Hi, I’ve been wanting to make an FPS game with an ELO matchmaking system as many FPS games I have seen on Roblox do not have any sort of skill-based matchmaking. Every server I join has all different types of players ranging from the newbie who can’t get a single kill and the try hard dominating the server. I want to have a skill-based matchmaking system so new players can play without constantly getting killed by people well above their skill level.
I feel this is why many FPS games do not grow very fast. Many new players are constantly demotivated to play and do not want to return because they know they won’t perform well.
An issue I have cited with an ELO based matchmaking system are smurfs. Many people like to smurf, for various reasons. The problem with this is a smurf can be seen as a newbie and put into a match with a lower skill level and absolutely dominate. Although they will quickly gain ELO to the point where they are now in matches within their skill range, many new players will lose ELO and may not want to play anymore.
I have thought about some solutions to this, such as adding a minimum account age requirement; however, this will be very easy to bypass as many people have old alt accounts and/or can easily get an alt from a few years ago.
it’s going to be an inherent problem to any game with ELO/ranked matchmaking, but not one you should worry too much about. It would be interesting to play a Roblox shooter with proper matchmaking. Attempts to identify smurfs in code can present a lot of false positives too; say someone is new to the game but has a decade of competitive shooter experience. They’re likely to out-perform their ELO very quickly, which a game might use to identify them as a smurf. I say go for it, and if it becomes a big problem, address it with updates later on.
Even games like Phantom Forces, with no team balancing or skill matching, has smurfs. Not sure why people enjoy smurfing on unranked games, but they do…
You can utilise a system that other competitive games use; pre-ranked matches, in which they have to play x ranked games in which they are allocated a rank elo to match with, based on their performance either increase or decrease the “allocated rank elo” to essentially find their performance over the set amount of matches. Other games also implement a hidden score that can be used to average with their actual rank to determine their proper skills, unfortunately; there isn’t a lot of insight on how games actually handle hidden scores.
In summary; use multiple checks to average out their score to determine their ability to perform in a match, ultimately if triple A games haven’t found a fool-proof method to detect smurfs; there isn’t a viable solution currently available.