Post by morsealworth on Apr 20, 2015 19:14:52 GMT
I was re-reading the blue post by Blizzard concerning matchmaking in Heroes of The Storm and thought I'd write about the part I especially liked.
What did I especially like? Well, the fact that they took the rule purely from the feedback and statistics. If they are able to take such a fundamental principle just from statistical data, boy, they do have great analytics.
What is so fundamental about it, you may ask. Well, that's what you should ask Pavlov, not me. You see, the whole six-minute rule is closely connected to classical conditioning. To be more specific, to the time span available for the conditional reflex to form.
There are different types of classic conditioning, but for effective conditioning there is one important requirement: the conditional stimulus must be presented before universal stimulus within the limited time span. This span is about 5 minutes in primates.
That's why in the case that the matchmaking spanning longer than 6 minutes, the conditioned response would be stress/disappointment no matter how good the game after the matchmaking was.
And this leads to the player being actually discouraged from entering the matchmaking and playing the game at all.
That's pure neurophysiology that was rediscovered by the analysts during the alpha test. That's another damn reason to be a Blizzard's fan.
Six Minute Rule
If our matchmaker can’t find you a close match before the end of a six minute queue, it instead finds the quickest possible match for you and your teammates. This rule was originally set early in the alpha as our data told us waiting longer than six minutes didn’t yield a better match experience for a majority of players.
As our population increases, we’re exploring the possibility of increasing the six minute rule to a higher time limit. We believe this change would make better matches for a number of our players, as currently they are being forced into matches against high level players. Because the six minute queue is forcing matches for high level players against the next possible group, they end up facing players substantially lower in MMR.
While the change would certainly help a majority of our players, our data suggests top-tier players wouldn’t see much improvement without other top-tier players being available for a match. The players at the highest level are the cream of the crop and eventually, regardless of how long the queue benchmark is, will be matched with players or teams of a lower skill level. We’re looking at ways to help this problem and hope to have a solid solution at a later date. Any feedback from the community is important to us, so please share your thoughts.
If our matchmaker can’t find you a close match before the end of a six minute queue, it instead finds the quickest possible match for you and your teammates. This rule was originally set early in the alpha as our data told us waiting longer than six minutes didn’t yield a better match experience for a majority of players.
As our population increases, we’re exploring the possibility of increasing the six minute rule to a higher time limit. We believe this change would make better matches for a number of our players, as currently they are being forced into matches against high level players. Because the six minute queue is forcing matches for high level players against the next possible group, they end up facing players substantially lower in MMR.
While the change would certainly help a majority of our players, our data suggests top-tier players wouldn’t see much improvement without other top-tier players being available for a match. The players at the highest level are the cream of the crop and eventually, regardless of how long the queue benchmark is, will be matched with players or teams of a lower skill level. We’re looking at ways to help this problem and hope to have a solid solution at a later date. Any feedback from the community is important to us, so please share your thoughts.
What did I especially like? Well, the fact that they took the rule purely from the feedback and statistics. If they are able to take such a fundamental principle just from statistical data, boy, they do have great analytics.
What is so fundamental about it, you may ask. Well, that's what you should ask Pavlov, not me. You see, the whole six-minute rule is closely connected to classical conditioning. To be more specific, to the time span available for the conditional reflex to form.
There are different types of classic conditioning, but for effective conditioning there is one important requirement: the conditional stimulus must be presented before universal stimulus within the limited time span. This span is about 5 minutes in primates.
That's why in the case that the matchmaking spanning longer than 6 minutes, the conditioned response would be stress/disappointment no matter how good the game after the matchmaking was.
And this leads to the player being actually discouraged from entering the matchmaking and playing the game at all.
That's pure neurophysiology that was rediscovered by the analysts during the alpha test. That's another damn reason to be a Blizzard's fan.
