Guild Wars 2

I’m just curious about this Matchmaking player pick here… here’s the scenario.

By chance (low population) me and my bud got placed on the same team without duo queuing together. So that’s fine. When we got done we went back to queueing solo – he was perhaps a few seconds ahead of me but we both waited at least a couple minutes before we got a queue pop.

Why did Matchmaking prefer my buddy’s rank 250’ish to fight against sbooM aka Darek who’s mmr is 1785 in the below pic? My mmr is clearly around that level yet Matchmaking did not choose me against him and his team.

My game was a blow-out favoring me, 502 – 108.
My bud’s game was a blow-out in sbooM favor, 500 – 139

I get there’s a low population so matchmaking is grabbing players as fast as possible… but we were both waiting for a couple minutes where I got a game seconds after he did.

This begs my next question. If another player queues before me at any given time, does that person have “seniority” for matchmaking to look first, before looking at me, rather than something that’s done simultaneous? So by happenstance Matchmaking said “last call” and my buddy was the one, even though I was in the queue pool as well?

Time: Around 12:10AM – 12:11 AM CST 3/28
Accounts:
LucosTheDutch.4819 – Darek.1836 – Saiyan.1704

I’m that bud he’s talking about. Been having solid matches for the longest time, was climbing the leader board slowly but surely. Then I get 4 matches in a row against top players with nobodies on my team, resulting in 4 blow outs, resulting in being thrown off the leader board again…

Anet please fix your match making…

It was shown during last season that matchmaking builds up teams a bit unevenly, giving sometimes rather clear advantage to one of them and apparently it does that way more often than you’d think. Anet did reply to the thread as well, if I remember correctly the official response was that they are looking into it. In the meantime, all you can really do is pray that you either get equal enough teams or end up in the favored team.

LucosTheDutch.4819:

I’m that bud he’s talking about. Been having solid matches for the longest time, was climbing the leader board slowly but surely. Then I get 4 matches in a row against top players with nobodies on my team, resulting in 4 blow outs, resulting in being thrown off the leader board again…

Anet please fix your match making…

Man, that sounds exactly like my Sunday. Went from a respectable spot in the top 100 to a tanked rating. I should have logged, but like a stubborn kitten I ate about 100 points of losses in the blink of an eye with the same clueless people. After I nearly chucked a deathadder against the wall I promised my fiance that I’m done playing with the weekend warriors.

48 hours later and I still have absolutely no desire to play, so it may be a bit more than that.

Permafrost.2695:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

I’m that bud he’s talking about. Been having solid matches for the longest time, was climbing the leader board slowly but surely. Then I get 4 matches in a row against top players with nobodies on my team, resulting in 4 blow outs, resulting in being thrown off the leader board again…

Anet please fix your match making…

Man, that sounds exactly like my Sunday. Went from a respectable spot in the top 100 to a tanked rating. I should have logged, but like a stubborn kitten I ate about 100 points of losses in the blink of an eye with the same clueless people. After I nearly chucked a deathadder against the wall I promised my fiance that I’m done playing with the weekend warriors.

48 hours later and I still have absolutely no desire to play, so it may be a bit more than that.

Sounds like my Sunday. After those 4 blow outs against the top players, I stubbornly continued playing, and got a lose streak of 20 matches in a row. TWENTY LOST MATCHES IN A ROW! I think over half of those matches were against sbooM and other top 20 players while I’m barely top 250 myself…

At that point I figured my anger and rage was compromising my performance, so I quit playing.

I went from top Gold Tier 3 to bottom Gold Tier 2. It took me the whole weekend to climb from Gold Tier 2 to Gold Tier 3, and now I blew all that progress away in a mere couple of hours because of crappy match-ups.

I need to find a new hobby. <_<

“I need to find a new hobby”

SAB

Birman.1705:

It was shown during last season that matchmaking builds up teams a bit unevenly, giving sometimes rather clear advantage to one of them and apparently it does that way more often than you’d think. Anet did reply to the thread as well, if I remember correctly the official response was that they are looking into it. In the meantime, all you can really do is pray that you either get equal enough teams or end up in the favored team.

If this happens as often as you say it does, does that mean these bad quality matches have more to do with this glitch/bug/issue, rather than the often “low population” excuse?

