So NetEase came shining in from way above with this one-hour-long video response about the great Marvel Rivals matchmaking debate. And honestly, it has been about time someone took to airing the grievances. Director of Combat Design Zhiyong sat for 18 whole minutes in front of a camera describing how ranking and matchmaking systems actually work because players have basically been screaming about that for weeks.
What does a player complain about? Oh man, where do I even start? Players that are solo queuing are being matched against full squads, and if there’s no death sentence for that, then so much for it! And that role confusion thingy, where neither of us knows what our teammates will pick, so you end up having three snipers and yet no one is tanking. And about the ranking system in some points so arbitrary that you lose points because suddenly someone leaves from your team, that is harsh beyond words.
Let’s analyze just about everything that Zhiyong explained in his video. Translation from a reply says the scoring system consists basically of empire exchange points (win/loss versus enemy team score) and performance points (your stats, normalized per hero, versus the average of your rank and your team). The weights vary according to your rank: Low rank weighs individual performances more; high ranks weigh pure victories. Which does sort of make sense, from where I stand.
Matchmaking tries to consider location of server, team composition, and player score. It starts off narrowly, but widens the search after a while if no game’s found. And for teams, it tries to match in similar group sizes, but if it must, it’ll mix and match. These rules go stricter for players on the high end of the ranks when they’re in big groups; might be one of the reasons some of the highest-level players complain of the queue times.
But players are not having any of it. The remarks to this announcement are a real mixed bag. Some even go on to praise NetEase for their transparent behavior rarely found in the gaming world these days. One player wrote “W NetEase for transparency. It’s nice seeing the team be open about match making to make the game better.” Now that’s wholesome.
And then the nasty bunch speak. These players simply go on to call them liars. “Is amazing how they lie to us with a straight face,” one reply reads. Ouch. Seems like the biggest issues are the ones with solo versus stack matchmaking: “how about we dont make it possible for someone who’s solo queuing to go against a 4 stack? like how is that at all fair?” Tempest is asking the real questions here.
Competitive players are begging for role queue and better tournament support. TcTooCold, who is competing for Ignite and MRC, exclaimed, “As a comp player for ignite and MRC for the love of god put in faction queue for seeding tournaments and allowing teams to practice. And 2 just do preferred roles. We would rather wait an extra minute than be queued up with a 6-13 blade.” In other words, competitive players want to wait longer for better matches, casuals want to jump into games quickly.
Then there is the cross-progression issue: “CROSS PROGRESSION? I stopped playing marvel rivals because I can’t use the stuff I bought on PlayStation on my pc.” That’s another hornet’s nest NetEase has yet to so much as clean out.
The video apparently is quite elaborative in areas explaining how they calculate scores and thereby match players. They refuted engagement optimized matchmaking (EOMM), that shady system that tries to keep you playing one minute more by monkeying with your wins and losses. Their excuses for imbalances were role distribution, hero picks, and just pure probability streaks. There’s just bad luck sometimes, I guess.
The players weren’t buying the whole story, though. iVoidout knew: “I rather wait for 10 minutes to play a fun game then be in a absolute nightmare of a game for 10 minutes.” That’s at the very heart: everybody’s got a different tolerance for wait time versus quality matches. Casual players want quick queues, but competitive players will endure extensive queues to get matched fairly.
The very fact that the video was even done for the talks is huge. More often than not, most game companies throw matchmaking complainants under the bus or hammer vague PR speak into their faces. This was a first: a developer actually on cam for a while explaining the system. Even if the players will never agree with how works, at least they’re open about it.
Marvel Rivals is still riding high in its infancy phase while the whole community is trying to figure out what it wants from the game altogether. Some players want to be way more competitive, with strict matchmaking, while others want to toss all that aside just to get into getting fun gameplay with their favorite Marvel characters. Balancing between these two audiences is an extremely hard task, and whatever NetEase does, someone’s gonna be unhappy.
One step forward with communication is this video response, but the real test lies within the implementation of those system changes. Players have given feedback down to the specific: universal role indicators in character select, better handling of AFK players, and protection from being victimized against full stacks when going solo. It all comes down to waiting to see if NetEase will make good on this.
At the end of the day, there’s a special something going on with Marvel Rivals. The gameplay is quite rewarding when the matchmaking agrees with you. The characters feel awesome, the skills very rewarding to pull off, and it emulates that Marvel superhero vibe better than any other game out there. If the matchmaking gets weighed in favor of good, this could very well be the next big paid competitive shooter. But, that’s one huge if.
As of now, players would just keep grinding ranked, having the occasional limping match, praying NetEase would pay audio attention to their protests. That was a good opening coming from the video, but actions scream far louder than anybody ever could. Let’s see what the next update will bring.
