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If I took up soccer, I'd be unlikely to join a team with some 8 year olds - even though I'd probably be at their skill level. Instead, I'd find a group of peopl

If I took up soccer, I'd be unlikely to join a team with some 8 year olds - even though I'd probably be at their skill level. Instead, I'd find a group of people who I'd get along with better. So why do games do matchmaking based only on skill, not taking social cohesion into account? There's much more to a good gaming experience than just having skill-balanced teams. CS:GO is a classic case of this - the player base is noticeably more mature at certain times of day, and there's a distinct period when all the kids have just got home from school where things are particularly bad. Occasionally you'll get a team where you everyone works together well, but to have that every time you'll need to spend a lot of effort maintaining a huge friends list in order to be able to put a team together at any given time - rather than just pressing the matchmaking button. (I think you could might get decent results on this by having each player rate the others at the end of the match - but you don't use the ratings to rank the players, instead you'd use them to cluster players based on who they mutually like to play with. You'd then use that as a variable to optimize on when doing matchmaking. Hopefully with enough data you'd be able to predict if players would have a good experience even if they've never played together before.)

nordsieck 8y ago
> I think you could might get decent results on this by having each player rate the others at the end of the match - but you don't use the ratings to rank the players, instead you'd use them to cluster players based on who they mutually like to play with. Dota has a system like this called "behavior score". I know it works based on reports, but it might include other things like text analysis or item feeding. It seems to work pretty well.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Since matchmaking has taken over, I basically don't even play online multiplayer games anymore. I feel fortunate to have grown up in a time where there were dedicated server communities. It's a bit like Cheers, sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name and you don't really mind that they routinely wipe the floor with you.
Mirioron 8y ago
>So why do games do matchmaking based only on skill, not taking social cohesion into account? There's much more to a good gaming experience than just having skill-balanced teams. Not enough players. Any matchmaking system requires a large number of players to be playing at once to work. People are generally unwilling to wait several minutes or more to get into a game. The problem is that this has a cascading effect: the longer your queue times the more people will quit and the longer your queue gets. Below a certain threshold the system breaks down. If you start classifying people based on criteria such as social cohesion then you increase matchmaking time even further. There are some games that could have a matchmaking system like this. But no developer knows in the development stage that their game is going to have this kind of popularity, which means that this type of matchmaking would have to be built after the fact. At that point you risk ruining something people like about the game. Another thing to keep in mind is that player numbers fluctuate significantly. The number of players playing at 5 am between Monday and Tuesday is much lower than the number of players playing at 7 pm on a Friday evening. You would have to change matchmaking algorithms based on time of day or activity. You would also have to change matchmaking algorithms based on skill level. At the very top end matchmaking is going to be long due to there simply not being enough players at that rating. This can have a negative impact on the retention of players, because popular streamers usually have a high rating. Watching a stream of matchmaking queue isn't very interesting and doesn't make people want to play the game. Then there's the question of whether you even should do this. People make friends in games. If a game introduces matchmaking on social cohesion you essentially put players into a filter bubble. We see from Facebook and Reddit that these kinds of filter bubbles aren't ideal. I think one of the coolest things that I've got from games is that I've interacted with and made friends with people wildly different from me.

nordsieck 8y ago

> I think you could might get decent results on this by having each player rate the others at the end of the match - but you don't use the ratings to rank the players, instead you'd use them to cluster players based on who they mutually like to play with. Dota has a system like this called "behavior score". I know it works based on reports, but it might include other things like text analysis or item feeding. It seems to work pretty well.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

Since matchmaking has taken over, I basically don't even play online multiplayer games anymore. I feel fortunate to have grown up in a time where there were dedicated server communities. It's a bit like Cheers, sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name and you don't really mind that they routinely wipe the floor with you.

Mirioron 8y ago

>So why do games do matchmaking based only on skill, not taking social cohesion into account? There's much more to a good gaming experience than just having skill-balanced teams. Not enough players. Any matchmaking system requires a large number of players to be playing at once to work. People are generally unwilling to wait several minutes or more to get into a game. The problem is that this has a cascading effect: the longer your queue times the more people will quit and the longer your queue gets. Below a certain threshold the system breaks down. If you start classifying people based on criteria such as social cohesion then you increase matchmaking time even further. There are some games that could have a matchmaking system like this. But no developer knows in the development stage that their game is going to have this kind of popularity, which means that this type of matchmaking would have to be built after the fact. At that point you risk ruining something people like about the game. Another thing to keep in mind is that player numbers fluctuate significantly. The number of players playing at 5 am between Monday and Tuesday is much lower than the number of players playing at 7 pm on a Friday evening. You would have to change matchmaking algorithms based on time of day or activity. You would also have to change matchmaking algorithms based on skill level. At the very top end matchmaking is going to be long due to there simply not being enough players at that rating. This can have a negative impact on the retention of players, because popular streamers usually have a high rating. Watching a stream of matchmaking queue isn't very interesting and doesn't make people want to play the game. Then there's the question of whether you even should do this. People make friends in games. If a game introduces matchmaking on social cohesion you essentially put players into a filter bubble. We see from Facebook and Reddit that these kinds of filter bubbles aren't ideal. I think one of the coolest things that I've got from games is that I've interacted with and made friends with people wildly different from me.