Polygon: Ten Key Questions (Destiny)

by squidnh3, Wednesday, April 30, 2014, 19:13 (3859 days ago) @ Cody Miller

3. Why not just use trueskill to match players with similar skills levels and gear?

It seems pretty obvious that this "delay" is for a variety of reasons, one of which is that it will drastically improve TrueSkill's ability to create good matches.

One of the huge problems with TrueSkill is that the first matches you play could be against pretty much anyone, resulting in a high incidence of lopsided games. It's also very frustrating to be matched up with new players on your team that have yet to even learn which buttons do what. Do you learn how to play basketball by jumping into a pickup game? No, you practice dribbling, shooting, then you try to put them together in a game. Forcing players to play a little bit and learn the mechanics before jumping into PvP will improve both their experience and the experience of the players that are already knowledgeable.

A second thing about this that helps is that it has a good shot at reducing second accounters. Halo has been full of people starting new accounts to destroy players at the low end of the TrueSkill curve: by adding this delay in, it will add a level of annoyance to this behavior that will discourage it, while still being reasonably short for a player with a more legitimate reason to start a new account. This should lead to an improvement of the TrueSkill player distribution, resulting in better matches for everyone.