I felt as though I've been getting an extremely high number of absurdly unbalanced games recently. The issue came to a head after this matchmaking game, played at 3pm on a Sunday.
Here are some common counterpoints to explanations for this game:
Q: you have bad internet and so are forced into fewer game lobbies
A: i have fiber optic internet with a wired ethernet connection. I live near multiple major cities and get 15-25 ping most games.
Q: you were queueing a small map pool or underplayed gamemode, so to keep queue times low games like this are created.
A: I was queueing the hot new Broken Fang Premier matchmaking which essentially queues all the maps. I imagine this would be the most played gamemode as it had just been released the previous day.
After getting no feedback from reddit (actually having my post removed multiple times for violation of Rule 2), I decided to fill out a steam support ticket. To my surprise, steam support quickly gave an insightful reply:
While it's very appreciated to know that CS:GO devs will be aware of my matchmaking issues and hopefully do something about it, at this point I decided I could contribute more meaningful data. I made a spreadsheet compiling my last 50 official matchmaking games. My main issue was that, although the knowledge of CS:GO matchmaking was appreciated, it seemed to be suggesting that the issues causing my imbalanced games were related to my internet or queueing small or underplayed maps. I would love if this were the case as it would give me something concrete I could do to avoid imbalanced games, unfortunately however I have very fast internet and queue for the most popular maps, as well as usually at least 5 maps at a time.
I assumed that if these issues were really causing the imbalanced matches, it would be reflected in queue time: higher queue time = less balanced matches. After compiling the data, this does not seem to be the case.
Here "Difference in Overall Rank" is calculated as the difference in aggregate rank of both teams: all ranks are given a number and each teams 5 ranks are added up. the difference is what you see on the left, with steams "Wait Time" on the bottom.
Of the 50 games analyzed 13 had a difference in overall rank of 8 or higher: for perspective 8 in this system is NOVA 3, and I am queueing in the vast majority of games as MG1 (10). This is tantamount to having an extra NOVA 3 player on one of the teams. Shockingly there were multiple outliers where one team towers over the other with an advantage of 18, 26, or even 40 total rank difference.
More worrying than overall balance of teams I believe is the specific inner balance to each individual team: just because each teams aggregate ranks equal out doesn't mean matchmaking is working properly. It's a common feature that me and my friend of equal rank will queue together, only to end up in a "balanced" game with players of vastly higher or lower skill levels.
In the spreadsheet this is calculated as "Variance" of each team. The lower the number, the more alike the ranks within the team were. Of the 100 teams analyzed, only 57 had a variance of 5.0 or lower. Only 21 of the 50 games pitted two teams both with variances of under 5.0 against each other.
It is up to us as the community to decide whether we care about rank variance within our teams, but personally I find games with lower variance to be immensely more enjoyable than "balanced" games where my teammates are either much better or much worse than me. Furthermore, I find myself queuing with the most limiting settings (25max ping) and regularly having pleasantly short queue times. I (personally) would much rather wait 10 minutes to play a game with people of equal skill level than 2 minutes to play with a wide range of ranks. I'm curious to hear what others think on this issue.
This is my first time using spreadsheets of any sort; if anyone has suggestions for how to better analyze the data please suggest them in the comments. Here is a link to the full spreadsheet in question: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qd621FJg3BBXUAw2R1uKlNHO7fWksZvBRovtHpRAJVg/edit?usp=sharing
All data used was collected from csgostats.gg and my steam matchmaking data under "personal game data".
