Upcoming Changes to Matchmaking for Lower Ping Times

A message to brawlers everywhere (especially those with high ping times):

Later today, we’ll be rolling out a few changes to matchmaking. These are aimed at reducing ping times for players in both Street Play and League Play.

Street Play changes are relatively minor. We’re further increasing the time it takes for our matchmaking system to expand acceptable ping for matches. We know most players are looking for short matchmaking times in Street Play, and we wanted to hold true to that, while still reducing the number of high-ping games people are playing.

League Play, on the other hand, is seeing some more dramatic changes. If you’ve been having ping times in League Play matches that are higher than a lob shot from the top of Rooftop Rumble, these fixes are for you.For a quick look under the hood, our matchmaking system is trying to find you matches based on three main factors: skill level, ping, and matchmaking time. Basically, we want to find you low-ping matches with people close to your skill level in as short a time as possible. When you queue for matchmaking, we search for people at very low ping and very close to your skill level. As you wait in a matchmaking queue, our servers expand both acceptable skill difference and ping thresholds over time.

The change we’re making today is drastically increasing the time it takes to hit the maximum ping that we’ll use to create a match. Before this change rolls out, that cap is hit in 60 seconds. After this change, max ping won’t be allowed until 480 seconds (8 minutes). We'll always try to match you with players at the same division and tier as you, but after a certain amount of time in the queue we'll now expand to allow matches with players no more than 1 tier above/below you before allowing the higher ping times, as well.

This means that you may wait for more time for a match, but the chances of you finding a low-ping match are much, much higher.

Another benefit of what’s rolling out today is that as of today, we also have a lot more flexibility in tuning these variables from the server, so if these changes don’t get it quite right, we can act a lot more quickly to tweak until we get to a place that feels good to as many people as possible.

I'll make an update to this thread when these changes are live, which should be sometime in the next several hours.

P.S. If you haven’t been having ping issues, what does all this mean for you? Probably nothing! Low-ping games should have no difference in matchmaking, so you’ll still get the same fast match times you’re used to now.

Edit: These changes are now live! Please let us know how these updates work for you.