[Beta] Introducing Custom Matchmaking with Custom Signals

[TimeFrenzied (Casey)]

@Hyxperionn

you just predicted the new price floor update for a load of accessories

I think he might’ve had a vision…

[gizzygazzy360 (Smile4)]

could we ever get an ID verified signal?

[TimeFrenzied (Casey)]

Is there any chance that players, as opposed to only developers, could configure (some) of the default signals themselves?

From the default matchmaking signals shown, I can see that friends has a default weight of 10, meaning it will always prioritize servers with friends in them. As a player of mainly competitive games, I’m not necessarily a fan of prioritizing friends over latency, and there’s no way to really circumvent this without extensions (besides turning your joins off I believe?)

There are other use cases, such as 17+ players wanting to play with more mature players in games that are rated -17.

Of course, developers should be the ones who choose if their matchmaking signals override players for balance with their custom signals (we can join from the server list anyway in most cases). The developer should have the option to override player-set signals individually and let players set others themselves.

[Witchrie (Witch)]

Is there any news on this? I’m dying to try it out.

[ElPsyCongroo_Y]

We are gradually rolling out to games requested the beta access. Please feel free to fill out a beta application here.

[MightyDantheman (Fate)]

I’m just going to repost what I said on a different topic:

Party API Is Here! Enable Connected Player Experiences and Drive Deeper Engagement

This is great, but could joining friends in general be fixed? The expected behavior is that, when you join the same experience that a friend is playing, you would join their server. However, this doesn’t appear to work with friends in different regions. It works when I play with others in the US, but not when joining people in the UK for example. I have to join them through the actual server list or profile page.

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@inlikewithyou

If you want to join the same experience your friend is playing, you would press Join on their profile. Not the play button on the experience page.

Since this is the more relevant topic, I will reply to you here. While this may usually be the case if you’re actively looking to join a friend, you might not even realize that a friend is actively playing the experience that you’re about to join. I believe that prioritizing friend joins is much more beneficial than the other factors, both for the friends involved and for the developer(s) of the experience (due to increased play time).

However, I do recognize that not everyone would like this behavior at all times, which is why I believe that it should simply be the default option:

@MightyDantheman

@TimeFrenzied

This would be a non-issue if players were allowed to customize preferred signals.

I’d honestly just love a simple join preference setting to toggle automatically joining friends on or off, with friends being the default.

Perhaps this could be overwritten by the experience settings too, I’m not sure if user settings or experience settings should take priority, but I believe that this should be the default when nothing is changed.

[inlikewithyou (dwla)]

Depends on the game. In my game, I use custom matchmaking to heavily prioritize servers where the round is ending soon or about to start. There is still a massive priority on social connections, and most times this outweighs the other signals, but it shouldn’t be the case that that’s always the best server. If you knew your friend was already in the game, it makes sense to just press the Join button.

This feature is great for developers, because they get to choose what happens when the player presses the Play button on the experience page. Tell me, does it really make sense to put that player in a server that is far from starting soon, has bad latency, doesn’t have many players in it, and various other positive signals, just because their friend is there when they didn’t explicitly want to join them? Not completely. Maybe what you should really be asking is for it to be easier to see friends which are already playing within the experience on the experience page near the play button so you can join them instead of relying on the Play button

example:

[MightyDantheman (Fate)]

@inlikewithyou

but it shouldn’t be the case

I was saying that it should be the default if nothing else is changed, not to always be the case.

@inlikewithyou

Maybe what you should really be asking is for it to be easier to see friends which are already playing within the experience on the experience page near the play button so you can join them instead of relying on the Play button

example:

This would definitely be a nice alternative though.

@inlikewithyou

In my game, I use custom matchmaking to heavily prioritize servers where the round is ending soon or about to start.

This might not make sense for all round-based experiences, but I’d recommend a system where you join a starting place that starts putting you into a new match right away, rather than putting the player into a match that’s nearly ending. To extend this, if you lose a round early, it would be nice to be put into a new round instantly rather than waiting for the next round. Again, this may not be the ideal option if you have a waiting lobby where you can buy things, but I’d highly recommend this for experiences where you want the player to always been in a round rather than ever having to wait.