Matchmaking: How Does It Work?

[zaskar]

Hypothesis:

 

The matchmaker takes into account total ship requisition earned by the ships in your chosen hanger once you have "locked" the choices via the launch button to decide if you are "new", "average" or "experienced". Currently only one "experienced" pilot is matched on a team of eight vs. "new" pilots if more than one is in the queue and their are more than eight but less than twelve pilots.

 

I don't think win/loss or any actual performance matters or if it did lesser pilots would be rotated in place of more experienced ones while the "average" pilots sit in the queue all day while 'experienced" and "new" pilots get match after match ad nauseam.

 

If pilots are in groups, it weights the group above all no matter what scores they may have within the group.

 

If the matchmaker actually looks at the data of each of the pilots and assigns a value to them based on past performance then that math is very much broken. It places the same pilots in matches over and over leaving medium and high ship req pilots sitting in the queue for 5-10 matches (hours).

 

This is an educated guess at how the matchmaker does things.

 

Problem:

 

All of this is wrong for how GSF actually is played. There are not enough pilots to make the matchmakers algorithm work, whatever it may be. People that want to play the game solo don't get too but groups of people that join matches in a group, to crash into rocks or capital ships over and over get matches all day long.

 

We know GSF is the kovge'tal verd'ika of SWTOR but can we get some love, before we stop playing (and spending money)?

 

There are some current issues with the gamemode, like everything that was broken in 2.9 and before. A bit of unblance and zero training at all. But if you lose your faithful, what the hell is left?

[Ramalina]

The matchmaker is primarily concerned with making matches happen as soon as possible.

 

The group queuing bias is a matter of filling teams efficiently.

 

You have to have the number of players on the two teams match to within two players. Getting a valid set of teams is easier to do if you slot the largest groups (3-4 people) into a team first, and then fill in the remainder with small groups or solo players. The algorithm seems to be set up to minimize the number of matches cancelled due to mismatch in team numbers.

 

So in order to do that solo queuers are slotted in after groups, because that makes it easier for a relatively simple algorithm to create teams with valid numbers of players on both sides.

 

As far as skill/gear balancing goes, it is not very strongly weighted in the matchmaker. You have to have a large surplus of players in the queue before it has a detectable influence, and even then it doesn't do a really great job.

 

Getting stuck in queue for a long time as a solo player isn't a skill/gear balancing issue, it's a balancing numbers of players per team issue.

 

If skill/gear balancing were strong enough to get a solo player stuck in the queue then GSF queue times would be glacially slow for everyone.

 

The other thing is that the matchmaker doesn't seem to care about capping someone's wait time (ie you don't get much increased priority for waiting a long time), and it doesn't try to average over time or predict the future of the queue. It wants to make a match as fast as possible with whatever is in the queue right this instant.

 

So on low population queues you find a very strong group preference, and you also find periodicity. So if you're "in phase" with a pair of valid GSF teams you'll tend to get into a whole bunch of matches in a row, but if you're out of phase you'll have a very long wait if you're solo queued.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

The matchmaker is primarily concerned with making matches happen as soon as possible.

 

The group queuing bias is a matter of filling teams efficiently.

 

You have to have the number of players on the two teams match to within two players. Getting a valid set of teams is easier to do if you slot the largest groups (3-4 people) into a team first, and then fill in the remainder with small groups or solo players. The algorithm seems to be set up to minimize the number of matches cancelled due to mismatch in team numbers.

 

While I understand that's the logic to it there seem to be distinct flaws. I was in a wargame match where I'm 90% sure it was a double premade against solos (mostly 3-5 shippers but still). So I think it may be queuing groups in a wonky way as that isn't the first time I've seen a wargame like that. I'd wager that if that happens in wargames (where it should be easy to avoid) it also happens in imp vs rep matches but is less easily identified (you don't know if those 8 enemy pilots were the only ones in the queue). Not sure whether it's an issue of queue priority, inability to redistribute players before they get out of the load screen after hitting "join match," or a combo of the two.

