Yesterday, Frost Giant Studios released their newest community discussion post – this one talking about different matchmaking approaches. As presented there are three different approaches to a matchmaking system: Global (all players are in the same player pool), Regional (players are matched and pooled by region – you’d have to swap regions to match against those regions), and a mixed approach, where players are matched globally but sorted into regional ladders and leaderboards.
From Frost Giant, a Global approach has the following benefits:
- it reduces the time to get matches against players of your skill level, even in non-prime time hours for NA/EU;
- it increases the size of the player pool, better matching opponents by skill level, resulting in better-quality matches;
- it simplifies live operations;
- it simplifies playing with friends who live far away;
- it makes it easy to see where you match up compared to the rest of the world;
- and it reduces the mystery behind “who are the best players in the world?” for esports purposes.
In contrast, these are the benefits of a Regional approach:
- Regional matchmaking has a higher likelihood of players in a given pool matching, which leads to more accurate regional MMR;
- Regional matchmaking directly answers the question: who is the best player in this region? It avoids the confusion of playing matches against out-of-region players when trying to climb a regional ladder;
- Without regional matchmaking, players from one region may end up dominating a global ladder;
- Many players would say that they prefer regional matchmaking because latency tends to be lower and that a low ping is more important than skill parity for better-quality games.
They also ask several questions of the community, as they tend to do in these community posts:
- What would you think of a global ladder that could also be filtered by region?
- Would you enjoy facing players from other regions while trying to climb your ladder?
- Would you like to see separate MMR and ladder rankings by faction?
- Do you have any fears or concerns about global matchmaking?
- What if there were rules in place to make it so you’d not have to play any matches with 130+ms pings?
- What region/country/city are you in and what would you consider “good” latency for an RTS? What is the highest latency you’d find acceptable?
If you want to contribute, make sure to contribute to the reddit post!
Getting Involved
As always, if you want to engage with the Frost Giant developers and get information from them as they post it, you should sign up for their newsletter, head on over to /r/Stormgate on reddit, and sign up for the beta and wishlist the game on steam!