Bungie admits skill-based matchmaking was implemented in Destiny, confirming fans’ rampant speculation after PvP matches have become extra competitive and laggy.
For the past month or so the Destiny community has been abuzz with a discussion about matchmaking in Destiny. That’s because in recent weeks, matches in the Crucible have been extra competitive, hard to find, and exceptionally laggy—typical signs that a matchmaking system is a skill based system.
And in fact, fans were correct. In December, Bungie implemented a new skill based matchmaking system without informing fans. Bungie admitted to changing how Destiny finds matches up players in PvP yesterday in the Bungie Weekly Update.
The problem with skill-based matchmaking, gamers say, is that when putting players together, it prioritizes skill ranking over connection strength and availability, thus resulting in long waits between matches and increased amounts of latency, commonly referred to as lag. Bungie says that the reason the system was implemented in Destiny was to keep games more competitive, and to avoid total blowouts:
“One of the bigger complaints we received during Year One was that you could get into very lopsided matches in the Crucible. The long term solution was always to retool the entire skill matching system under the hood so players would have much closer matches. As some stop-gap measures, we added systems like Blowout Prevention and the Mercy Rule until we could do the real stuff with Taken King.”
