One of my perosnal gripes with Titanfall is its lack of autobalance in matchmaking. There were several instances today where teams were heavily out of balance; I'd get domolished because my teammates couldn't comprehend the concept of Capture-the-Flag, find a new lobby, and be matched against multiple Generation 3s, Generation 4s, and even a Generation 6. Totally fair.
It appears that Respawn Enterainment has heard my cries of dispair. An update for matchmaking is currently rolling out, aiming to alleviate these very issues. They've compiled data that shows the skill level of players forms a nice, neat, symmetric graph, as shown below. Each dash on the bottom line represents 5 levels while the percentages on the left represent the amount of players that fall into that particular level. As you can tell from the graph, a majority fall smack dab in the middle.
Repsawn mentions in a blog post that they weren't using this data to its fullest potential. They are now, though, and they're doing it in two ways:
1. Searching for teammates and opponents will now sometimes take more time to look for players that ar ea good skill level match, rather than purely prioritizing speed over quality. This will give us more time to build better teams and create closer games that are worth staying in for a longer period of time.
2. Rather than playing against the same opponents over and over, the game will periodically split the teams apart and search for new opponents for each time. This means if one team is dominating, we will update the skill for all the players and then find each team a better suited match for the next round. Did you lose to a really great team? We'll make them disappear and replace them with a new opposing team – and they will have no idea that you just got your butts kicked. This should end some of the frustration with playing for extended perios of time when you're having an off night.
These changes are set to be made immediately, meaning they're live as we speak. All you need to do is select the "Improved Matchmaking (Beta)" playlist to give it a go. You can access this playlist under the "Classic MP" option. Keep in mind, though, that you'll only be playing Attrition.
