Practical matchmaking (gear-based)
There isn't enough players in the game at the moment to have pure skill-based matchmaking implemented. And with 10x more players it's still not gonna be enough.
I want to propose simple & practical solution to the issue of "making the matches feel fair", it will work based on gear up/down scaling:
we have 4 armor pieces + 1 weapon piece (lets ignore rings + gems for simplicity) ... with every piece ranging from white to legendary we get 25 possible gear-levels
whenever a player queues up to an arena match, his currently equipped gear scales up or down depending on his win-rate (targetting 50% win-rate) ... the passive properties of his gear stay, the only thing that changes is the gear color (or it's respective stats that come with it)
this kind of scaling:
depends purely on how you perform, pushing you in the "correct" direction (helping you if you are underperforming, providing you a harder challenge if you are overperforming) ... hence it is simple to implement
it works regardless of how many people play the game equally well
25 gear-levels should provide enough of a room to make the match fun/fair even for a complete beginner vs a veteran
hard to fool/abuse (you only get "better gear" if you are losing arena games)
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Comments1
norwnd
Feb 16
The proposed system can also be easily “combined” with more advanced MMR-based one (eg. as a fallback in cases when the primary system can’t find opponents of similar skill level).