 

The other thing is that the matchmaker doesn't seem to care about capping someone's wait time (ie you don't get much increased priority for waiting a long time), and it doesn't try to average over time or predict the future of the queue.

 

It doesn't do this already? That seems absurdly stupid to have left out since that's going to really discourage people from queueing (especially newbies).

[Nemarus]

I think they covered it pretty well in this video:

[Verain]

Yea, that covers the technical parts, but if you want to see it in practice:

 

 

[Asbetos]

At the moment (with low population) I believe it's a simple FIFO (First In First Out) system with an exception when there's, say, 3 people missing but there's a group of 4 people in the queue. In that case it'll skip the last 3 solo players and send in the group of 4.

 

The attempts of actual matchmaking do happen in wargames. When we're queueing 2 groups at the same time, we always end up against each other in wargames, but, for whatever reason it doesn't always manage to do that as people have said before.

[Altheran]

It's just a guess, but I think that the game tries to make a balanced squad then a balanced 8/12/16-man "pool" .

 

 

I'm basing this hypothesis on two personal experiences

 

1. When I queue (solo) and there are a few other veterans, I am always put in the same squad as them. The most intriguing part is when I am in a 8-Rep vs 8-Rep, full of 2-shippers, and that 4-veteran squad is made anyway.

 

The only logical reason why I am never put in the other squad(s) of the team, but always with players of the closer caliber, is that the game looked for a 4-man squad made of balanced players, above all.

 

2. Then there also the thing when my bro plays GSF. He's in an Imp guild and are 5/6/7 players queing in two groups. Oddly the two groups are almost always together although facing them, there is at most only one or two Rep veterans and plenty of nobodies. Worse, the Imp team is often filled with Rep veterans who are tired of the 6/7-man stomping and switched sides. Result : 6/7 veterans vs 1 veteran. Nothing warrants that concentration of power.

But what is strange, is that it can't be explained by a lack of "noobs" since the next match may be a 8-Imp vs 8-Imp, with 8 new pilots. And that's the only time where the two guild groups will be "separated" if we can say so, as they'll be put facing each other.

And that's always like this.

 

The only logical reason is that the game tries to build a consistant 8-man pool or 16-man pool before to make consistant match-ups :

- the game considered Rep and Imp as two 8-man pools, made them "internally consistant", and faced them although completely unbalanced.

- the game planned the Imp/imp match as a unique 16-man pool. From these it was able to make balanced teams.

[Verain]

In seriousness, the devs would be fools to ever reveal how matchmaking (supposedly) works, if only because jackhats would try to exploit it somehow.

 

That being said, this is my actual, no hamsters, attempt at guessing a top level version of their alg:

 

1)- When someone queues, set a priority number to an initial value based on time stamp, and also read out "how mastered" the hangar they queued with is.

2)- In the case of a group queue, bump that priority up some- you've been "waiting" longer if you group queue.

3)- Every time someone joins the queue or every time some small delta (say, 15 seconds) of time has elapsed, run the matchmaker.

 

 

Matchmaker: If the matchmaker was called less than some amount of time ago (say, five seconds), just quit.

 

Look through all the available guys queued by priority number. This number could just be the timestamp, or it could be the result of a formula based on the timestamp, but what we know is, the longer you have been in queue, the bigger it is. If anyone's priority exceeds a certain amount (or if a certain number do), then we'll settle for ANY match we can make, and we are in "critical mode".

 

Build a list of the 14? highest priority guys in queue. Salt the "mastered" number of each ship up by some random (and moderate) amount. Now using the modified mastered numbered, make a match. If the matches of the top 12 are bad, try the top 8. If those are bad, then don't make a match- unless we are in "critical mode", see above.

 

 

 

I think it does something like this based on:

 

1)- Sometimes queues can pop instantly, without anyone else having seen them. This happens often enough that it probably reevaluates everything the moment you queue.

