[JohnMakin]

I could write an essay on this (played since 2015) so I'm sorry if this is overly wordy and I hope it makes sense.

A long time ago they had a pretty basic MMR/matchmaking system that was being gamed pretty badly by smurfs. So, in an attempt to deal with smurfs, Epic made a really opaque blackbox "internal" MMR, that determines what kind of teammates you get. The reason this exists is because everyone tends to get lumped into "chokepoint" ranks - Diamond 3/low champ, C3/GC, and from there I think there's another one closer to SSL but I've only been a GC1 before so I can't comment on that experience. The reason for this is you can have a 60+% winrate in diamond and never leave diamond. That results in tons of players being in a rank they clearly do not belong in - very ironically creating an unintentional smurf problem they were trying to addresss in the first place - and this is exacerbated by a draconian rank decay/reset every season which only lasts a quarter. So, it's not entirely uncommon to see players with a GC tournament tag from the previous season (means they won a GC tournament, which means they almost certainly are SSL players) in low champ or even diamond. This is made even WORSE by the way that placement games work every season - pros have worked out it's almost always better to just sit out the first few weeks of a season before doing your placements, because you may accidentally get a really high "internal" mmr (the only purpose of these placements) by beating other smurfs in a low rank ladder.

As a result, epic has tried to balance this idiotic mess by pairing these types of players with lower "true" ranks. So, often when I am in high diamond/low champ I will have a literal carried platinum player with me every single time against another team with a guy who also has a higher "true" MMR and whatever "low" MMR player the matchmaking has decided he also gets paired with. I solo queue though, so this effect is basically a miserable experience trying to climb, as it's much more difficult for me to climb out of a low rank than other players closer to their "true" rank. And I have to repeat this process every 12 fucking weeks.

when I play casual, within 10 games the matchmaking immediately puts me in high champ lobbies. So, they know how to match make fairly, clearly - there's simply no mechanism in ranked to quickly rank someone up who very obviously should not be in the rank. It should not be possible to win 15 games in a row and stay in the same rank - every other game addresses this by quickly ranking up people on win streaks. For whatever reason, epic does not, and for this reason and all of what I listed above, the experience is absolutely miserable.

[batch12]

If it helps anyone else- The term 'smurf' is used in gaming to describe a player in an online game that creates a new account to play against lower-ranked players, however, it can be used as an all-around term for describing a player who uses an alternate account or multiple accounts.

Matchmaking Rating (MMR)

[stackghost]

Pretty sure that "Smurf" originated with the Tribes series, as you could create alias nicknames/accounts that showed up as blue in the player list.

Or at least, that's the first time I encountered the term.

[Cpoll]

The etymology I've heard is that it comes from Warcraft 2, where some top players made Smurf-themed alt-accounts after everyone started dodging them. That may be apocryphal.

[thoughtpalette]

I remember a guy on Tribes literally named Smurf IIRC. +]-[+ SmuRF or something.

[JohnMakin]

yea, sorry, these are common terms in that community I didn't explain, thank you. When I'm using it here it mostly means "someone who is intentionally playing in a rank they don't belong in"

[JohnMakin]

> when I play casual, within 10 games the matchmaking immediately puts me in high champ lobbies. So, they know how to match make fairly, clearly - there's simply no mechanism in ranked to quickly rank someone up who very obviously should not be in the rank. It should not be possible to win 15 games in a row and stay in the same rank - every other game addresses this by quickly ranking up people on win streaks. For whatever reason, epic does not, and for this reason and all of what I listed above, the experience is absolutely miserable.

Adding to this note, the blizzard card game Hearthstone has had the same notorious problem for as long as I've known (havent played in a few years no idea if it changed, I doubt it). They started to mess around with bonus mechanisms for win streaks, but largely before legend ranks (which worked with a much more sane ranking system) you would never be put in a higher rank if you went 50-0 vs going 200-150 - the game viewed that as exactly the same. The result was the same as with rocket league - huge rank choke points in which people were stuck for weeks playing players far above their own rank. Frustrating for both sides, and the only reasoning I can put behind it is they want you to spend more time grinding, and that's the only way they can think to do it.

[bonestamp2]

Very well said, it's so frustrating.

One thing that has always bugged me, and that I've never seen discussed, is that when I play solo they'll pair me up with two other solo players and then match us up against a 3 player clan!

Even if we all have the same rank, they're not at all considering the advantage of 3 players who play well as a team, and in the clan case... probably practice and play together a lot. Especially at the lower ranks, but sometimes in the mid-high ranks, a well organized team can demolish a random group of slightly higher ranked players who haven't established a playbook.

At times when the servers are saturated with players, I think they should only match parties with other parties of the same size. For example, parties of two would only be matched against other parties of two and then each party would get solo player(s) to reach the team size of a given match. Parties of three would only play against other parties of three, etc. I understand there are times of low liquidity and such matchmaking would be impossible, and that's fine... I'd rather play than not, but when liquidity is high then I'd rather wait an extra 15-30 seconds for teams and parties to be more balanced.

What do you think about party size aware match making?

[JohnMakin]

> What do you think about party size aware match making?

I'm heavily in favor of what you said, and yea, back in the day when psyonix owned it there was a mode called "solo standard" which was 3v3 but you couldn't join with a team. It was awesome, people who did well in that mode tended to be extremely good teammates - you kinda had to to succeed. As a result it was usually much less toxic. Epic killed that mode almost immediately and it made me super upset.

[bonestamp2]

Ah, that's too bad Epic killed it. Epic keeps temporarily removing snow day and that hurts too.

[JohnMakin]

Yea I have a whole rant about this too - it probably costs them very little to keep these mods alive. I don't know their backend at all, or their engines - maybe some minor engineering effort they deemed wasn't worth it per patch so they axed it. At least that's what they claim by saying it was removed for lack of popularity. Which is a little gas-lighty because they can completely control the flow of traffic into these modes via incentives. Personally, every mode they've removed except solo standard I haven't cared about much, but I always laugh when they do it because it cannot possibly cost them that much to maintain. Just terrible management and it suggests they have a tiny skeleton team with little bandwidth or deep knowledge of how to maintain it. They don't really introduce any updates except cosmetics, and almost never server code. And everyone's happy with that - the community's deepest fear from the outset was that they'd mess with server code or the physics engines, which remain much the same as the day the game came out - which is a good thing.

The game is unique and important enough, for whatever reason, as an e-sport that I think it should be preserved in some form and I think to epic's credit so far they've mostly preserved what was there. These things however are quite frustrating.

[bonestamp2]

I completely agree. I almost forgot about Football too, that's one of the best game modes and it's only around for 1-2 weeks/year. I get that they're probably licensing the NFL brands for that time period, but they could still offer the game mode void of any NFL branding at other times of the year.