At the beginning H5 seemed blessed by the most consistent matchmaking system of all times: a solid ranking system, very low latency, quick search times. All looked perfect.
This idyll unfortunately lasted a very short time, as soon as population started dropping (for many reasons i’m not listing here) after a few months, showing all the flaws of a really imperfect system.
Suddenly lots of people started experiencing very bad lag and other kind of issues like disconnections, teleporting, rubber banding, poor hit registration, delay etc.
The first approach for fixing this was Region Lock. This was a good thing in the first place on latency side, but sooner than later that brought to light a new enormous problem: very long search times and, in some cases, complete inability to find matches in less populated areas like, well, every zone outside US boundaries (which we all know, is were the largest part of Halo fanbase is concentrated, i’m not bashing US people).
After that, search options were quickly implemented as “palliative” in order to make everyone happy, but without gathering so much success for various reasons like:
- in some zones balanced and focused are nearly unuseful because finding games with them is basically impossible; - sometimes options seem pretty inconsistent, with people from other continents matched together even when using focused option; - expanded option is a joke: with it 99% of games will be hosted on US servers (were the majority actually is, as i said) with lot of lag, inconsistencies, etc. for foreign people.After all these troubles a question came in my mind: Why the hell they haven’t implemented preferred data center selection as primised in an article after H5 beta by mr. Josh Holmes himself?
Some documentation about this:
ARTICLE LINK (Matchmaking paragraph)
Then i found this interview answering my question.
And in particular this Q/A:
> BGE: Are we able to choose our region for the dedicated server used in matchmaking/custom games? Or at least a preferred region?
>
> Josh: Our services detect location and assign players to the nearest and best datacentre to ensure optimal experience. We considered allowing players to limit themselves to a specific datacentre but this introduces a number of issues with matchmaking, particularly in an experience where matching for appropriate skill is so important. We have been running closed beta tests consistently over the months since beta to optimize our matchmaking and QoS (Quality of Service) detection and we are very happy with how it performs today. (From experience, it’s working really well – Sik)
As i always suspected (never having the complete certainty) the entire Halo 5 matchmaking mechanism is completely built for skill based games, even in social modes, and everything is subordinated to ranking system, also the in-game connection quality. Unfortunately a system like that can, in my opinion, functioning as intended only where population is big and healty (at the beginning pretty much everywhere, now only in US).
Every other places will be plagued by every kind of issue and people have to force themselves to play laggy games or to wait enormous amounts of time for a good game but killing all the fun before even starting.
Other links here:
LINK 1; LINK 2; LINK 3;
Ranks are important, they are needed to provide a challenge to people and to ensure fairness in matchmaking. But think about that: how good is playing with people at your same level (or stronger) when they have all the possible advantages due to connection latency? All because you are forced to expand your search boundaries for partial or complete inability to find a single game ( RIP Oceania)? It’s like choosing deliberatley a 150+ms server in games that allows you to do so (too bad H5 isn’t between them).
Is that fair in your opinion? Is that funny? It’s not IMO.
The argument is hot, the possible solutions aren’t easy and no one can make everyone happy. But a wrong decision can make the difference for many people, even if they’re not the majority, to play or not to play ENTIRELy the game they love.
Before saying “343 cannot redo everything to fix things for a tiny part of the entire population” (yes, many people in this very subreddit said that to me) remeber this:
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even if the “tiny” part is a 30% of the total, the 30% is a respectable part of players that possibly will aboandon the game in the future making things worse for everyone; - everyone, even the minority, paid for the game like everyone else: it deserve the same respect and a game built to ensure fun, best connectivity and low search times as is for the others.There are examples of games out there, using the same H5 infrastructure, that are finding compromises to ensure playability for everyone:
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Titanfall 2 can provide you preferred datacenter selection (very very low pings) and very quick matching (even with 50 players total in a gamemode) but at the cost of the complete absence of a skill matching system (i’d rather this approach to H5’s one, but is just my opinion maybe brought to my personal exasperation); - GOW4 provides preferred region selection (also there low pings) exactly as Titanfall, with the only difference that GOW has a ranked playlist where also skill is taken into account (i haven’t much experience to judge here, i’m more a FPS guy). The other ones are skill free and connection quality is the only parameter in play (this is the best approach IMO, but can lead in a future quick ranked playlist death if population drops too much); - Titanfall 1 is basically the same as the next iteration with a very particular ranking system: a switchable system that can be activated or deactivated any time, taking into account the TRUESKILL of the player with every single action, killing spree, K/D ratio and so on, used to increase or decrease player’s skill level (very interesting in my opinion, unfortunately it was introduced as the last CU for that game).These are example of games having systems where skill is subordinated to the connection quality/low search times combo, not the complete opposite.
My opinion is pretty clear i think: as a player facing every day all possible connectivity weirdness and infinite search times a Titanfall system is pretty ideal for me ( i envy its selectable datacenters in particular). I know that this cannot suite everyone, but seeing how thing are going around i think that the current approach isn’t the best on the long shot.
A little curiosity: on H5/Azure system interaction: some friends told me that, currently, H5 is using only two Azure’s datacenters in Europe, Amsterdam’s and Dublin’s (they used Netduma routers or packet sniffing programs watching destination IP Addresses). I know for sure that since August 4 more datacenters are active here (2 England, 2 Germany) and also a new one in North Europe is UP with 2 more coming soon in France.
Apparently none of the new ones are being used by the game. I think that this isn’t something restricted only to EU, but to the entire world: basically H5 hasn’t been updraded to use all the new Azure datacenters released over time.