by the time the Waiting game has been waiting.

    These two changes mean that any player under 150 rating will get priority over any other player under 150 rating if they made their game first! This did not happen before. The player on slightly higher rating would always get paired first. The lower rated player would just have to keep waiting until the next opportunity, which they also were likely to be overlooked on due to their rating being lower than most.


    ADDITIONAL SERVER CHANGE

    Since this could lead to people being paired more regularly with players below 100 rating, the Gold and XP reward for matches has been made universally the same regardless of rating of your opponent.

    A nice side-effect of this is also that anyone writing a guide or describing how much Gold/XP you get for a result will just be able to say some numbers without caveats!

    RATED WIN = 80 gold and 400 XP
    RATED DRAW = 40 gold and 200 XP
    RATED LOSS = 0 gold and 100 XP (each successive loss reduces the amount of XP you get until you get a win)

  2. #2
    Lead Developer / Designer Gondorian's Avatar
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    As far as I know, this is going well, but I'd be interested to hear your subjective experiences on this.

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