Matchmaking - they admit it. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Friday, January 22, 2016, 09:06 (3323 days ago) @ Kahzgul

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 rarely play multiplayer. Most of the time I've done so because of a specific achievement, quest, or weapon I'm after that requires it, and so far I've got all the ones for Taken King that I'm going to. However I'll try and make a note to record some footage next time I do have reason to be in crucible or IB.

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.

That IS what I mean. Unless Destiny is using a ring architecture, someone lagging in the game does not lag you. It only lags them. So sometimes when the server is correcting itself, you'll see the lagged player warp around a bit. However to that player, just about everybody is warping around a bit all the time, as the client tries to predict where players will move and the server corrects them.

Unlike, say, an old game that literally uses a ring architecture, where the world state gets passed around the ring, and everybody has to wait until the slow, lagged player catches up with everybody else, and is frozen until they do.

That kind of design absolutely warrants keeping high and low latency connections segregated. Modern multiplayer clients do not.

Nobody is getting cheated out of what appear to be legitimate kills more often than the person who is lagged-- not everybody else in the game with them. If you're talking about somebody shaping their network traffic-- that is something else entirely and should be detected and dealt with wherever possible.