Match made in Heaven

I have been playing Titanfall since launch now and by all accounts it is a great FPS game that has brought some new elements to a largely stale genre, as well as revived a few old classic mechanics that have been spurned for far too long.

It is a solid game where, regardless of how you perform in any given match, it is simply fun to wall-run and double jump (Hello Quake and UT) and magnificent when you get into your own Titan. At least for a while…

Because, if you are a player of average (or below) skill or of a casual nature, chances are you are not alive long enough to really string things together and get into the flow. You spawn into a map, ready with your burn cards and eager to try out the new gun-sight you just unlocked, just to be picked off by an opponent already in a Titan, because hey, he got a  much better burn card to start the round already strapped into his Titan. These are rare of course, but those that play a lot are favored. Or you finally get your Titan dropped, which looks and sounds AWESOME, climb onboard and are just about ready to lay waste when your alarm bells go off and you get ejected. Because an opponent is using the biggest and baddest Titan there is and before you even know what’s going on, your own Titan has gone up in flames.

In a game that hands out upgrades and new equipment based challenges and level, those that climb to the top faster get an advantage. And that advantage can be devastating. In theory unlocking upgrades like this makes sense, because everyone, eventually, can get all the upgrades – just invest enough time and you too can have the most powerful weapon, the most powerful Titan.

In theory. Because what the design did not seem to incorporate, or something that was dismissed or that was too difficult to implement properly, was a good match making system.

If you buy Titanfall right now and log in today, you are likely going to play against opponents which have unlocked everything. They are in tier 2 of ranks (post level 50) and they know the maps by heart. The game does apparently have a match-making system in place, but i have not been able to figure out just what exactly it does and what stats it takes into account. It certainly does not seem to be skill based, or even win/loss ratio based. But i simply don’t know. Respawn has acknowledged the problem, but for a studio with such a long history of making PvP shooters, how could this not have been obvious?

But Titanfall is not alone with this. I have not played an online shooter with automatic server assignment and matchmaking where it was a truly balanced affair. Games which allow you to chose servers, and some servers are labeled as “beginner” or “max level only”, work better (though you do get the occasional jerk), but automated matchmaking seems to just be broken across the board.

Even games like Battlefield suffer from it, though you do notice it slightly less depending on game mode due to the slightly slower paced nature as well as the fact that unlocked guns are not automatically more powerful than previous ones. You get a rank based on individual skill, and that is supposedly used for matchmaking, however after a few trial runs (deliberately going down in skill) i still joined servers playing against the same people when choosing quick match. Checking the battlelog of those people revealed they were considerably higher skill.

And here is where my theory comes in: matchmaking in console online shooters is a scam. It does not actually exist. Working in development i know it would be easy to actually check for skill in the case of BF or even rudimentary for level in games like Titanfall, and assign players accordingly. Why is this not done? Because the top priority of the developer and publisher is to fill up servers. This serves 2 functions:

- Give the players the “optimal” experience for the map, ensure there are enough opponents and sides are evenly numbered.

- Give players the illusion that every server they join is full, or close to it, that the population is healthy and that it’s worth sticking with the game.

Now games like BF and CoD (and no doubt Titanfall) do extremely well. However it would be interesting to know the drop off rate for online players. How long do casual and below average skill players engage with the game on a session by session basis and in the long run.

My current maximum tolerance for Titanfall is about 3 to 5 matches. Because i don’t play 6 hours a day, i am not rank 50 yet and my equipment is mediocre at best. Less than 2 weeks after launch i am already at a huge disadvantage compared to the hard-core gamers. So in 3 to 5 matches i get about all the fun i can out of the game. I might get one or 2 good movement combinations, get a decent run in my Titan and rack up a few kills. Mostly i go for AI, as i know i can get some kills. After that, i am too frustrated to continue and the pool of fun is exhausted, at least for a day, perhaps longer. I love the game, i love a lot of the mechanics and some of the designs are simply beautiful, but thanks to matchmaking and imbalance, Titanfall is not the type of game where i sit at work thinking about it, not a game that makes me run home, switch on my Xbone and game for hours. It is a game i now play if i have nothing better to do.

And here is the thing. Getting the player to understand how to be better and proper matchmaking are very very simple to do. Yet no developer seems to really care.

Games like BF and Titanfall track ALL the stats needed to accomplish both. Battlefield in particular actually has it’s own battle log, where players can see their stats. Here is an independant site which has been tracking BF stats since at least BF2. Everything is there. Other sites deal purely with guns. Look at the detail on this site. That’s for ONE weapon (incidentally my favourite assault rifle). Isn’t it incredible?

Now if games track all these stats, most of which are extracted by players themselves and fed into these wonderful charts, trackers and documents, why can’t developers use these stats to make the game more enjoyable for more players?

Player stats such as kill/death ratio, win/loss ratio, hit ratio and level can easily feed into a properly designed skill stat, which is then used to actually match up people on the same server. As an added benefit, or a more elaborate system, the game could suggest to a player to change server if skill is increased or decreased beyond the margin on the currently matched server.

Player stats such as hit ratio, accuracy, kill vs. ammo used ratio etc. (tracked by sites like symthic) could actually be used by the game itself to teach the player and suggest changes in playstyle:

“Hey ZeGerman, we noticed you switched to the AK47 and your accuracy has dropped by 7%, we suggest you level up some more and get the M16. Alternatively you could unlock the grip and heavy barrel for the AK47, this should increase accuracy. Also try using shorter bursts instead of keeping the trigger pressed. According to your stats your average burst is 20 rounds. Burst of 5 or more increase muzzle drift and reduce accuracy. You could get about 2.3 more kills per round with either suggestion.”

How about that? The game tracks anyway what i do and how i do it. What if the game actually made use of all that information it tracks and exposes it in a meaningful way to the player and helps the player get better? Wouldn’t that be something!

It’s not that much work. And it could even be done offline – on sites such as battlelog, so the system can evolve over time. But no. Players are left entirely on their own to try and get better. They are given weapons with multitude of stats and the majority of players don’t understand half of it. Battlelog is awesome for stat bragging and seeing what you have achieved, but it does not tell you how to get better. The core gamer gets better simply by trying, by reading up on 3rd party websites and by playing for hours and hours and hours. The less than core and casual gamer does not do this and is left wondering why the opposition is so much better. In Titanfall this is even worse, because the opposition simply is more powerful by playing longer and ranking up more, skill does not immediately come into it.

Titanfall, in my opinion, was a great step forward for the FPS genre. I think the next big leap forward is when we see an FPS game that actually cares how their players perform, teaches their players to be better and matches them up against equal opponents.