So I have some minor insight into how matchmaking chooses dedicated servers. Let me pre-face this with this statement. Halo 5 Guardians plays better than any other Halo over a networked connection. In my experience it’s pretty consistent. My issues are with why it’s not perfect given that I think it’s totally possible to be very close to perfect most of the time.
When you jump into Arena or Slayer or FFA etc, it appears as if matchmaking will immediately put you on ANY server as quickly as possible. This is great if you wanna play as many games as possible in the shortest amount of time. However, based on my location in western Canada it’s a problem for me. Halo 5 is using Microsoft’s Azure cloud servers to run. These servers while very high quality and robust, are not spread out all over North America. The ones I’ve tracked being connected too are in a handful of spots and only in the US and overseas. (Not one in Canada, it’s a big country 343)
All of these locations likely have many servers capable of handling lots of games and users. The point I am making is that there are only 6 locations (that I’ve tracked) for these server racks. This means that if you live close to a location. Theoretically you should have a sick low ping connection at all times. If you don’t live close you really have to hope that one is within about 1000 miles. Distance = Lag for the most part. There’s much much more that plays into lag but distance puts more twists and turns into the route through the internet, that your headshot data packet has to go before it registers as a kill on the server.
Here is what the Azure Cloud locations look like relative to me.
I live in western Canada and when I try to connect to games. 80-90% of the time it tries to connect me to the Iowa, Illinois, Texas or Virgina servers. Maybe one in every 10 games I will get the California server. Whats worse is that I have a beautiful low ping connection to the California server. My ping is consistently 35ms, which makes halo feel like a hot knife through butter. It literally seems to affect how the controls feel. Headshots register every time. When I feel like I beat someone they die, when I feel like I got beat I die. It’s amazing and I love the LA server. The games runs well and has minor lag spikes up to 60ms.
The next best servers to me are slower by almost double ping. 65ms. (Iowa, Illinois) On this it’s what I feel I’ll call normal Halo 5. Sometimes it feels like it’s pretty fair, sometimes it’s not. I can handle this connection but it’s not as much fun. There’s enough WTF moments with hit registration and animations being sporadic that it loses it’s luster after a couple of games. The lag spikes on these servers go up to 100-150ms which is enough to ruin a play. Unfortunately these are the servers I connect to most often.
The other server locations suck for me. (Texas and Virginia) Not only do I lose every tie pistol battle, but lag spikes go from being a minor annoyance to full fledged game changers. Pretty frustrating and a bummer. Those of you in Texas, Halo loves you. 2 servers within a few hundred miles. Consider yourselves lucky.
So based on all this you’d think that Guardians would just see that for a guy in western Canada that LA server is best and always just look for a game there first? NOPE. Even if I block all the others servers IP address. It will just keep trying to connect to one of the middle american servers. It’s will literally do this for half an hour before it connects to LA. It won’t just try to connect to one of them either, it tries all of them, a few times. After about 8-10 attempts to connect to one of the bigger ping servers it seems to finally go to the LA one. Like a battle to have a decent game.
So theories. 343 wants you to get the quickest games as priority #1. That’s respectable to me and I get that. I’d personally rather wait a minute longer and get a sweet host 100% of the time. I am not convinced that other than huge region grouping Halo even looks at ping as one of the determining factors in matchmaking. Or maybe it does when you first start playing and then remembers it. Making it possible to get stuck on a server if one of your team mates live close to a far away one. Either way when you solo queue it’s hard enough playing with strangers let alone playing on a high ping server 200 miles away.
So maybe there could be a prefer option? PREFER QUICK GAMES or PREFER BEST CONNECTION.
Or since there’s only freaking 6 locations just be able to order them as 1st, 2nd,3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th preference?
Or get a couple of other servers going in East and Western Canada. It’s a freaking big country 343. Western Canada to Virginia might as well over an ocean.