Cross posted from [email protected], but really applies to most games with matchmaking that I've played...
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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I don’t get it.
If you play enough, pure random chance will eventually get you a game that feels like a fair fight.
But quite often, video game matchmaking systems will fail to accurately estimate player skill correctly, creating teams where one will utterly demolish the other.
Or, as a counter-point, perhaps they are nearly evenly matched, and the slight difference in skill between them is disproportionately reflected in the scoreboard. I've seen this happen in fighting games, but admittedly, I haven't really played a matchmade team game in a long, long time, because they kind of stopped making those games for me.
Not so much a counterpoint. It's actually a factor that I've thought about too, and I think it adds to the problem.
In one of my other comments here, I talk about how it's an impossible problem, and how I'd solve it by not trying to find a bunch of players of the exact same skill level to begin with. You go for roughly even teams, not precisely even players.
If you have 10 people at almost the same skill level, the tiniest difference in ability gets massively magnified, because that's the only deciding factor that's left.
You also have the team synergy as a factor in a team based game. Even if the match is perfectly balanced if people have any grief with each other in the same team(bad previous interaction, bias against certain characters, the good old racism/bigotry against other player or just difference in playstyles) the match is doomed.
But I don't think that's the matchmaking system failing to accurately estimate player skill. It could have done it perfectly and still felt way off.
Yeah but I'm explaining the meme, not writing an essay like I was in the other conment.
But maybe the meme loses its humor by having less of that kernel of truth that a good joke relies on? Like, if you don't think the matchmaking is bullshit, it's not going to be funny, you know?
The only kernel of truth required is that most people have experienced completely unfair matches, and attribute that to the shortcomings of modern skill-based matchmaking.
What exactly the mechanics behind those shortcomings are, matters little.