Matchmaking - they admit it. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, January 22, 2016, 04:37 (3323 days ago) @ narcogen

Yup. "Skill based" matchmaking is confirmed. Not discussed is the "closed loops" of skill players only being matched against the same pool of teams and players repeatedly, regardless of match outcomes. Briefly mentioned is that they are working on addressing how the current matchmaking is causing latency by not prioritizing connection quality. Also not discussed is how their netcode gives an advantage to lagging players.

As a lagged player, I call bull. There is no such thing. When you miss a kill on a lagged player and consider that an unfair advantage because that player is teleporting around the map, you have to realize that from the perspective of that player, everyone else is teleporting around the map. All the time. Snipers are useless. Shotgun blasts at point blank range become vain shots into walls and empty air. Super kills are something other players get because you always seem to die before your activation animation finishes.

So this is interesting. Would you mind posting some vids so I can see how the other half lives? I can say that usually the lagged players I encounter aren't the highest scoring, but they absolutely help their team by soaking rockets, supers, special ammo, etc... In Trials I've faced many teams that were pretty clearly lag-switching, too, where one guy would be totally fine for most of the match, and then suddenly lag run into a wall. A second later he teleports elsewhere and all three of my teammates die to simultaneous shotgun blasts. The way Destiny handles lag is exploitable if you turn off outbound traffic while leaving inbound traffic active.

I think the bottom line here is that if matchmaking worked while prioritizing connection quality, they'd do that. It's not hard to do from a technical perspective. Heck, it's probably the easiest way to do matchmaking. There's apparently not a large enough population and not a large enough overlap between "players with good connections close by" and "players with similar skill levels" to accommodate both all the time without incurring large wait times, so they've opted for that method. They'd be making more players less happy by either putting them in matches against mismatched players with similar connection speeds, or forcing them to wait even longer, when wait time is the other thing players love to complain about.

They just said in the update that they're aware that their current matchmaking isn't respecting connection quality enough. Seems to indicate that they are capable of adjusting it in that fashion.

Unless Destiny is using a token ring architecture there's no reason to force all high latency players to play together.

I didn't mean making a game with all lag all the time, but rather to keep people who consistently lag out games cordoned off in their own areas (so people in Siberia would only get matched with other Siberians). Eh, it's much harder to do when you have a fireteam and not purely solo players.