Modern multiplayer games making matches unfair by design, what are your thoughts on Engagement Optimized MatchMaking (EOMM)?

de_fa
Sat, 17 Jun 2023 19:35:22 +0000

Title
Anyone that has been playing multiplayer games for a while must have noticed the recent shift when it comes to multiplayer games matchmaking trends.
Multiplayer games were no joke, they were hardcore, with high entry barriers where the more experienced players would dominate the field, and newer players were nothing but fodder for them. If you were new to a game you could expect to lose most of your matches for a while, but if you were to put in the effort, improved, learned the game and persevered trough, then you'd be rewarded by becoming the one to dominate the field instead.
Nowadays it's different, anyone can pick up a game, no matter how experienced they are, and expect to win roughly half the games they play. From newcomers to pro players, everyone seems to be relegated to a strictly forced 50% winrate policy. But how is that possible?

The focus in game design seems to have shifted from rewarding individual oriented play, to rewarding more teamwork oriented skills instead. The focus on teamwork has been pushed so far to the point where, if your team isn't putting in the effort, no matter how good of a player you are, you won't be able to compensate for your team lack of skills and they'll be the reason why you lose the match. There wouldn't be anything inherently wrong with this, especially in a team game, if it weren't for the fact that it really feels as if the better you get at the game, the worse your teammates get.
This is how they're able to make everyone's winrates hover around 50%. Sure if you lose too much the algorithm will start giving you better teammates, but if you win too much then the quality of your matches will be abysmal, leading to a point where all the good players get effectively punished and can never fully see the fruits of the effort they put for actually learning the game.
Players have expressed for years their frustrations against this balancing method, as many felt cheated due to losing too many matches due to factors completely out of their control, but so far nothing has changed.

This sort of matchmaking algorithm can also be used to impose certain "patterns" in the wins and losses that a player experiences while playing, in order to increase their engagement. A study from 2017 published for EA , goes to show how players are more likely to quit a game if they incur in specific win/loss patterns. For example, of the entire playerbase, 5% of them will quit the game if they were to incur in three losses in a row.
Here's an excerpt from the paper's abstract
"Current matchmaking systems depend on a single core strategy: create fair games at all times. These systems pair similarly skilled players on the assumption that a fair game is best player experience. We will demonstrate, however, that this intuitive assumption sometimes fails and that matchmaking based on fairness is not optimal for engagement"

This is just a window into what goes trough the developing process of a multiplayer videogame these days. The paper is from 2017 but troughout these years this approach to multiplayer games has been adopted and developed to the point where every single multiplayer experience, from PC to mobile to consoles, feels artificially crafted and finely tuned to keep you as hooked for as much time as possible to the screen.
This doesn't stop to win/loss patterns, another example would be gears of war, where the devs have admitted to make your bullets do more damage on your first match of the day, because their studies showed that people were more likely to play troughout the day if they were to win the first match they played. These same devs would later go to make Fortnite, which would go on to generate billions in revenue for years.

What are your thoughts? Do you prefer the modern take to make multiplayer games more accessible to everyone, or would you rather go back to the days where communities would develope more organically?

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