There are many elements to multiplayer gaming that have to be taken into consideration when making and then distributing a product. For example, you have to make sure certain multiplayer elements are balanced, like the characters you play as or the items that you can get access to. Then, there’s the matchmaking element of it all. If you’re dealing with a game with a lot of players, but most of them are beyond a certain player’s skill level, they’re not going to have fun! Roblox might not seem to be a place where this kind of thing is thought about, but it’s actually more important than you think.
After all, there are many thousands of games within the universe, and some of them don’t play around. There are gamers of all skill levels there, and when the wrong players are put together, the matches can be pretty one-sided. That’s why Roblox promised to start rolling out custom matchmaking features last year, and now, the first phase of that is happening. As noted in a new blog post, a beta is happening for select creators to test out and monitor how well the feature works:
“You can start customizing how players are matched in your experience by signing up for early access through our beta program. Rolling out this feature as a beta allows us to gather your feedback, identify usability gaps, and address any critical issues before expanding access. We will be expanding access to Custom Matchmaking in the next few months.
We want to include a diverse set of experiences across genres and matchmaking preferences for this initial release. This beta will be limited to experiences with over 500 concurrent players to ensure we gather enough data for a successful full launch. If you’re not selected for this beta, don’t worry – we’ll be making this feature widely available in the next few months.”
While we won’t go fully into it here, we will say that the dev team goes deep in their blog post explaining how things work and how it all breaks down regarding getting the right players into your game. Skill levels via the Data Stores are considered, as are other factors. You can also analyze the “signals” you use to get players to see how effective they were in getting the players you wanted and more.
If this all works out, a very nice balancing wave could happen when the feature is fully rolled out.
