Hello Holotable Heroes,

We recently indicated that we were making some changes to matchmaking (here).

We’ve seen many questions surfacing around what changed, how it works now, and what the implications are, so we’d like to give a little context.

Over the time that Grand Arena has been in the game, we’ve explored a few different paradigms of matchmaking. Most recently we’ve been running matches on pure collection GP comparisons, and while that may look fair on paper, we observed too many cases where pure GP matches, among active participants, still resulted in blowouts. (For some context, we are trying to get this number under 5% of matches.)

Then, in our Quality of Life update, we shifted the focus to only the part of the collection that is eligible in that Grand Arena (i.e. characters only, or characters+ships). This did not work either. Among active participants in Grand Arena, the number of blowouts was still far higher than our targets.

Ultimately, we think close matches with some tension are at the heart of what makes a great Grand Arena experience, therefore we are moving away from pure collection GP as the basis for matchmaking.

So, while you may match with someone who has a much different GP than you, behind the scenes we’ve done our best to match you based on similar roster characteristics. The most obvious similarity is in the GP of your top few squads - but there is more going on behind the scenes.

We have definitely heard from some players that there is a lack of clarity when you are scoping out your opponent upfront, and we are looking at other ways to highlight that you and your opponent are most likely in for a fair fight for a future update.

We’d also like to touch on Divisions. Please note that while Divisions are grouped by pure GP, this does not really impact matchmaking. There are cases where you may be matched against someone from a lower or higher Division, because your eligible collection and other metrics are very similar. Right now, we believe that partitioning matchmaking purely within division is going to result in many more of the blowout type matches that we’re looking to avoid.

Matchmaking is ultimately an iterative process. We will continue to monitor the results and feedback throughout the Exhibition period, and will adjust the parameters as needed to ensure fair matchmaking. We are especially focused on the quality of matches during the last few weeks of the 5-week Exhibition - i.e., once players have sorted themselves into different Leagues. We’ll let you know if/when we make further changes.

Thanks for all the feedback so far. We’re excited to see the exhibition move forward!