This week at Bungie we’re planning raid night.
Happy Solstice, everyone! The fire is lit, there is grass in the tower, and the Guardians dress up their new armor with features and glowing elements. We hope you are enjoying your time at EAZ this year. We’ve tracked your feedback on what you like about the event, the changes you don’t feel good about, and any improvements you’d like to see added. Thanks for sharing your feedback and keep it up.
We have a busy TWAB planned for you today. As promised, we’ll take a look at the launch date of the next raid and then discuss some matchmaking changes coming in Season 18 and Season 19.
Let’s get into it.
Raid the Date
Coming up in Season 18 will be our second attempt at raiding the Destiny Content Vault, and this time it will be… [REDACTED]. Sorry, we’re saving the reveal of which raid is coming to Destiny 2 for our Destiny 2 demo on August 23rd. But we wanted to make sure you had time to do everything you needed to be ready for day one. So, take time off work, hire a babysitter, but don’t skip school, please, your education is important.
[REDACTED] raid goes live at 10:00am Pacific on August 26, 2022.
Since this will be a raid that many of you are already somewhat familiar with, we’re going to change the World First race a bit like we did with Vault of Glass. Here’s what to expect:
- The raid will start with Contest Mode enabled for 24 hours.
- You will need to be at 1560 power to be level for all encounters.
- Clearing the raid with Contest Mode active is the first step to access the new Challenge Mode in Director and the special Triumph for completing all Challenge Triumphs for each encounter.
- Completing the Secret Triumph, a curated list of challenges in this newly unlocked challenge mode, will be how a fireteam crosses the finish line to be the first in the world and claim their prize.
- To enforce Triumph’s requirements in Challenge mode, your team will delete if you fail to meet the success conditions during any encounter.
Challenge Mode and Secret Triumph will only be available for the first 24 hours, so hurry if completing it is on your bucket list. The first firefighting team to do so will be declared a World First winner — pending review by our team. If all goes well, the last six members of the event’s winning fireteam will be awarded the coveted raid belts as a memento of their achievements.
Good luck!
Making matches
Starting in Season 18, we’ll be introducing some changes to the way we play matchmakers in the Crucible. This will be the first iteration that is part of a larger plan moving through Season 19. Our World Systems teams are leading the charge on this transition and are here with great information on what to expect.
Let’s talk skills and connection
We know this has been discussed with a lot of passion and goodwill in many places in the community (and at Bungie), so we’ll give you the lowdown before we dive deeper into the hows and whys:
- We aim to target all players — including New Lights! — to be able to enter the Crucible and regularly get matches where they feel competitive and have a reasonable chance of winning/competing.
- Making fair matches using skill-based matching (SBMM) will be important in achieving this goal.
- We start by implementing a loose SBMM in the control playlist at the start of Season 18.
- Loose SBMM has a broader similarity of starting skills than Survival and should lead to matchups with a wider variety of players while eliminating some of the frustrations we see in our current system.
- Expect loose SBMM to expand to other playlists in future seasons as we fine tune what we consider a “high quality match” by gathering real data and feedback from you.
- We don’t plan to add it to every Crucible playlist that is matched.
- We’ll keep tweaking until we’re in a good place.
- We will report regular setup updates.
- We will be implementing a form of matchmaking with preferred fireteam size in Season 19.
Much of what follows is pretty in-depth, feel free to skip to the setup section below if you don’t care about the details and just want a high-level view of what you’ll be experiencing!
Goals to create high quality matches
We’ve developed some goals that we’ll be working on over the next few seasons:
- All players (including New Lights!) can enter the Crucible and regularly receive matches to feel competitive.
- All players, whether solo or with fireteams, can find a place in the Crucible where they can play a variety of matches and have a reasonable chance of winning/competing.
- We define reasonable as “an expected win rate between 40 and 60% for most matches.”
- Players are rewarded based on their skill and take pride in their skill.
- Save space for players who don’t want to participate in the skill system.
Generally speaking, any matchmaking in a competitive multiplayer game tries to collect high quality matches. We consider three things when putting together a high-quality match:
- Connection quality:
- There are two types of links that are important:
- Game server connection.
- Link to all other players in the match.
- In general, poor connections to other players have a greater effect in Crucible than connection to game servers, so when we talk about connection quality in Crucible, we’re talking about this – player-to-player connection.
- Lower quality matches result in jerks from other players, missed shots, or unexpected injury or death.
- When fireteams are scattered around the world, we choose single player latency to speed up matchmaking.
- A match of honesty:
- Ideally, all players in a match have a reasonable chance of winning that match (ie have similar skills).
- Matchmaking speed:
- We always consider the speed of finding matches as a key element – no one wants to wait 10 minutes between matches, no matter how perfect they end up being.
When matchmaking, we need to balance these three elements. If we want to reduce the speed of finding matches, we will either need matches that are less fair or matches with a lower connection quality.
We’ll keep tweaking to find the best possible balance.
Skill
In this TWAB we will use the term “skill”. In Destiny, this term refers to how we rate all players who participate in PvP on a scale of 2000. A player’s skill is reflected in a graph that looks like this:
Internally, skill is a combination of stats made up of your performance (kills, deaths, captures, round wins, revives, dunks, etc.) that ranks you against all other players in the match. Each player’s skill is compared to the skills of the other players in the match, and we make skill adjustments for all players at the end of the match when the two rankings differ. There’s also a confidence rating – the more games the system has seen you in recently, the more confident the skill setting is.
In addition to the stats mentioned above, skill includes all sorts of things: your reaction time/agility, how you approach battles, how well you know the map/mode, how well you know your character, how you build your character, weapons, armor, and mods , which you use, and how you mix it all up effectively with other players.
You’ll never actually see a skill value in-game, and while we’re currently only using it to try to make Survival and Elimination matches fairer, we’re still tracking it for all modes (including Gambit!). This gives us a reasonable starting position in new game types like Rift or Zone Control.
Now, how do these skill numbers actually play out in the game? Here’s a good shorthand we use internally:
- If someone is 200 skill above you, you can definitely tell they are better than you and will win ~75% of the engagements against you. The opposite is true if someone is 200 or more below you.
- By the time you get to a 400 spread, the better players will win ~90% of the engagements, and the lower skilled players have to be extremely lucky to pull off a win.
- Once you get to a 600 spread, there is essentially zero chance of the lower skilled player ever winning a 1v1 conflict.
Engagements should become fairer the closer you get to the same skill. This is our goal.
The problem space
When we started looking at the competitive landscape in Destiny, we noticed a few things:
Outside of survival and elimination, the ability to influence whether your team wins or loses is usually out of your personal control if you’re of average skill or below (half the population!). This can feel bad as the outcome of the match seems essentially random and you don’t feel motivated to try to win. This has helped us de-emphasize victory as a requirement to obtain rewards in the Crucible.
The current landscape also allows brand new players to compete with some of the highest skilled veterans and are expected to compete. On the other hand, if you’re highly skilled, you’re often put on a team where you feel like you’re wearing them and you have to constantly perform if you want to have a chance at winning. This is not good for anyone.
In Control, the difference in skill of a team can be large – over 50% of matches have a skill difference of 900 or more between the best and worst player, so significant that the result is already known before it is given one shot. On the other hand, in Freelance Survival, 60% of matches have a skill gap of 250 or less. This is much more reasonable.
These large skill differences also result in more mercy games than you might expect. For example Control:
Large differences in skills also exacerbate other problematic elements:
- With large differences in skill, catching a team in spawn is significantly easier.
- With large skill disparities, it’s more likely that most of one team will be dead at the same time, freeing up…
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