Matchmaking is so important in Dota because the differences in skill between players tends to make or break the game. Assuming the system gets it pretty well balanced then it comes down to team work, picks, good plays and maybe a bit of luck - hopefully making for a gg.
Did a bit of research and found out some interesting things about the matchmaking system:
- There are no actual skill brackets for matchmaking (you can see which category your games get placed in by going to "Watch", and then filtering by skill and your name), it's on a continuous scale. This is good to hear, as you'd think they'd be some pretty big variations by putting players into just 3 categories.
- Your usual role and hero choices aren't taken into account when matchmaking. This is a bit disappointing, although I can understand the difficulties from a technical perspective...and how it could trap you in a particular role too often.
They are talking about letting you select a role before matchmaking - would probably get a lot of fast games as a support...solo mids and hard carries could be waiting a while longer :). However, think this will rely on maybe restrictions people's heroes selections once in game.
- Supposedly all players are picked to be the best match skillwise with all the others (exception being parties...which is why they're screwed up so often), so there shouldn't be any massively weaker or stronger players on either team - not entirely sure this is true!
One thing that would make a nice difference here would be to have more info about how good the other players are - if you're the "strongest" player on the team, should you really be going hard support...or a more influential role like solo mid?
- Finally, on the slightly related topic of skill...I feel support heroes get a bit of a bum deal here too. Your personal skill bars rate your hero performance against players of the same skill - however if you're playing a support hero properly you shouldn't really be getting the most kills, levels or last hits - maybe you'll take deaths for the team. Playing them as gankers/semi-carries probably nets more of the good stuff...but doesn't necessarily mean you've played better, sometimes the opposite.
Personally I'd like to see how some of this is calculated, and maybe some changes for Supports - assists would be a big one, levels, lack of deaths, team itemed provided...etc.
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