CCP Rattati wrote:Thanks for the feedback.
Traditionally matchmaking is referred to as the "selection of the 32 players in the battle".
For each player, an index (ELO like) is calculated, that is based on the individuals Win/Loss ratio. At the end of each battle, that index is updated by the battles result. A players index will go higher (or lower) until theoretically converging to the index value that where they win exactly 50% of their battles as they are consistently fighting players who are at equal skill.
By selecting 32 with similar indices, theory says that if that selection is robust and effective, the 32 should be similar enough to make a fair fight. However, due to many factors, this selection is very inefficient and results in very disparate players skills as most of you know.
That wouldn't be a problem as long as the teams are balanced, from any team sport it is known that is all right if the good players are properly mixed, even better than just fighting people of your own skill so you can learn from your betters. I play soccer and hate nothing more than one-sided matches with unfair teams, as they are bad for everyone, it's absolutely not fun to win either. That is not the case either with poor Scotty.
Therefore. and I have mentioned that recently, we are working on getting improvements on the teambuilding algorithm instead, basing it on the most effective way on splitting the 32 player pool into as perfectly equal teams as we can at the beginning of the battle.
The current design is to collect around 40 players, of the most similar skill we can without making the wait period too long. If Scotty is working, then they will be similar, if not they will be disparate.
Then all squads and units will be aggregated into team units. The parameter aggregated will be Lifetime Warpoints/Lifetime Battle seconds, Lifetime Warpoints/Lifetime Deaths or Lifetime Kills/Lifetime Deaths. The units are then ranked and distributed.
The aggregation will be sum so large powerful squads will always be fighting each other. Because of the various number of squads and squadmembers per squad, we may need to use lower ranked units, so as to not exceed 16 on each team. Then the remaining 8 players will be reseeded back into the waiting pool to be matchmade again.
Other known battle issues such as not joining battles that are already over/decided, joining empty battles on one side, "squad free" modes(squads fight squads only, solo vs solo) are also on the plan, but lower priority than team balancing improvements.
Thanks for reading