Vainglory Matchmaker - Technical Discussion

My own experience of casual matches is that MM doesn’t apply or is implemented differently from ranked (just a couple of screen grabs below). Since I’m only ever playing casual for build and hero testing it doesn’t concern me but I can see why this would be immensely frustrating for some.

In ranked I feel it’s working, I typically get drafted in or around my tier level. However I’m very dubious as to the quality of the people in my tier, perhaps it’s because 5v5 is new but people don’t seem to understand basics. It’s left me very frustrated recently, and in the last week I’ve considered quitting VG as I can’t stand one sided snowball matches game after game.

1 Like

That is exactly why I don’t play Cas…
That is what I am so afraid of…

In cases like this one, it can’t be too hard for the matchmaker to balance it out, can it? you’d think something like an internal calculator would do to balance it out - try and make the total sum of all ranks on each team separately add up to be as similar as possible…

I don’t know, I know nothing about coding, computers or calculators, so I may be wrong in saying it’s easy but considering I could do it in decent time in my head I doubt it would take that long

1 Like

Parties are the root of all evil when it comes to matchmaking. Getting a duo or triple que party of unskilled players is a nightmare.

@Glowarm and I just met again in soloque. Twas a nightmare of a match with so called poa players on our side who were horrible… And that is at roughly the same VST…

Just a warning … a LOT of these posts are waaaay off topic and are going to get hidden when I get time …

Please, no one get offended. It’s nothing personal, but this is supposed to be a technical discussion, as mentioned in the original post …

the actual difficulty is, your pool of players to chose from is always changing.
some players start to q and leave it before a match starts, other players may fit better into other games and you HAVE to put sth in place that prevents anyone from waiting too long for a game.
add to that you get the best games, when all players are roughly on the same level. if there is too much difference inside the individual teams, the game wont feel balanced, even if the numbers all add up.

add to that that the number might not be correct (new players, smurfs and old returning players all might not have a correct matchmakerrating)

so matchmaking needs to do the following things all at the same time:

  • fit every player in the q into the best match possible
  • do that in a really short time
  • account for players joining/leaving the q

to account for the time, the mm will widen the accebtable team compositions for players not fitting into a game as their q time progresses (all to keep the q short and to get them a game)

now how to solve this?
you could try to form games around the player that are the longest time in the q, but have to find the optimal teams out of several options. (and maybe wait for the one player giving a good chance for a good match) that doesnt sound trivial to me.
add to that the teams of 2 or 3 you have to match around.

1 Like

Yeah I do understand this. My point is, as in @Ve3nNo0wM’s picture, once the 10 (or 6) players have been locked in, the matchmaker could decide on who ends up on which team in the way I explained. Obviously the match still wouldn’t be completely fair, but it might have made it a little more even. (unless, of course, they were partying together, in which case there’s not much you can do.)

parties would be a good guess. parties get matched against slightly better opponents most of the time.
also, dont forget that visual tier might not be the same as mmr here.

1 Like

I solo queue 95% of the time. I am PoA bronze right now. I only play during what I think are peak times 6-12 pm EST and when I see lots of people on the weekends. Matches typically vary by 1 tier, PoA gold to SA gold. At some point between 3-4 mins it appears the bands open up to two tiers, PoA gold to Hotness gold. I think it steps one grade (gold, silver, bronz) at a time and by 5 mins, it’s a full 2 tiers. This is VST so it’s pretty meaningless this early in the season. I also suspect win percentage factors. I flux between winning 65-70% on my climb from Hotness to PoA and I consistently was matched with people who last season were PoA and at the top spectrum of the matching tier. For example, I would be SA bronze and most players were last season PoA. I’m regularly the lowest current VST ranked person in my matches also. The past ranks are based off the match up screen which shows last seasons tier so this may or may not be meaningless. The current ranks are based on VGPro.

That’s in terms of ranked, the problem comes with casual.

I suspect casual is pulling off a separate elo from rank or just pulls the first 6 or 10 players it can which is why you see large VST differences. I’ve queued into pro players in casual in the past. VST is not reliable info especially early in a season.

MMR for each mode is indeed independent.

I never find a match before 4 min and it usually hits 6+…

That would explain most of my matches.

The 20+ min ques are the worst…

I almost never take more than after 5 mins for solo rank 5v5. Most matches take right at 4 mins and 2-3 mins is pretty rare. I look at VGPro after every few matches because if you wait few days it skews the VST. I think this is one of the best iterations of the match maker for 5v5 rank.

There has been more dodging of late. The quality of the matches is really good. I have only had a few matches out of 100+ of intentional throwing. There have been a few smurfs, vgpro makes it obvious. Hmmm, every match you have is 20+ kills on bottom tier win rate hero with less than 20 matches played, ok. Even at PoA there are lane abandoners like a Top lane Petal or enemy teams with 5 carries and no support.

7 min que for 3v3 so pretty bad…

I believe VG should at least be transparent in who it is matching you up against in game. Here is a message I sent to them before, but got no reply:

"I would like to bring to attention an issue where I feel is important for the transparency of the Matchmaker. I think it is important to show either through the loading “vs” screen, scoreboard, or post-match results which players are in a team. Attached, you can see three examples of different mobas that do this: In Overwatch, it is shown in the hero loading screen, in LoL and DotA it is shown in the scoreboard.

This is important because it at least will tell you if you are matched with a 2, 3 or 4 man stack, or if you are up against a full team or partied opposing team (which in theory, should never happen, right???). I think it will just ease the minds of players who feel like they are disadvantaged by being matched against full teams when they only have a two man stack on their team. And even if the matchmaking timer maxes out at 8 minutes or 6 minutes or whatever, it would at least be nice for it to tell us if we’re up against a party or not.

Thanks,
Frustrated Solo-Queue-er."

If they showed who was in the party in the loading screen or in the scoreboard, you would at least know what you were up against. This information should also be rolled out to API as well, so as to have better analytics on parties vs. individuals or parties vs. parties.

2 Likes

we were in a 5 man party and waited arounf 4 mins queue and we were matched against them.I mean look at the ranks. After first match we queued again and we were again matched against them like why?
And no the unranked dude on the enemy team was certainly playing on a smurf.

In what mode? I always reach a max of 4 min.

Any basically. Ranked 3v3 and 5v5.
I get full blown idiots everywhere. I only played two games and I am done for today. Skye going spellfire Eve… No damage…

The incompetence levels at my supposed level of play are insane.

First pick in draft and you pick Ardan. Enemy pick Vox and Lyra=GG in 3v3…

I just played with a kestrel that had, at minut 15 SF and CW, only 19 farm… funny thing is that the enemy was just as bad, she had no damage and all the enemy with aegis XD