How Matchmaking Works and Tyrande/Special Promotions – Max McCall & Yong Woo

The Hearthstone official forums are seeing a lot of chatter from the Hearthstone dev team. If you have some questions about the game or things you want to discuss, now would be a good time to go check it out! Here are a couple of recent posts by devs that I thought were interesting.

Yong Woo Discusses Special Promotions – Tyrande Hero Skin

Thanks for the message simon and RoKa! I am a big fan of Priest as well, and I totally get why you’d be bummed that you can’t unlock Tyrande.

When we do special promotions, we want the people who participate to feel really special for being involved. At the same time, we totally acknowledge that people who can’t participate can feel really left out – especially if the reason for not being able to participate is out of their control (regional access restriction, or maybe they weren’t around when the event was happening, etc).

Given this, we are actively looking into ways to grant access to new Heroes and card backs that some players may have missed out on. We’ll make an announcement once our plans are solidified!

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Max McCall Discusses How Matchmaking Works

I saw this post last week, but didn’t have time to respond to it. I’ll do that now: when you go into a game, the only variable that affects who your opponent will be is your skill rating.

Matchmaking works as follows:

We use a formula to assess player skill. After every game, the formula looks at if you won or lost and uses your current rating, your opponent’s rating, and your rating history to generate your new rating. We call this rating MMR for short. In casual and at Legend rank, we pair players with similar MMRs. In Ranked below legend, we pair people with similar star ranks instead of similar MMRs. Your rating is the only input that the matchmaker receives. It doesn’t know what deck you’re playing, what deck you just played with or against, or anything else, except for your rating.

When you press ‘play’ you enter a queue for your chosen game mode. The matchmaker looks at your MMR and compares it to the MMR of everyone else in the queue. If it finds someone else with the same MMR as you, it pairs you into a game. If it doesn’t, it will wait a few seconds and look again. The second time, it doesn’t look just for someone with your MMR; it will also look for someone with an MMR that’s almost the same as yours. If it still doesn’t find a match, it waits another few seconds and looks again. The bound for what MMRs are considered a good match keep widening the longer you’re in the queue; this is to ensure that you don’t have to wait too long to play. Usually a match is found so quickly that the widening bounds never really matter. After the game, your rating is updated, and the process is repeated the next time you queue up.

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