When death is of little consequence (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Monday, August 11, 2014, 09:04 (3761 days ago) @ kapowaz

They've used the term matchmaking all over the place. Even in the Destiny UI the words beside the Finding Guardians spinner sometimes would say something like Evaluating Guardians. It'd be a massive story if PvP weren't matchmade. It being in seems like a basic part a Bungie game to me for, you know, the past decade...

It's worth mentioning that there's a distinction between “matchmaking” and a rating/ranking system (such as XBL's TrueSkill). I think it's become common amongst the FPS scene to conflate the two as meaning the same thing (possibly because a lot of the time they come together), but there's two distinct concepts here. The first of these concerns the creation of a group of players to throw into a game together and the second is transparently ranking individual player ability over the course of many games, and using this as one of the criteria when matchmaking.

Destiny uses matchmaking in Strikes, for example (note that the furore over the lack of matchmaking for Raids used that specific term). It also uses it for Crucible, but the question is whether or not it tracks and ranks players behind the scenes somehow, then uses that ranking when matchmaking. I have to imagine it would, because as you say it would be a massive deal if it wasn't (for one thing it would probably make PvP quite unapproachable for FPS newcomers).

Edit: I see in your replies above Bungie has confirmed they are indeed tracking and ranking players.

Edit 2: This is a reply, not an edit. Good one, kapowaz.