2)- Sometimes you can have a whole group in queue for awhlie and it won't make a match. Not a LONG time, mind you, but up to a minute or so, so my assumption here is that it will give a little bit of time if it can't make a fair match.

3)- Solo queue wargames will sometimes be EXTREMELY uneven. The most recent example here would be, I'm solo queued (17 mastered ships hangar, 5 mastered ships on bar), my buddies in mumble are group queued, the match pops- their four group (all mastered ships) plus my solo queue, plus another solo queue (all mastered) plus two guys I'm less sure about but their ships have some req, versus 8 two-shippers (WAR GAME, so it could have sorted us differently). But this hard fail is not the rule, it is an exception- so presumably the "salt" value added to masteredness, or the order of assigning can be deterministic and then changed before launch, or something is inserting some randomness, probably so the matchmaker can't be gamed.

4)- I'm almost certain that win/loss and other statistics aren't even glanced at. I think it's entirely which ships you queue with. If it was anything but that, we wouldn't have our whole hangar locked when queued. That extraordinarily burdensome measure is meant to prevent you from gaming the matchmaker, queuing with one unupgraded type 1 strike for matchmaking purposes, then switching in your full hangar. I know it SEEMS meaningless, but this must have been their design logic.

 

 

 

 

 

The reason we think there "is no matchmaking" is that, in practice, there really isn't. If 20 guys of varying skill on each side were to to simulqueue, I'm positive it would make two pretty good matches almost instantly. The problem is, people trickle in. The matchmaker is almost always, I'm CERTAIN, stuck looking at someone who was in queue for twenty five minutes- not because "there's no pops" or "no one plays GSF", but because IT MADE A MATCH AND THAT GUY WOULDN'T FIT. It can't set up a damned 9v9 or 7v7, it only has two things to try. So when a queue pops, from zero to fifteen players are left stranded. The matchmaker can't make a match with less than 16 (I guess it can try and guess forward, but then reduce the number a bit, and it's the same problem fundamentally). So if out of 30 would be GSF players, twenty four are kuat mesasing each other down and forming a deep hatred of battle scouts and rail snipers, six of them are posting on avatarless accounts about how GSF is dead.

 

The moment those 24 guys get out, maybe 18 requeue almost instantly. Now the matchmaker has to make that match STAT and those six who didn't get to play MUST be included. Except four of them are side A and suck, and two of them are side B and are good. It's going to have a hard time forming a fair match based on the small pool it has.

 

 

 

The only solution is the cross server thing. That would make it from up to fifteen orphans per server, to up to fifteen orphans per region or per planet Earth, likely a two order of magnitude increase in efficiency. There would be multiple games ending rapidly, so your odds of picking up a whole new crew instead of waiting for one of the (at most three, but commonly one or two) GSF games on your server would be negated. Instead of six players that waited twenty five minutes, the max wait time would drop to like seven minutes, and the matchmaker wouldn't always be putting out a fire of a twenty five minute wait time guy.

 

 

And note- you'll see that guy. I'll be queueing chain all night, and someone will be like "I just had to wait 20 minutes!" and I'll do the math and realize that he queued during a game, didn't get into the next one (probably based on legitimate matchmaking), and then was super high priority for the following, and is now under the impression that queues don't pop, despite only missing one pop, and probably for "good for the game" reasons.

 

But that guy won't always open his mouth, so try asking.

 

 

 

 

Anyway, that's my honest guess, based on performance of the system as seen from outside, as to about how it must work internally. The one thing I'm pretty much certain of is that a few players sitting in queue for a long time is something that essentially disables the skill based seeking of the matchmaker- it doesn't want you to wait for a long time, and if a second game isn't happening, you MUST wait for conclusion of the current game, at which point it WILL make a match with available players.

