Shortly following Fortnite’s v9.10 update, the folks at Epic Games made some major changes to the game’s Arena matchmaking logic, which they’ve been continuing to tweak and adjust, and now they’re giving players a look at what they’ve been doing behind the scenes in hopes of improving matchmaking speed and match quality for all players. Previously, the game “used a model where you would search for opponents with a similar amount of Hype,” which we assume is effectively a skill rating. After 15 minutes of searching without an adequate match, the system would “give up and create the best match possible based on the players available at that specific moment.” In this system, players with over 350 Hype were all “considered equal for matchmaking purposes” in order to ensure that players with “extremely high amounts of Hype” wouldn’t find themselves unable to get into a match.
The problem with this old model, however, was that “all players searching for a game needed to expand their Hype range to reach each other mutually,” which meant that “players in high population divisions would create matches easily, leaving players in low population divisions still searching for additional players.” In order to address this issue, the new matchmaking system now “uses a set of Hype ranges which define a series of buckets,” and if one of these so-called buckets doesn’t have a sufficient number of players in it, “it will merge with a neighbor bucket after a certain amount of time.” The devs expect that this new system will “create better matches for players in all divisions and greatly reduce occurrences where Champion League players are matched with Open League opponents after an extended wait.” The new system isn’t completely set in stone yet, however, and the devs are still “closely monitoring both queue times and match quality” and “actively making adjustments” based on player feedback, but they encourage all players to go ahead and give it a try to see what they think.
