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Overwatch had a feature where you could avoid players, but a top sniper was avoided by enough top players that he could never find a match. The matchmaking syst

Overwatch had a feature where you could avoid players, but a top sniper was avoided by enough top players that he could never find a match. The matchmaking system could never find him a match because almost all potential matches had at least one player on each team that had him avoided. The devs eventually reworked that feature so that he could play the game. Sometimes seemingly innocuous features have weird edge cases! Even for an average player, adding an avoid player feature would ultimately make matchmaking take longer. It necessarily reduces the number of valid matchings of players, so the system will only be slower. My guess is that average queue time is an important metric that management does not want to increase. It’s an especially tough sell because if you really wanted fresh players in your game, you could always not queue for a few minutes and you will almost certainly get all-new teammates.

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
Isn't it fair that if every player you play against decides they don't want to play with you, you shouldn't get to play? Obviously something is wrong with you. (A 4chan style let's-make-this-person's-life-hell attack notwithstanding)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Your parent comment specifies that the reason so many people were avoiding this guy was that he was good at the game. I wouldn't agree that that should mean he's not allowed to play.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- judge2020 4y ago
  It wasn't that this player was disrespectful/racist/etc., it's that they were so much better that playing against this player was almost a guaranteed loss.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    Wouldn't a good skill based matchmaking system take care of that?
    - ketzo 4y ago
      That’s the problem. this player was at the top of the matchmaking ladder that (very small) population had a lot of people who wanted to avoid him he couldn’t get games at his current level, and he couldn’t rise above that level, because there was nothing above that level
      - skybrian 4y ago
        Maybe that means he won the game and it's time to do something else until someone with similar skill comes along? Or maybe there should be a handicapping system.
        ketzo 4y ago
        There were players of similar (and higher) skill — but they didn’t want to play with him because he was “annoying” to play against. Which is a normal part of a competitive multiplayer game, except that people got the option to avoid him (rather than learn to beat him), so many took it!
        dandellion 4y ago
        If they were playing the game to have fun, it's an entirely rational decision to make, even if it's unfair to the good player. In fact if the developers were optimising the game for fun they should have kept the feature as it was. In my opinion it should be more important to optimise games for fun than for fairness, but I suppose the developers don't share that opinion if they changed it.
        judge2020 4y ago
        Optimizing for fun is kind of impossible, at least in the sense of making a fun but unfair game. Fun games are inherently ones where you're matched with players at your skill level, and you're actually being challenged while still getting kills. Going 30-0 is only fun for so long (and for the people who don't get tired of it, they often go and download a cheating program).
amatecha 4y ago
Right, it sounds like Overwatch's implementation was poor. I don't expect to have the player "unmatched" forever, or even completely unmatched for that matter. Just lowered in the "algorithm", probably including a cooldown factor so the "de-rank via reporting" is gone after some time. Like I said I don't care if matchmaking takes longer (usually it's only ~30 sec). The pool of players is utterly massive, and ranking one player down a bit would make a trivial difference. Yeah, I could wait a couple minutes and not queue up. But that's making it my problem that I had to deal with a toxic/abusive player. I already did my part and reported them, but now I also have to just not play the game for a while to make sure I don't get matched again? Indeed, my suggested solution of lowering their matchmaking "matchability" to me would benefit the community. Not to mention, the effect could be nullified if I am spamming unfounded reports against players constantly. I kind of just assume that a competitive multiplayer game under active development for the past 15 years would have functionality like I've mentioned above. Maybe it does, and it just hasn't worked well to prevent me from matching up with toxic players multiple games in a row.
- Nekhrimah 4y ago
  Overwatch's current avoid player system has a limit of 3 players, and only for 7 days per player - and no way to extend unless you run into that player again. Also, it's only avoid as teammate (which was alluded to in the top sniper story, but not specifically stated).
makeitdouble 4y ago
SPlatoon 2 had the same issue where people would block the best players to get more favorable matchings. It was reported to still mostly works that way for lower ranks, but they completely removed the effect for the highest tier (X rank). Inter-user features are always delicate to balance when it comes to competitive games.

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago

Isn't it fair that if every player you play against decides they don't want to play with you, you shouldn't get to play? Obviously something is wrong with you. (A 4chan style let's-make-this-person's-life-hell attack notwithstanding)

thaumasiotes 4y ago
Your parent comment specifies that the reason so many people were avoiding this guy was that he was good at the game. I wouldn't agree that that should mean he's not allowed to play.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
judge2020 4y ago
It wasn't that this player was disrespectful/racist/etc., it's that they were so much better that playing against this player was almost a guaranteed loss.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  Wouldn't a good skill based matchmaking system take care of that?
  - ketzo 4y ago
    That’s the problem. this player was at the top of the matchmaking ladder that (very small) population had a lot of people who wanted to avoid him he couldn’t get games at his current level, and he couldn’t rise above that level, because there was nothing above that level
    - skybrian 4y ago
      Maybe that means he won the game and it's time to do something else until someone with similar skill comes along? Or maybe there should be a handicapping system.
      - ketzo 4y ago
        There were players of similar (and higher) skill — but they didn’t want to play with him because he was “annoying” to play against. Which is a normal part of a competitive multiplayer game, except that people got the option to avoid him (rather than learn to beat him), so many took it!
        dandellion 4y ago
        If they were playing the game to have fun, it's an entirely rational decision to make, even if it's unfair to the good player. In fact if the developers were optimising the game for fun they should have kept the feature as it was. In my opinion it should be more important to optimise games for fun than for fairness, but I suppose the developers don't share that opinion if they changed it.
        judge2020 4y ago
        Optimizing for fun is kind of impossible, at least in the sense of making a fun but unfair game. Fun games are inherently ones where you're matched with players at your skill level, and you're actually being challenged while still getting kills. Going 30-0 is only fun for so long (and for the people who don't get tired of it, they often go and download a cheating program).

amatecha 4y ago

Right, it sounds like Overwatch's implementation was poor. I don't expect to have the player "unmatched" forever, or even completely unmatched for that matter. Just lowered in the "algorithm", probably including a cooldown factor so the "de-rank via reporting" is gone after some time. Like I said I don't care if matchmaking takes longer (usually it's only ~30 sec). The pool of players is utterly massive, and ranking one player down a bit would make a trivial difference. Yeah, I could wait a couple minutes and not queue up. But that's making it my problem that I had to deal with a toxic/abusive player. I already did my part and reported them, but now I also have to just not play the game for a while to make sure I don't get matched again? Indeed, my suggested solution of lowering their matchmaking "matchability" to me would benefit the community. Not to mention, the effect could be nullified if I am spamming unfounded reports against players constantly. I kind of just assume that a competitive multiplayer game under active development for the past 15 years would have functionality like I've mentioned above. Maybe it does, and it just hasn't worked well to prevent me from matching up with toxic players multiple games in a row.

Nekhrimah 4y ago
Overwatch's current avoid player system has a limit of 3 players, and only for 7 days per player - and no way to extend unless you run into that player again. Also, it's only avoid as teammate (which was alluded to in the top sniper story, but not specifically stated).

makeitdouble 4y ago

SPlatoon 2 had the same issue where people would block the best players to get more favorable matchings. It was reported to still mostly works that way for lower ranks, but they completely removed the effect for the highest tier (X rank). Inter-user features are always delicate to balance when it comes to competitive games.