 

 

 

This, plus the slightly random behavior of the matchmaker, leads players to say that "there's no matchmaking". Which, I actually repeat. Not because I don't believe they wrote the software, or that they ninja-disabled it, but because in practice, on live servers, the matchmaking is not something you need to consider as a force.

 

 

 

 

 

Cross server is the only feature 3.0 needs. For GSF, for warzones, for whatever "light-bat the glowy plastic monster" the pve game is, all of it. It's a huge deal for them too, and they know it's a bugbear. The only people who wouldn't have their lives measurably improved by a cross server experience are dedicated raiders and solo grinders, who wouldn't be harmed by it (unless they went the WoW route with dynamic world folding and junk, but that's both very controversial and hugely expensive).

Edited September 23, 2014 by Verain

[Verain]

Another ancedote- a few months ago, we hosted a night on Bastion where we simulqueued as opposite faction guys versus each other. Example queue would be like:

 

Group E1- Four pilots with high req hangars.

Group E2- Two well reqqed guys.

 

Group R1- Four pilots with high req hangars.

Group R2- Three medium-low reqqed guys.

 

 

Groups would form instantly, and be all crazy. We would RARELY get E1 versus R1, despite having set them up SPECIFICALLY TO HELP THE MATCHMAKER figure it out (again, it's probably designed to be ungameable, even for its own benefit).

 

We would see stuff like: E1+E2 versus all two ship nubs in game A, game B is R1 versus random imperials, R2 nothing.

 

 

 

What was happening?

 

Well, the non-group queued guys were probably sitting around for the whole last match, the matchmaker unable to help them. When faced with a bunch of fresh blood, it probably didn't even wait for our simul queue to be simul (another reason I'm convinced it will run the moment someone presses queue)- even though all queued within a half second, it likely ran the MOMENT it had a valid match it could make- it was unwilling to wait EVEN 100 MILLISECONDS for the next guy to press queue to make a fair match. So say E1 queues first, it IMMEDIATELY looks and sees that it can make a match for the Republicans who were waiting patiently (not our groups), so it slots them PRONTO. The match is made long before R1 and R2 press queue- and if they had pressed queue first, it might have been different (not that we'd have any way to tell).

 

 

 

Basically, the matchmaker isn't happy if people are waiting for a full game and change. Those people need to get in pronto, or the play experience will be bad.

[zaskar]

I can't believe some of you actually think this works.

 

Just because its a group of x amount of people it should not be weighted higher priority, period. This is a queue exploit, premades queue up all day, end up two premades vs. 7 brand new players and a lone veteran. The same premades since they are worth more push solo pilots out of matches for hours on end simply because there are not enough people queuing to create two matches simultaneously.

 

There is a phrase I can think of for this but the profanity filter will just star it out so I'll call it what it is in much less colorful yet succinct language.

 

BROKEN

[Kcin_Trebla]

I can't believe some of you actually think this works.

 

Just because its a group of x amount of people it should not be weighted higher priority, period. This is a queue exploit, premades queue up all day, end up two premades vs. 7 brand new players and a lone veteran. The same premades since they are worth more push solo pilots out of matches for hours on end simply because there are not enough people queuing to create two matches simultaneously.

 

There is a phrase I can think of for this but the profanity filter will just star it out so I'll call it what it is in much less colorful yet succinct language.

 

BROKEN

 

Agreed. Indeed. Amen... and whatever you have to mean "that's it".

Broken.

C'm on folks, how can you even think to accept to put a group facing solos? Even if they are all on premades their advantage (comunication and coordination) will simply get the match to a ridiculous ending...

rofl

Edited September 23, 2014 by Kcin_Trebla

[zaskar]

Lets take today for example.

 

My hanger is

 

1. T1 Strike, 17k ship req

2. T2 Strike, 0 ship req

3. T3 Strike, 1790 ship req

4. T3 GS, 35k ship req

5. T1 bomber, 118k ship req

 

(ya working on strikes for achives)

 

I have seen six matches start and finish and I've yet to get into one. All the players in the matches are either *new" or *intermediate* no *advanced* pilots.

