Hello all. I sympathize with the idea of better matchmaking but as of now rating is meaningless for matchmaking and devising an "updated" rating would provide little benefit.
The lobby community is capable of doing balanced and imbalanced matches already but I am speaking with my experience. I am allowed to play with the cool kids and I remember usernames of good players. There is always some uncertainty in a game but I see no difficulty in matchmaking in the games I play in.
You can never solve this problem. Good players with new accounts are effectively new players to any matchmaking unless they share this info.
Yes and no. Online games like HALO (and many others) use the game data to give a skill level to players. This skill level can then be used for balanced matchmaking. There is plenty of literature on this topic and I recommend people read some at least to discover what problems are there. E,g. accurate skill estimation, game balance, resilience to skill manipulation, etc.
I have worked on giving players a skill level already. I have published the data here but is terribly outdated. The skill level was computed using a system called trueskill that I like but requires me to give an order to the players in a game to update their skill level. I chose to order the winning team first and the losing team second. Obviously this could be done better, e.g. give each player its own position in the order by only looking at the score.
This work was focused on providing a better matchmaking for my group when we were starting but I have little interest to continue it right now. I am available for questions if people are interested but I am not working on this.
To recap my post:
I would like to see good matchmaking capabilities on the lobby. All the work I have seen on this topic also hides the computed skill level to the players. I guess people would like to have it public but I think the current 1v1 rating is the only way to give a player a public known good rating.
I would also like to see a proposal for improvements to the current 1v1 rating. I think the lobby uses a ELO variation and there is definitely space for improvement here. I am in favor of at adding a "last 1v1 match" date to players profile or have the rating decay over time mostly because I noticed that 1v1 skill worsen over time (personal experience here).
If the lobby is interested in matchmaking instead (and they should be in my opinion) there is plenty of work that could be done even with something as crude as what I was doing.
That said there are bigger fish to fry for improving the game experience, e.g. reducing game latency (both networking latency and player input latency).
Have a nice day you all!
edoput
