DICE is making more changes to the Matchmaking system in Star Wars Battlefront 2. First batch coming with the September Update, more to follow in the next months
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Community manager for Star Wars Battlefront 2 Ben Walke posted yet another announcement on the game’s forums to address the upcoming Matchmaking changes DICE has been working on for the September Update to the game.
The message came shortly after Ben’s previous post about the fixes coming to Clone Trooper Appearances. This time the focus of the “community transmission” is the Matchmaking and how it is going to change.
The main goal is to further improve the balance in each match. For that a new mechanic is being introduces – End of Round Matchmaking. It will break the chain of unbalanced matches you get queued for when players start to leave after a few rounds.
Improvements have been made to balance the servers created and their population. The new system will attempt to fill in empty slots with new players instead of creating a new server, which as it currently stands, happens often and people end up in empty or very low populated servers.
To further help spread population and fill up servers with empty slots, a new “Ping Site Change” is also coming with the Semptember Update. This will allow the game to better populate servers if you have the same or very similar ping to more than one server.
If you like, you can read the full message from Ben Walke, as it was posted on the forums:
Matchmaking is a common conversation topic within the community and we wanted to take a few moments to talk about what we have planned for the coming months.
Coming in the Squad System Update are some further changes to Matchmaking. Without getting too technical, we are changing the way the game and our servers interact with each other when switching rounds, and with these changes should come a host of benefits All of which you’ll read below.
End of Round (EOR) matchmaking is a feature you will have noticed before. It’s something that has been turned on and tested at intermittent periods over the last few months. We’ve had some good success with it, but the testing also flagged some issues, such as being placed in empty servers.
The Squad System update aims to correct these issues and shortly after it’s released, we will be turning on the EOR matchmaking.
Once the EOR matchmaking has been switched on, we hope to leave it on and by doing so, we hope to achieve a number of things.
Bring Balance
When matchmaking, we’ve always tried to match players of similar skill level. However, since you would only matchmake once in the previous system, you sometimes found yourself in a not so enjoyable experience. This was due to a lack of EOR matchmaking, which meant that when you joined a game, you were in it until you left.The result of this meant that as people left and the original balance degraded, your experience was sometimes less than optimal. With EOR matchmaking taking place after each match, players and teams should be “scrambled” more often making is less likely that you will find yourself stuck in a poorly balanced game for more than a few rounds.
Fuller Servers
The system currently in place favours the creation of setting up new servers with the minimum number of players.
As we move forward with the new system, we will be changing the matchmaking behaviour so it prioritises filling up existing servers as opposed to starting new ones.What this means is that with more matchmaking events occurring at a server level, you should find yourself joining games where the server is trending towards being full, rather than starting a new, empty server.
Ping Site Changes
We have added a new default setting to the ping site option. When you have this selected, the game will attempt to match you to any of the ping sites that you have the best ping to. In the real world, this means that if you are located in Europe and have a good ping to both Frankfurt [FRA] and Dublin [DUB], you could be matched to either one, meaning you should find games a lot quicker.These changes will start to arrive alongside the September update and further updates will be made in the months after, as we continue to tweak and improve the matchmaking system.
DICE will not bring the End of Round Matchmaking together with the patch. As Ben said, this has been in testing for the past few months and the team wants to make sure the update is stable before they turn this new feature on.
To give some further insight on this. The EOR matchmaking will be turned on after the update is live, it won’t be active straight away.
Once we’re happy with the updates stability we will turn on the EOR matchmaking for a 24 hour period and monitor how it goes. From there, we can turn on / off as required. Your feedback will be vital during this time.
Earlier this week DICE announced some upcoming fixes to the newly released (and some unreleased yet) Appearances. Based on player feedback the dev team has decided to correct a few details on the 327th Elite Corps Trooper and the upcoming with the September update 91st and 104th Trooper outfits.
Since the September Update is already locked and ready for release, these changes are going to happen in a separate stand-alone hotfix patch that will be introduced some time between regular updates.
