Team Balancing and Matchmaking

Discussion in 'Monday Night Combat 360 General Discussion' started by joshdale, August 17, 2010.

  1. joshdale

    joshdale New Member

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    Last night was really frustrating trying to get into a lobby that was evenly balanced. It was either all the higher level players (30-55) were fighting the lower level players (0-20). I do understand if a whole team is partied up, but it's not the case if you back out and enter the same scenario in a different lobby (10-15 times).

    Have y'all seen or been a victim of this? For my sake, I guess I'll have to man up and grind out some levels, but it does get really frustrating when half the night you're trying to find a decent lobby.
  2. Porshapwr

    Porshapwr New Member

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    Yes I was complaining about it last night actually.


    1. My friends and I started a match (full 6 of us) and yet I got put on the other team. Why wouldn't MM wait until we had 6 others so that we could stay together?

    2. Is there any kind of actual skill rating behind the scenes like TrueSkill used? As the rank in MNC means nothing but how much someone has played.
  3. TrMako

    TrMako New Member

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    I've noticed this too. It really seems to be doing the exact opposite of trying to create "balanced" teams. Every single time there's an odd number of people, it'll stick all the level 0's and 1's on the team with less people, vs a bunch of people in the 40's or 50's. They'll be outnumbered by experience and people. It's led to a lot of boring games because the teams are so unbalanced.

    I honestly would not be surprised to learn that there is zero team balancing coded in to the matchmaking, that would make more sense to me than the fact that the team balancing is there and just so horribly off all the time.

    Does it try to balance based off of K/D ratio? Or win ratio? And somehow, it gives people with zero games or zero wins an infinite rating, and that's why they're always on the team that's outnumbered? Just doesn't really make sense to me.
  4. joshdale

    joshdale New Member

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    Yeah, I don't think there's anything really associated to a players true skill within the game, but the level does indicate how much they've played the game and in turn reveals some sort of experience and/or skill.

    You could argue that all stats (K/D, Win %, etc) indicate some sort of skill, but I doubt that there's any code matching up players of the same defined "skill." It would be nice to know officially what's the MM mechanism. :D
  5. Doom

    Doom New Member

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    If there's one thing I'd like to see added to the game, it'd be a separate playlist for people to play if they're going into MM solo (Like Merc TDM in CoD). It's annoying to go in solo and play a full party, and with a Mercenary style playlist you could actually get balanced matches by re-organizing teams based on money or something.
  6. joshdale

    joshdale New Member

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    Yeah, that would keep it statistically balanced.
  7. Qbakies

    Qbakies New Member

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    Somewhere on the forums the devs stated that Trueskill is used for the matchmaking. Perhaps it's somewhere in the long Q&A thread. Even so, I too have found that when I'm going solo I often end up in mismatched lobbies.
  8. joshdale

    joshdale New Member

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  9. scathis

    scathis Arbiter of Awesome Uber Alumni

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    Keep in mind that level is not indicative of player skill in any way. It's merely a measure of how much you played the game.
  10. Rolo

    Rolo New Member

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    Muhahahahahaha, that's because I bribed someone to make it so.


    The MM does need a few tweaks for sure, but so far, it's a very small complaint for me.

    Being able to easily choose who plays on what team in private matches is more important to me.
  11. Porshapwr

    Porshapwr New Member

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    :lol: Bet you didn't realize my team would be so awesome.

    /sarcasm
  12. Rolo

    Rolo New Member

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    Oh c'mon, you can't help the fact you outshined the rest of your team who combined had a total of 3 kills and built no turrets. A good player should have carried them to victory. Lol.

    The way I see it, if six of us go into MM, we should NEVER be split up, period.
  13. Porshapwr

    Porshapwr New Member

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    3 kills, no turrets, AND no robots built. I mean it takes real talent to be that oblivious to the workings of a game - nevermind to find 3 of those geniuses in one game.

    And I agree, no reason to split us up unless we have more than 6 people.
  14. Rolo

    Rolo New Member

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    Robots? You can spawn robots too?!?! :lol:


    Any dev care to explain exactly WHY we were getting split up? Does it have to do with wait times? As in, we'd have a really long wait time looking for another party of 6?
  15. Warskull

    Warskull New Member

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    I think a big problem is that true-skill is going to take a very long time to be accurate in this game. Bad players drag good players down and good players drag bad players up to make everyone look average.

    One major issue with the system is it balances teams the same way every time. This means the team that loses will probably continue to lose every time. Perhaps if people stay in the lobby it should scramble the teams a bit based on earnings. Top 3 earners get a trueskill boost, next 3 get a smaller trueskill boost, next 3 get a small trueskill penalty, and the bottom 3 get a larger trueskill penalty. The boost/penalty is only for that lobby and to help scramble up the teams a bit. Break the players in the lobby into 4 quartiles after the game and try and rebalance a bit using that. The only way lobbies get fixed is if the top players or worst players quit out.

    Trueskill is a good starting point, but I find in other games you need to manually balance lobbies after 1-2 games.
  16. dragonfist

    dragonfist Member

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    I can't find any matches with Lvl. 60's+
  17. Briq

    Briq New Member

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    There are definitely some issues with the team balancing in matchmaking. I haven't played with more than one friend, we're level 60 and 51 or something like that. We frequently get put in games with a wide variety of levels and often its all of the high levels against all of the low levels. Unless the low levels are partied there's an issue and I highly doubt they're always partied because of how frequently it happens.

    Another issue is getting split up as a party. Like I said I only play with one other friend, it shouldn't be hard to put 2 people on the same team in a 6v6 game. I'd say probably half of the time we enter matchmaking we have to immediately leave because we're split up. This usually happens when we're put into a game already in progress.

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