Matchmaking update: Season three retrospective and future plans
Looking back, we saw many changes go into Season Three to minimize role deltas in matches, and we wanted to take a look at the results we saw following the change. Let’s jump into the details with Senior Software Engineer Morgan Maddren and Lead Meta Designer Scott Mercer.
Role delta is something we’ve talked about previously on matchmaking blogs as well as the Season Three mid-cycle DevChat. “Role delta is the difference in skill between the best-paired players within each role across teams,” explains Morgan. “We implemented changes at the top of Season Three to minimize this difference.”
These changes significantly changed how our matchmaker works overall, and it took the team some time to smooth out the rough edges. But in the weeks following this update, we saw the difference in skill shrink between players across teams. “We learned a lot about the more complex dynamics of our matchmaker after this change,” Morgan elaborates. “Season Three was the first time our matchmaker started to pay close attention to the internal structure of matches, and of groups. It’s really exciting for us, because now that we’ve seen the new matchmaking tech perform in the real world, we have a bunch of new ideas for future improvements.”
The Y-axis represents the difference in MMR between the two Tanks expressed in Rank divisions. The delta between the two tanks in Competitive got closer between Season Two and Season Four.
This adjustment not only affected role delta, but it caused a chain reaction in other areas of matchmaking as well. “There were a lot of surprises for us with the new systems we built for Season Three, Morgan says “For example, the changes sped up queue times for the competitive mode without sacrificing match quality."
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