Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-31526827-20190522091136

I noticed something I wanted to bring to light, in case others have spotted it, or it's not known. (let me preemtively state, this is not a complaint, it's an observation) I'm sorry for the wall of text but I prefer being detailed than possibly misunderstood or have to repeat myself to clarify.

I happen to like the new matchmaking system in OMP after it's most recent change; I would rather wait than ever be placed in a race where I can't win any points. Playing with the only two outcomes being break even or lose points is, to me, a bad choice. That being said, I noticed some things about how it works. These are my observations and could easily be wrong; looking foward to your own observations.

What I've noticed is that when making a match and racing, it appears that the algorythm tries to match you to racers who are no more than about 250-300 points away from your own score. It tries hardest to match you even closer. For example, if I'm a 500 point racer I'll race against others as low as 250-300 and as high as 750-800. Rarely do I see things outside this range. And that's fine. It works satisfactorily. If you are a 500 and race against 7 other 300s, you'll still earn points for winning. Cool.

So, if you are a above average/good racer & you start at 500 you'll easily start rising, winning against not as skilled players. I'm an above average racer so I can easily win 10-20 races in a row or more at this level. 500, 650, 700, 750, 800, 950+ no problemo within an hour or so.

Here is where things get wonky. And let me state that I've now tested this over several weeks and used cloud restore after upgrading to intentionally push my score down to 100 to retest my observation. Allow me to elaborate:

If you start at 500 you'll be matched in a range between 300-800 typically. As you increase in score this should increase around you. In other words, once I get to a score of, say, 800, I should be racing against 500-1100 racers. This doesn't happen.

Here's my observation: As long as you do not exit OMP you keep getting matched at whatever the point level you were when you started.

Last night I started at 500 and played non-stop all the way to 1011 and at no time did I ever see anything outside the range of 300-800. At 1011 I was matching quickly and easily (as if I was a 500), but the vast majority of racers were still at approx 400-600 (centering around 500).

THEN, I exited, and restarted. Immediately upon doing this my matching making time went up drmatically and when I finally got races it was with racers who were around 800-1250 (because there were fewer), every race. I never saw 500s any more.

So, to mess with things I let myself lose, into 8th place, over and over, score dropping like a rock. And my match making time started going up and up and up until I was waiting 10 minutes for a match.

Then I exited (with a score of around 150) and tried again. It took a long time to match and I was matched with players between 150-500. I kept playing and winning but each match took a very long time, very long and even after finally coming up to 600 again it was still taking forever to match.

I exited - and tried again and was immediately able to match, quickly and with 400-900 racers.

--- What's going on. Well (and I hope a programmer will have spotted the issue already), I believe I know where the (respectfully) "bug" lies. Without having to know how to code, imagine that the match making formula needs to know two things: What your score is and what the score of the other available players is, then it does it's sorting and matching magic and off you eight go. What I believe is happening is that the variable that keeps track of your score for matchmaking purposes is not being updated to your actual current score. So, the match making formula keeps trying to make matches based on whatever your score was when you very first entered that particular round of OMP. It's only updated when you start OMP again.

Whether my guess "why" is right or wrong is really unimportant and let's not focus on that. The take away is the issue with matchmaking I've spotted and what your own experiences, now that I'm hoping you'll pay attention to this, are. The good news is is that if I'm right this should be not only an easy fix but, I believe, server side (where the matchmaking formula and process takes place) so can be fixed without having to wait for a new code cycle to work it's way up through prior ones.

For anyone not interested or who don't see this, feel free to ignore this lengthy post. Have a great day. 