Director’s Take – Making a Great Match

news.blizzard.com:

Two weeks ago, we talked about balance and matchmaking in our blog update. Matchmaking has continued to be a big topic in the community, and it's something we've been focused on internally. If it's important to you then it’s important for us to talk about, so I'd like to update you all on what we're seeing and doing.

One note before we begin - I think we're at risk of sounding like a broken record with our communication on matchmaking. "We're working on it and it's getting better" isn't the best message, especially when players are still experiencing bad matches. So, I wanted to share some data to help you better understand the state of matchmaking and the impact of some of our recent changes. Let’s get into it!

Over the past week, we’ve made changes to the system that have brought down the skill gap between players in a match significantly for high and low MMR matches. If you look at the Ranked Skill Difference chart below, you can see two spikes that negatively impacted match quality in Season 3 and the recent changes that have started bringing this back down. We’re almost back to where we were when Season 3 started.

Looking at the high MMR group (GM players and above), roughly half of our matches have an MMR range of about 4-5 divisions, while 25% are at a difference of about 5-6 divisions and the worst 1% of matches are at roughly 10 divisions. Grouping behavior drives a large part of this gap – remember, in Masters, players can group with other players who are up to 5 divisions apart.

Competitive Role Queue Intra-match Player Delta Percentiles

High Ranked

Medium Ranked

Low Ranked

█ = 50th Percentile █ = 75th Percentile █ = 95th Percentile █ = 99th Percentile

Okay, so that’s where we were as of March 6. Let's talk a bit