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Stop Getting Matchmaking Wrong! Why Destiny, Call Of Duty, Battlefield Et Al Must Finally Learn To Play Fair
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Titan character. Especially as I fancied some of that ‘bubble shield’ action I’ve found so maddening during my Crucible games as a Warlock.
As soon as my new Titan could enter the Crucible I dived straight in, eager to keep levelling up in the part of Destiny that for me has provided the most consistent enjoyment. And then I died. Over and over and over again. With barely a kill or two (usually at the end of a rocket launcher) of my own to break the fatal monotony.
While I’ll happily admit I’m not a particularly brilliant Destiny player, I usually hold my own. So a lack of skills couldn’t totally be to blame for my complete and continual annihilation. Luckily there was an all-too-apparent other explanation for my endless failure: my pathetically low rank versus the other players I kept being thrown up against.
Got a feeling I’m not going to be too popular with my Destiny team mates…
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Five Essential Fixes for ‘Destiny’ a few weeks back.
The huge and frankly unfair challenge facing new Destiny players even more than my ‘second character’ woes shows that the sort of matchmaking flaws exposed in Destiny aren’t just a bit frustrating; they’re potentially hugely damaging to the long-term online shelf-life of the game as struggling newcomers quickly abandon their struggle and move onto something more rewarding.
Everyone here looks equally tough, but their level scores will likely tell a different story.
Of course, Destiny is hardly the first game that can’t seem to get matchmaking right. Looking at just a trio of the most popular online games, Battlefield can’t matchmake well consistently; the Ghost Recon reboot routinely threw up laughable mismatches; racers with the possible exception of Project Gotham seem to love nothing more than to pitch you against vastly more experienced drivers; and I swear the Call of Duty games don’t even bother trying (see screenshot below…).
In fact, I’d argue that in all my years of gaming the only games that have got matchmaking pretty much right for most of the time have been the Halo series. But even if only one game can manage effective matchmaking, then that’s enough to raise serious questions about why nobody else can do it.
Halo’s relative matchmaking success makes Destiny’s failings look all the more ironic, of course, given that both games are made by Bungie. It’s almost as if Bungie has suddenly forgotten how to pull off its top online party trick exactly at the time when it needed it most. But actually I don’t think the situation is quite that simple. Destiny’s persistent failure to deliver balanced online games is also a reflection of the type of game Bungie has decided to create.
A recent Call Of Duty team deathmatch roster. Ouch.
In other words, I think Destiny’s matchmaking issues cast a particularly harsh spotlight on a growing dichotomy in modern gaming caused by the desire to introduce RPG elements to what was once a straightforward online shooter world.
The thing is, online shooters now try to feed your addiction by rewarding your progress through the levels with new often better weapons, new often better armour, and. most significantly in Destiny’s case, new improved abilities. This seems very attractive on paper, of course. Borderlands in particular has shown the potential appeal of the ‘shoot and loot’ format, and getting my hands on new weapons or new attachments for weapons has proved a powerful intoxicator with the last few Battlefield and Call Of Duty releases.
At the same time, though, I’ve noticed that even these relatively light Battlefield/COD ‘loot reward’ experiences have created growing frustrations about the way online sessions can pan out when you’re the victim of serious matchmaking failures. So now that Destiny has introduced a system where your level is directly related to how effective your character is in combat, even the slightest matchmaking inequality has the potential to upset a game balance and frustrate players. So it’s inevitable that when you get routine large matchmaking Destiny inequalities like pitching level 2 characters against level 29s, the results are truly game-ruiningly bad.
Hence the dichotomy I mentioned earlier. The more game makers try to keep people playing their games online by rewarding them with gear, the more likely they are to actually drive some people away from their game if they don’t get matchmaking absolutely spot on.
If you’re a low-level Destiny character your relatively low level character abilities can make you feel much more susceptible to instant death at the hands of a sniper.
In the ‘old days’ of online games, if you found yourself in a mismatched online game you at least knew your character makeup would be more or less the same as everyone else’s, so if you played particularly well you might still have a chance of making your mark. If you find yourself in a mismatched game of Destiny (and, to a lesser degree, the current versions of CoD and Battlefield) on the other hand, I’d argue you might as well just quit out and start looking for a slightly more even match.
There are, of course, defences for the game industry’s seemingly terminal lack of matchmaking know-how. Not least the fact that managing the game stats and ping scores of hundreds of thousands, even millions of players around the world in ‘real time’ and then bringing enough compatible players together without taking hours about it must be really, really hard.
Obviously nobody wants to sit there for half an hour at a time waiting for a suitably fair game to be put together by a matchmaking system. But surely most people would be happy to wait at least a minute or two longer to be put in an evenly matched game rather than wasting 10 minutes or more getting mercilessly pummelled in a mismatched game. Hell, I reckon some people might even take the option of having a few suitably levelled bots in a game if a full ‘human’ contingent can’t be found.
I guess some might argue that it’s nice now and then to be able to feel the full might of your hard-earned prowess in Destiny by imperiously dispatching much lower-ranked players. But I really don’t see this as having long-term appeal or being much of a draw for true gamers.
The Xbox One was supposed to improve matchmaking through its more advanced ‘back end’. Not seeing much sign of it working so far, though.
One further potential defence for the game makers is that it probably isn’t all their fault. I remember an Xbox spokesperson at a pre-launch event for the Xbox One stating that one of the key features of the new console was the way its improved game server handling could deliver enhanced matchmaking. I even piped up to compliment him for this ‘advance’, as I felt it had the potential to be a massive strength for the console. But sadly I’ve seen little if any evidence of this supposed advance coming to pass. So it seems likely Microsoft MSFT -1.25% and Sony need to get involved too in making the matchmaking system fit for modern purpose.
Ultimately, though, I don’t really care where the matchmaking improvements come from. All that matters is that if online gaming is going to continue to evolve in the direction it’s going at the moment, somebody somewhere has to finally get a proper grip on an issue that’s blighted the online gaming world for far, far too long.
Addendum
Some commenters have stated that I should have been clearer about the way I discussed the impact of character and weapon progression in Destiny. So I’ll try to put that right here. The issue is that the base defence and attack values for your character’s armour and weapons are normalised in standard PvP matches. However, the abilities associated with your character’s sub-class progression and your weapon and armour progression do carry over, so low level characters are still disadvantaged in ways that can make themselves frustratingly felt. And in any case, this issue doesn’t have any impact at all on my argument that new players are simply disadvantaged by sheer experience – especially map knowledge – when they’re put up against people with much higher rankings.