 

They have been matched each time to a double premade that destroy them.

 

This is not healthy for the gametype, all those new players will simply never queue again.

[ALaggyGrunt]

@OP: It doesn't even try.

 

Probably it just goes First In/First Out.

[Verain]

This is not healthy for the gametype, all those new players will simply never queue again.

 

That's probably ok though.

 

I mean, if you queue up into a pvp game and get grouped against an elite squad of players, and your response is to quit?

 

Good riddance.

 

The game needs players, not babies.

 

 

 

 

The response *should* be, "how do I fix this"? And then work towards that. Just because the new player can't solve it that very second- remember "solving it" involves defeating four to eight coordinated and skilled players, so he should be helpless before them, by the very nature of what pvp should be- doesn't mean he should give up. Do you really think that this one (I'm assuming real) double premade is there 24/7? Of course not. He should be motivated to practice, get a team, etc.

Edited September 24, 2014 by Verain

[zaskar]

That's probably ok though.

 

I mean, if you queue up into a pvp game and get grouped against an elite squad of players, and your response is to quit?

 

Good riddance.

 

The game needs players, not babies.

 

 

 

 

The response *should* be, "how do I fix this"? And then work towards that. Just because the new player can't solve it that very second- remember "solving it" involves defeating four to eight coordinated and skilled players, so he should be helpless before them, by the very nature of what pvp should be- doesn't mean he should give up. Do you really think that this one (I'm assuming real) double premade is there 24/7? Of course not. He should be motivated to practice, get a team, etc.

 

If I was new and played one of those matches I would say the game was BROKEN for putting my completely green *** into that situation. Even if I spent 10 minutes in the horrid tutorial I would not have been prepared in anyway for a double premade from the same PVP and GSF focused guild. To say anything different is being destructively obtuse or trolling. You're usually somewhat constructive, bad morning?

Edited September 24, 2014 by zaskar

[Magira]

 

The game needs players, not babies.

 

 

The spell is worth a price. The golden lemon, or something.

 

This attitude is to blame for the sorry state of PVP itself. Some arrogant snob make PVP impossible for almost everyone else.

Edited September 24, 2014 by Magira

[Devrius]

Matchmaking? What is this matchmaking you speak of? There's no such thing in GSF, when you queue it's just a waiting line until a match is filled, for example: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=15s0wp4&s=8#.VCMzcfldWqk

 

Some guys where obviously flying GSF for the 1st time, I wouldn't judge them too harshly for thinking GSF is "broken" and not queuing anymore after something like that...

[TrinityLyre]

Here's how it works:

 

Enough players queue up for a game: Create game, randomly assign everyone (group queuers stay together).

 

... yeah, I'm pretty sure that's as far as the algorithm functions in practice. In theory... well, since the theory never applies, does it really matter?

[HuaRya]

I can't believe some of you actually think this works.

 

Just because its a group of x amount of people it should not be weighted higher priority, period. This is a queue exploit, premades queue up all day, end up two premades vs. 7 brand new players and a lone veteran. The same premades since they are worth more push solo pilots out of matches for hours on end simply because there are not enough people queuing to create two matches simultaneously.

BROKEN

 

After GSF'ing since launch I feel exactly this way. Often I wait ten plus minutes only to get on a team of what seems to be the brand new f2p two ships versus the four ship premades. I used to think it was faction specific but regardless of faction whenever I queue solo it's me leading the two shippers against the four ship premade who are so lazy they only use gunships and have a scout and/or fighter to run interference to mix up the noobs in the middle so they can take pot shots at them.

 

I enjoy and appreciate GSF but sympathize with the haters of space pvp because often times their first experience is playing on the noob team that gets slaughtered. I know GSF would be wildly popular if the matches were balanced.

 

The only way this will happen is to only allow a premades queue pop if an equal sized premade is available to face them on the opposite team.