Matchmaking balancing seems broken

[mankinskin]

I regularly get into really unbalanced games in matchmaking, last game I had was 14% and one before that was 57% balanced. How can this be? Its really annoying when you just lose in a teamgame because of this.

The matchmaking should really only allow games above a specific boundary or at least not allow premade teams to break balance. 14% balance is unaccaptable and just a waste of time.

[BlackYps]

Please post some replay ids so we can investigate the issue

[mankinskin]

• 20806391 link 4v4, that is interesting because now it shows 71% (from 14% earlier) after one person has apparently played their first game and won... now he is rated 1092 ... from 0 to 1092 in one game (talking about player "Rigadoon" here)
• 20805901 link 3v3 74% here my team was actually on the winning side
• 20805770 link 4v4 57%
• 20782487 link 4v4 20%
• 20694871 link 3v3 71%
• 20784272 link 4v4 51% it seems a lot worse for 4v4 games

another problem related to this is when one team has a lot of rating concentrated on one player. it depends on the map if this is an advantage or disadvantage but it almost always feels unbalanced even if the balance rating may be above 90%.

[mankinskin]

A way to solve this might be to require people to play 1v1 ladder and use that as a proxy for the tmm ratings when they have 0 tmm games. Then balance below a threshold should not be allowed. And the distance of each player to the average rating should affect the balance rating. When there is one 2000 player and a few 500 players vs a few 1000 players, depending on the map that may be an advantage or a disadvantage. Generally more mexes means the 2000 can expand way more and dominate the 1000 players. few mexes means the 500s will block the mexes and not use their eco as efficiently as the 1000s. Either way it is unbalanced so it should not be rated as well balanced.

[BlackYps]

We already use global rating as a baseline to initialize the tmm ratings. That is why the first game you linked seemed to have this rating jump from 0 to 1092. In reality the displayed 0 rating is a visual bug, it was 1092 already, that's why the match launched, because the actual balance was good, even though the game reported it as low, because it falsely got that guy as 0 rated.

And the distance of each player to the average rating should affect the balance rating.

This is already implemented

• 20805901 I see no issue here. There is less than 500 rating difference between the players, which is generally regarded as fine.
• 20805770 unbalanced by 150 rating and less than 400 rating difference between the players
• 20782487 I can see the issuethe ratings of the players are spread out a lot
• 20694871 same here
• 20784272 same here
  The thing is that we don't know if some of these players are premade, but regardless of that we have a tradeoff between match quality and waiting times. That also explains why it is worse for the 4v4 queue. That one is just a lot less active. On top of that, new players get more lenient matching, so especially in the low rating ranges it can happen that games that are not ideal (at least from the pure numbers) are launching.

[mankinskin]

we don't know if some of these players are premade

but that must be possible to determine during balancing?

tradeoff between match quality and waiting times

yes that is obviously an issue, I see at most 20 players in matchmaking queue at a time so an ideal balance will not always be possible.

One issue I think that should be addressed though is that games are rated with high balance when there is a huge disbalance within the teams. Especially on point mirrored maps, where the symmetric spots dont actually play against each other, this can turn out extremely unfair, because the best player of each team plays against the worst of the other team.

In general the balance within the teams should be included into the rating to hopefully get a bit more balanced games.

On top of that it might be a nice feature in the client if you could set your minimum balance rating. That way players could decide how much they are willing to wait for a better game. But that is probably a bigger change.

Also when one team is very unbalanced and the other is balanced, that also creates an unfair setting depending on the map.

[BlackYps]

but that must be possible to determine during balancing?

What I am getting at is that a high rated and a low rated player in the same game might be because they were premades.

Trueskill doesn't take rating distribution into account in the way you describe, which is a limitation we have to work with, but in the long term it doesn't matter because these unfairnesses will balance out. Some times you are favoured, sometimes you are not, but in the end you will converge on an average rating that is fitting.

Being able to set a minimum balance rating sounds like a nice feature on the surface, but is unfeasible and also not desireable. This feature has been discussed at length and the conclusion is that it is just not viable.

I know that some matches feel suboptimal, but as I said it is a game of tradeoffs and I feel we are pretty much at a local optimum right now.

[mankinskin]

in the long term it doesn't matter because these unfairnesses will balance out

That may be true but the issue is not really getting an inaccurate rating, but having unfair games. Its not fun, no matter which side you are on. An unbalanced game will either be frustrating because you lose or boring because you win easily. Its primarily a game quality issue.

Trueskill doesn't take rating distribution into account in the way you describe, which is a limitation we have to work with

That is unfortunate, because I feel like that is the only issue that could really be improved. It is impossible to know how well someone will play when they have zero games, and when there are no players in queue you can't make a better game. But making unbalanced games because TrueSkill doesn't detect it seems a bit unnecessary. Possibly there are alternative balancing methods which take intra-team balance into account? Otherwise I imagine it could be simple enough to scale the balance rating by some inverse distance of each player in a team from the average rating of all players, so that more "spread out" ratings are discouraged? It seems like an option that could at least be tested.

[BlackYps]

I'm not sure if we are talking about the same thing. Do you mean the rating changes after a game or how people get selected for games?

[mankinskin]

How people get selected for games. Its not really my issue what rating I end up with, I would just like to be matched into games that are as equally balanced as possible.

[BlackYps]

the matchmaker already discourages matches where the ratings are spread out

[mankinskin]

Oh really? Okay, because some of these games were still rated very high in terms of balance.

[BlackYps]

Ignore the balance percent rating. This is the trueskill balance metric that is not accomodating for rating spread. It is not used by the matchmaker. For the matchmaker we use a custom algorithm to determine how balanced a game is

[mankinskin]

aha, understood. Maybe that could be an improvement to show the actual balance rating in the client? 😅