Month: August 2015

As folks have continued to throw down in the Rising Thunder alpha, many have been curious as to how its matchmaking system works. In a game so dependent on online play, these systems are an important part to a player’s overall enjoyment of their time with it, so the developers recently provided an in-depth look at how they are pairing you with opponents.

Rising Thunder has two built-in programs running the show. The first, ranking tiers, are basically a tally of your win/loss ratio. As you score more victories, your tier placement rises; lose too many and you drop. Simple enough, right? Ranking tiers are also the only judge of skill made visible by the developers, as they are mostly meant to be “easy to understand and fun.”

Skill ratings, however, are where the real matchmaking begins. Much like the Elo rating systems employed by games like chess, League of Legends, and Magic: The Gathering, Rising Thunder uses a complex algorithm behind the scenes to produce a more accurate representation of a player’s skill.

While not shared with competitors themselves, these skill ratings combine with player locations and time spent in queue to determine who they are matched up with. “Basically the matchmaker juggles all these factors and tries to make the best match possible,” the developer post explains. “One of our jobs in the Alpha is to refine the matchmaking algorithms to get you more competitive matches that also feel awesome online.”

To provide an example of how this could change, an experiment was run to see what would happen if the matchmaker used both ranking tiers and skill ratings to find opponents. Though it still looked for matches in skill ratings, it also placed a preference on players within the same ranking tiers. Unfortunately, this increased waiting times online, and so they rolled the process back to its original build.

For more details on how they measure the “fairness” of this matchmaking system, be sure to check out the original post.

Source: Rising Thunder via Patrick Miller