Non-Rematch / Rematch

[HamsterIV]

I have noticed something peculiar when a lobby fails to vote for a rematch. After a very short period in the Match Making Queue our Ship is placed into a new lobby with the exact same ships that were in the last lobby. Often the teams are preserved (no ship shuffle) such that it is an exact repeat of the last match. This doesn't happen all the time and seems to happen more at hours where there are very few people online. So I suspect there are no other games for match maker to sort the 4 non rematch ships into.

I find it ironic that not voting rematch increased the likely hood of playing with/against the exact same people in some situations. At least when people vote rematch there will be a ship shuffle and the chance at a better ally.

I don't pretend to understand the black magic of the Match Making System, however there should be something that the devs can do to prevent a ship who wants different opponents from being sucked back into essentially in the same lobby it just left.

[nanoduckling]

There are a few problems here, a big one being that the MM is faced with a very similar calculus when the ships join the queue as when they were last in it. If the MM screwed up the first time round then it is very likely it will screw up the exact same way the secound time round. I've become increasingly convinced the more I've used it that the MM has some massive blind spots which leave it all but broken when experienced players are in the queue (I win in underdog matches way more often than I should as pilot for example, and lose more often as crew). I am increasingly convinced that the MM algorithm was not implemented by a professional statistician, and this odd behaviour is one of many of the resulting quirks.

[HamsterIV]

The fairness of matchmaking is a different topic for me. When a crew deliberately does not click the rematch button, they are telling the game they want different opponents and allies. There should be some way for the Match Making System to lock them out of rejoining essentially the same lobby they just voted to leave.

One implementation I can think of is a hidden timer that spaces out the ships from the old lobby from entering the match making queue at the same time. That way there is a greater chance of new ships getting filtered in with members of the old lobby.

Alternately Muse could have implemented something that resolves this and I was just hitting a weird edge case. I post this to the forums to see if anyone else is encountering the same issue, and to see if Muse is working on a solution or has already implemented one.

[BlackenedPies]

MM wants to start quickly so if there are no others in queue it will create the lobby again. Ship positions will remain the same if MM thinks it was balanced. In this situation no one else is waiting in queue and the MMR is balanced.

Adding a timer would take longer for everyone to get into a new lobby. The solution is to leave the new lobby and rejoin the queue. It's your decision not to play the lobby again and the others shouldn't be penalized with a longer wait time when the queue is empty.

Recreating the same lobby is a last resort and not by default. When the queue has no suitable matches your choice is to play with the old lobby or wait. The system works right but there may be quirks. Algorithm balancing is a separate issue.

[Kamoba]

I think the problem is the use of the word Rematch in this situation.

Many people who do not click rematch do not do so for a few different reasons:
Most common is they don't give a damn about who they are with or against, this is the bulk of pubs.
Then the guys who don't vote because they want to avoid another 5-0 stomp, not realising team.scramble happens. This is a bigger and more common issue than it seems.
Then the guys who want to go back to crew form so they can reform their two ships. However some of these guys vote rematch if people request it, knowing its no extra time to leave the lobby and goto crew form than it is to leave individual crew form and goto crew form.

So I think if rematch was reworded to something with emphasis on team scramble, then rematches would happen more often.

One thing I try to do is advertise the fact that rematch voting means less queue time in match maker (when busy) thus faster.

[nanoduckling]

They are practically different issues, unfortunately they have some of the same underlying causes. That said if the intent is to fix this one problem in isolation one option would be to put some distance or metric on the space of possible games and penalise close games to the previous one. Hamming distance between lobbies would be the obvious one, just add (or subtract depending on how the rating system works) MaxDist-LobbyDist to the rating for each possible lobby in the queue. This would slow down the queue though since it would cause MM to think there weren't any good lobbies available when there might be.

[BlackenedPies]

Rematch should be changed to scramble. Tweaking how MM decides suitable matchups doesn't help when the queue is empty. There's a good reason for MM creating the same lobby again. Putting you in a very low MMR lobby and swapping in a low MMR into your old lobby doesn't help balance.