'Overwatch' Game Director On Matchmaking And The Removal Of The Avoid System

Jeff Kaplan, the game director of Overwatch took to the Battle.net forums again today to discuss matchmaking. The post is extremely long and goes into detail about how matchmaking works and how they plan to change it in the future. For those of you who have no desire to read a giant wall of text, here’s the tl;dr.

• Matchmaking in Overwatch is incredibly complicated and tries to lower queue times while also increasing quality in matches.

• There are three big factors that affect matchmaking: time, ping and grouping

• Time- players want a quality game but also don’t want to wait forever. Blizzard’s research has shown that after a specific amount of time waiting, players will start to complain. Waiting longer doesn't necessarily mean you will get a better Overwatch match.

• Ping- In Overwatch’ s second stress test in Beta, the development team decided to prioritize “skill and time” over ping to disastrous results. If you played in the stress test, “you’ll remember how terrible the game performance was on the first day as well as how ‘lit up’ the forums were demanding that players be given an option of server choice.” Now ping is a priority in matchmaking.

• Grouping- Groups of equal size are matched together “first and foremost.” Sometimes, if the wait time is too long, the matchmaking system will put premade groups with or against solos, but only in rare circumstances.

• MMR, or Match Making Rating, is decided by a bunch of factors, the main one being how many games you win or lose. You either gain MMR by winning matches, or lose MMR by being defeated, though what champion you play, what map you are on and whether you are defending or attacking all factor into it.

• New players are kept away from the general populace until they get a few games under their belts.

The Avoid System is currently disabled and will be removed from the game because good players are being “avoided” and as a result are getting extremely long queue times.