I was playing on my alt last night with some random I didn’t know. I haven’t finished my placements on him but his invisible rating is probably still above 1800.

matchmaker has always been rigged to favor one side, most of you have just never been aware of it till this season.

Sooloo.1364:

matchmaker has always been rigged to favor one side, most of you have just never been aware of it till this season.

It tries to make teams of similar players. This has been in the matchmaking page on the wiki for quite some time.

Here’s how the matchmaker works in summary:

Note: A roster is who you queued with. It could be just yourself.

1. Take the roster at the front of the queue. This roster is called the “target” and is the base for selecting people for this match. The target roster will be in the match no matter what.

2. Starting at the front of the queue, create a list of “potential” rosters for the match which must all be within a rating range of the target. The range appears to be ±50 and starts increasing after 5min, but the rate of increase is unclear. If not enough potentials could be found, put the target roster at the back of the queue and start again at #1.

3. Start building teams. The target roster forms the basis of the first team. Continue the following until both teams are full:
a. Within the potential list (created in #2), find the best single roster to add to one of the two teams.
b. The “best” is determined by calculating the score of each remaining potential roster based primarily on time in queue, max roster size on each team, and how well adding the roster to either team keeps the ratings of the teams equal to each other. One point of rating differential is worth five seconds in queue (configurable weights).
c. Add the best roster to the team on which it scored best

One thing I noticed in the February 2017 edit of the wiki page (between season 5 and season 6), is that the rating screening for potential matches was changed. It used to double-pad and now it doesn’t. If that was a real change and not just clean-up of the wiki, it explains a lot.

Right now, from how I read the wiki, potential matches start out as ±25 from your rating. Before the edit it would pad both sides: (your rating – 25) vs. (potential + 25) and (your rating + 25) vs. (potential – 25). Finding a potential match within a range of 100 is a lot more likely than a range of 50. And probably just as reasonable.

Because the range is so tight, nothing happens for people near the top for 5min. Then at 5min, the floodgates open and the rating ranges expand dramatically. ANet didn’t list the Filter/Rating/@padding value, so I can’t be sure, but it looks like rating expands at 3/sec (so an additional ±90 rating by 5min30sec).

So if there aren’t 20 rosters in queue with 50 rating between highest and lowest, when you hit 5min you’ll be dumped into just about any match within a range of 200 rating. This seems to be the problem the top players are experiencing.

I’d like ANet to double-check the numbers and pseudo-code, particularly the missing Filter/Rating/padding value, but it seems like they need tweaked. I would probably set Filter/Rating/start to around 2min30sec, since the average queue time is just under that and this will only begin to affect the fringes. I would also increase the Filter/Rating/min value, but make Filter/Rating/padding more gradual.

Saiyan.1704:

Birman.1705:

It was shown during last season that matchmaking builds up teams a bit unevenly, giving sometimes rather clear advantage to one of them and apparently it does that way more often than you’d think. Anet did reply to the thread as well, if I remember correctly the official response was that they are looking into it. In the meantime, all you can really do is pray that you either get equal enough teams or end up in the favored team.

If this happens as often as you say it does, does that mean these bad quality matches have more to do with this glitch/bug/issue, rather than the often “low population” excuse?

It could be the case yes. Just lately Anet added a note that matchmaking will rebuild the teams if one or more players fail to click Accept button, meaning there was a slight potential for very uneven teams whenever that happened. However, in normal cases, why would matchmaking be happy about teams that are uneven more than just slightly is unclear. Once you have 10 people, building two teams is not very complicated. If what Exedore posted is correct then the “time in queue” factor might have too big of an influence on the outcome. Maybe it considers some more values, like the volatility of each person’s rating? Or maybe there are some checks that are either missing or not working properly that determine whether the result in progress or finished is good. Furthermore, it would be wrong to judge the equality of teams based on average rating only, because if one team has 4 low rating + 1 high rating players and the other team has all 5 players with ratings very close to the average of team 1 then that’s also a kittened up case. Can only guess what’s going on, since we can’t see under the hood. The result to us is somewhat visible though – ratings can be pulled for each player (although painful) and the match results themselves speak quite a lot – no, the enemy player is not getting lucky in every teamfight and capturing and player locations (being at the right place at the right time). It is all happening for a reason and it’s because the other team has higher rating.