How Does Destiny Matchmaking Work?

I don’t know about you, but video games are some of the best things that humanity has ever come up with. Thank you, Benjamin Franklin, for discovering electricity and making everything fun possible.

Loving video games is a whole different kind of affliction; we prefer spending our time playing royal battles in virtual reality. The amount of discipline and dedication required to complete a game is some of the purest forms of commitment you could ever witness from a fellow human being. Seeing the animated world through our character’s eyes, slicing past the bad guys, with just the mission in our mind, who said video games are silly?

Destiny 2 (also known as Destiny 2: New Light and Destiny: Guardians in Korea) is a Bungie-developed online-only first-person shooter video game. Destiny 2 is a multiplayer game. It was first released for Xbox One, PlayStation 4,  and Microsoft Windows as a pay-to-play game in 2017.

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On October 1, 2019, Destiny 2 was available free-to-play under the New Light title, utilizing the games as a service model, accompanied by the release of the game on Stadia the month later. This was followed by its release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S platforms in December 2020.

Activision published the game on December 31, 2018, when Bungie purchased the franchise’s publishing rights. It’s the follow-up to 2014’s Destiny and its expansions.

In Destiny 2, a competitive mode exists known as the Trials of Osiris, which has received mixed reviews from sources. Essentially, this mode allows the possession of a much-coveted loot to the team that wins. However, the Bungie developers want to make the mode more accessible and user-friendly, allowing a higher number of players to receive the rewards.

This matchmaking feature introduced in the game allows the players to be matched according to their skills on a much broader base, allowing for overall equality. Pretty democratic, right?

So if you are a little rusty, have been having a Butterfinger week, or are not in the mojo to win, you would be paired up with similar struggling players. And if you are on a winning streak, suddenly turned ambidextrous, or own a miracle double hat-trick under your belt, you would be matched against people with the same ability level.

Destiny 2 is a shooter game for predators with MMO elements, so it offers all sorts of game modes that players can tackle,  from PvE to PvP. In PvE, players can dive into dungeons, perform full raids, and participate in various playlist activities such as strikes and nightfalls. For PvP,  there are different game modes for Crucible in one rev, with fewer choices but set to be better in the fifth year.

How Does Matchmaking Base on Skill Work in Games?

There are different approaches, but formulas generally evaluate a player’s performance and give a score. The system then looks for and compares other players within a specific range of scores.

There often exist “brackets” like this, and sometimes, theoretically, the system throws the player a softball from a low bracket or a hardball from a high shelf, but often it’s with someone from their stand.

While not common or usually doesn’t take place, the system is programmed to compare the player’s score to everyone else’s and then wired to match the player according to the best match of their caliber. This is an expensive process.

Therefore, the system periodically evaluates players, matches them to those brackets, and then adjusts based solely on them. So, if it’s “normally” about once a day, when you suddenly break through and get good, you won’t be able to find an equally good player until the brackets are updated after a while.

Some games make this very clear by putting the player in a “league” and allowing them to be promoted or delegated at the end of a week.

Destiny 2: Trials of Osiris Matchmaking

The Destiny 2 fan base has recently brought up matchmaking’s growing inconsistency, where teams and lobbies are frequently built in a way that ensures one side will defeat the other. The matchmaking mechanism essentially pits teams of highly skilled players instead of groups of less experienced players, leading to imbalanced encounters that either concludes very quickly or drag on for too long. Some Crucible players may have believed that skill-based matchmaking was in use.

In response to these concerns and presumptions, Bungie stated that the matchmaking algorithm the game currently uses does not focus on the abilities of each player when forming teams. Players of all skill levels have expressed concern about the current scenario; however, games are so uneven that the losing team has no hope of recovering. Plays like those in the Call of Duty series employ system-based matchmaking to avoid that. Because of the complaints from top-tier players at the time, system-based matchmaking was disabled several years ago and is still inactive for most Crucible playlists today.

Matches would be generally more balanced with system-based matchmaking active, and this adjustment could offer Bungie some time to find an alternative solution. Although Destiny 2 doesn’t focus on competitive modes, several gamers have suggested that it may benefit from a rank-based system.

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