Sunlight

Matchmaking is a touchy subject and this has previously made me somewhat hesitant to write about it in an open and frank manner. Today's topic especially so, since some players might interpret this post as one big excuse for any faults in the Awesomenauts matchmaking. However, the psychology of matchmaking is a very important topic when designing a matchmaking system, so today I'm going to discuss it anyway. For science! :) While we were designing the Galactron matchmaking systems I did quite a lot of research into how the biggest multiplayer games approach their matchmaking. The devs themselves often don't say all that much about it, but there's plenty of comments and analysis by the players of those games. The one thing they all have in common, is that whatever game you look for, you'll always find tons of complaints from users claiming the matchmaking for that particular game sucks. My impression is that no matter how big the budget and how clever the programmer...

Matchmaking is a big topic with lots of challenges, but at its core is a very simple question: who should play with whom? A couple of years after releasing Awesomenauts we rebuilt our entire matchmaking systems, releasing the new systems in the Galactron update. Today I'd like to discuss how Galactron chooses who you get to play with. While the question is simple enough, the answer turns out to be pretty complex. Many different factors influence what's a good match. Should players of similar skill play together? Should players from the same region or language player together? Should we take premades into account? Ping? Should we avoid matching players who just played together already? Should we use matchmaking to let griefers play against each other and keep them away from normal folks? If the answer to all of these questions is 'Yes, let's take that into account!', then you'd better have a lot of players! I've previously written about how many players yo...

In a game where high quality matchmaking is important (like competitive team-based games), waiting times to find suitable opponents are often unavoidable. Today I'd like to discuss the problems we had in Awesomenauts with our initial approach to this and how we made waiting a bit less boring later on. Until the launch of the Galactron update in 2016, this is how it worked in Awesomenauts: when you started searching you got into a matchroom right away. You selected your character, and then you had to wait in the loading screen until the match was full with 6 players. This could take several minutes and there was no interaction possible whatsoever: just a loading screen that says the match isn't full yet. To show progress we did have six tickboxes that showed how many players had joined and whether they had already selected their characters, but that was it. A static screen with no interaction possible is probably the most boring type of waiting imaginable. Compare this to curre...

I've previously explained how Steam, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all offer similar generic matchmaking systems based on rooms . These systems are great for quickly getting things going and are fine for most smallish games. However, if matchmaking is very important for your game and the requirements for matchmaking become more complex, these generic systems turn out to be pretty limiting. Today I'd like to discuss how we tried several approaches to get the best out of such generic systems in our game Awesomenauts and how the problems we encountered ultimately led us to develop our own matchmaking servers altogether. Keep in mind that whether these problems are truly important depends on the game. If your game is a bit more casual, or has fewer players per match, or less focus on online multiplayer, or allows late-join, then the requirements for matchmaking become a lot less stringent. Depending on how demanding the matchmaking for your game is, none of these problems might be ...

When creating matchmaking for a game you can either build it all yourself, or use a generic system provided by the platform you're releasing on. Steam, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all offer similar room-based systems. The basic idea is that clients can create, search for and join game rooms, and the actual decision which room to join is entirely made by the client. There's very little actual logic happening in those matchmaking servers. Today I would like to discuss how they work and what benefits and limitations they come with. As far as I know most smallish games build their matchmaking using these generic room-based systems. The big triple-A developers seem to usually build everything themselves from scratch, but that's too much work and too much server maintenance to be feasible for most smaller developers. Our own game Awesomenauts initially launched using these basic room-based systems. We didn't develop our own matchmaking system Galactron until years later wh...

Matchmaking is a highly important part of most modern multiplayer games. Build it badly and the user might be stomped by players way too good for them, get a really laggy connection or wait forever to get into a match. It's also a difficult topic to analyse and test before launch because there are so many unpredictable factors. For example, how are your players spread out over the globe? How much do match durations vary? How long are players willing to wait? How good are their internet connections? All of these and many other factors influence whether any given matchmaking implementation actually works well. Surprisingly few developers have written about the matchmaking in their games in detail, so I figured it would be useful to share our experiences. Over the years we've had several different approaches to matchmaking in Awesomenauts , and have iterated live on each of those, so let's have a look at what we've learned so far! Matchmaking is such a big and complex topi...

We're currently rebuilding the entire matchmaking, menus and party system of Awesomenauts . This rework is called Galactron. This is a huge operation: especially the matchmaking part is highly complex. We've done a bunch of betas for it so far and last week we let it run live for everyone for 48 hours. After that we turned it off again to analyse the results, read player feedback and fix bugs. Today I'd like to discuss the most interesting results. I plan to do an overview of how Galactron works in a future blogpost, but today I'm just going to focus on what we've encountered in last week's beta. Ragequitters and the removal of latejoin This is probably the hottest topic in Galactron. Latejoin was probably the most hated feature of the old Awesomenauts so we've removed it altogether. In Galactron players are never put in a match that's already in progress. We've also added a rejoin option so if you're kicked out of a match due to a network error ...

Most multiplayer games die within a week. Not because the multiplayer doesn't work, but because there aren't enough people playing online. If you look for opponents and don't find any, then the multiplayer mode might just as well not have been made. This is even more of a waste because online multiplayer is so much work to develop, as I recently explained . The vast majority of online multiplayer games ever made isn't playable any more because of this. Partially this is because not all games can be a success, but there is a much more important reason: often the matchmaking is poorly designed for a smaller playerbase. With clever choices multiplayer can flourish even with a tiny community. For an average indie game that is doing okay but isn't a big hit it is pretty decent to have 40 simultaneous players a few weeks after launch. Our own game Awesomenauts did really well so our daily peak is usually above 1000 players, but expecting such numbers is unrealistic for m...

Good matchmaking is an important part of creating an online multiplayer game. One thing you may not realise is that no matter how you build it, truly good matchmaking requires enormous numbers of players. Awesomenauts often has well over 1,000 people playing the game at the same time, which is very high and successful for an indie game. It certainly sounds like a lot to me, but this is only a fraction of what would be needed to do everything with matchmaking that we would want to do. Today I am going to explain why tens of thousands of concurrent players are needed for truly awesome matchmaking. Matchmaking has two main goals. The first is to let people play together who will have a good internet connection to each other. We would like to avoid Australians playing together with Europeans because their ping will be very high. High ping decreases the quality of the game experience, especially in a fast and highly competitive game like Awesomenauts. Finding good connections is more compl...