Targeting elite-players

Top-players are -by definition- very rare. This makes the matchmaking for them more intricate. Statistically speaking, they are on the far right of the distribution of skill. This means, there are very few other players similar in skill to match them to and those are very likely to be on the top-player's left, meaning: inferior to them.

For Idem, top-players are a core priority. The elite of players drives visibility of a game through streaming and social media. This is particularly important for the launch of a game, where poor early reviews can make a game tank before it is even out of the gate. In most other matchmakers, top-players are systematically at a disadvantage. Algorithms tend to optimise for the best average outcome. With top-players being so rare, they don't have sufficient weight in the data to be a concern, and hence they experience nasty edge-case behaviour of excessive waiting times.

Through the concept of 'target-waiting-time' (see target-waiting-time) and the efficiency gains of predicting incoming players before the enqueue, our matchmaker ensures that top-players find matches as fast as any average player and waiting time is generally shortened.

Waiting-time-distortion

Compared to average players, top-players will always experience poorer matchmaking than the average player, since the available pool of opponents for them is simply more limited. By default the matchmaker is configured to have a 'target-waiting-time' that applies to all players equally. The more you want a top-player to be matched with somebody on the same level, the longer you will have to set the 'target-waiting-time'. Some games might wish for games between the very top-players to be as much on eye-level as possible, which would normally put an unnecessary burden of waiting on average players, that would get satisfactory matches with much lower waiting time. For this reason, our matchmaker has the functionality of 'waiting-time-distortion'. This allows to fine tune, how important proximity of skill in elite matches is to your game, compared to waiting time for those elite players. Fundamentally, instead of having a single 'target-waiting-time' for all players, the 'target-waiting-time' is distorted at the far ends of the distribution, where the elite-players live. This means, the elite players wait a bit longer than the average player, but receive a more closely matched opponent which, in the case of your particular game, might be a better trade-off.

To adjust the 'waiting-time-distortion':
please contact us at match@idem.gg